In the modern world, a great way to offend someone on the Internet is to comment on their low IQ. But few people imagine what actually hides behind this abbreviation and how exactly it is possible to measure human intelligence using mathematics.
The intelligence quotient (IQ, short for intelligence quotient), otherwise the intelligence quotient, is a quantitative assessment of a person's intelligence level. It is calculated as the ratio of the so-called "mental age" of the individual to the chronological age. In other words, on one side of the scale is your biological age, and on the other - the level of knowledge inherent in the average person at this age. This is not to say that if one person has a higher IQ than another, then he is smarter than his opponent: in fact, everything is much more complicated.
People have made attempts to assess the level of mental development of an individual person since ancient times. With the appearance in culture of the concept of the scientific method of cognition, test systems gradually began to appear, designed to make such a procedure universal and bring it to a certain standard. In 1905, French psychologists Alfred Binet and Theodore Simon developed a test designed to assess the "age of consciousness" of a subject. It was based on the answers to a series of questions, which were then compared with the biological age of the respondent.
In early 20th century France, this system was successful and the test was soon translated into English. In 1915, it was improved by the Stanford psychologist Lewis Terman and was renamed the Stanford-Binet test. He became the most common method of measuring the level of intelligence in the United States in the first half of the XX century. In 1995, psychologist and psychiatrist David Wexler made his own contribution by refining the technique with an improved structure and adding a non-verbal component to it. This did the test a great service: now even those who did not know English could pass it. This principle has been preserved to this day: even now, when we hear about the IQ test, most likely we are talking about the Veksler version.
How IQ testing works
Like most modern counterparts, it captures the subject's ability to answer a wide range of questions and compares them to the average number of responses from subjects of the same age. Modern online versions demonstrate this especially well: one requires the ability for mathematics and numerical calculation, the other is a logical puzzle, etc. The main idea is to measure the level of critical thinking of a person, and not just his intellectual baggage and ability to store in memory, facts are only a parameter of erudition.
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Researchers are trying to choose a set of questions that would reflect the ability of intelligence in a number of categories of thinking, such as spatial thinking, verbal recognition, "working" memory, etc. But it is worth considering: like any standardized system, the IQ test is not the perfect way to measure intelligence. It only shows how well a person answers a number of questions that only indirectly reflect the concept of intelligence as a whole. This is true if only because the very concept of "intelligence" is still a subject of heated debate within the scientific community, so that there can be no talk of any true universality.
Criticism of the IQ system
The main reasons for the imperfection of such tests are primarily economic and cultural factors of everyday life in various regions of the Earth. Critics draw attention to the fact that since the 50s the system has become outdated and needs a qualitative update, and the concept itself resembles phrenology more than classical psychology. Today it is a useful tool for collecting statistics, but nothing more. New research time and again confirms that trying to seriously judge the level of the human mind by its IQ is an approach that should be abandoned long ago.
Vasily Makarov
