2017 Personality 18: Biology & Traits: Openness/Intelligence/Creativity I

This is just a clip from the full lecture here: [VIDEO] If you like the clip, watch the whole thing. It's great.

Let's hear it from a psychologist: "If you don’t buy IQ research, you might as well throw out all the rest of psychology." (Jordan Peterson) [VIDEO] For anybody interested in personality research, I warmly recommend this lecture series, by the way. These are the basics, which psychology students learn at university.

This is a talking point from an old university class lecture interpreting factor analytic data on personality and IQ [1]. In practice, intelligence tests don’t depend on the specific questions asked. If you let a group of people generate their own items, pool them together, sample randomly, and then rank scores, the same individuals would tend to rise to the top. The high IQ people would cluster toward the top with a correlation of 0.9. This is because people with higher general cognitive ability perform better across virtually any cognitive task, a phenomenon first documented by Spearman (1904) and repeatedly confirmed in psychometrics research (e.g., Jensen 1998; Deary 2012). [1] [VIDEO]

If you dismiss IQ research, you might as well disregard all of psychology. The psychologists who developed intelligence tests were pioneers in using the statistical methods (e.g. factor analysis) that now underpin the entire field. IQ is defined more precisely than almost any other psychological construct. Discarding it leaves you with poorly defined concepts and no clear way to handle them. [1] [1] [VIDEO]