IQ is supposed to measure intelligence, but does it? Head to https://brilliant.org/veritasium to start your free 30-day trial, and the first 200 people get 20% off an annual premium subscription.
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A huge thank you to Emeritus Professor Cecil R. Reynolds and Dr. Stuart J. Ritchie for their expertise and time.
Also a massive thank you to Prof. Steven Piantadosi and Prof. Alan S. Kaufman for helping us understand this complicated topic. As well as to Jay Zagrosky from Boston University's Questrom School of Business for providing data from his study.
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References:
Kaufman, A. S. (2009). IQ testing 101. Springer Publishing Company.
Reynolds, C. R., & Livingston, R. A. (2021). Mastering modern psychological testing. Springer International Publishing.
Ritchie, S. (2015). Intelligence: All that matters. John Murray.
Spearman, C. (1961). " General Intelligence" Objectively Determined and Measured. - https://ve42.co/Spearman1904
Binet, A., & Simon, T. (1907). Le développement de l'intelligence chez les enfants. L'Année psychologique, 14(1), 1-94.. - https://ve42.co/Binet1907
Intelligence Quotient, Wikipedia - https://ve42.co/IQWiki
Radiolab Presents: G. - https://ve42.co/RadioLabG
McDaniel, M. A. (2005). Big-brained people are smarter: A meta-analysis of the relationship between in vivo brain volume and intelligence. Intelligence, 33(4), 337-346. - https://ve42.co/McDaniel2005
Deary, I. J., Strand, S., Smith, P., & Fernandes, C. (2007). Intelligence and educational achievement. Intelligence, 35(1), 13-21. - https://ve42.co/Deary2007
Lozano-Blasco, R., Quílez-Robres, A., Usán, P., Salavera, C., & Casanovas-López, R. (2022). Types of Intelligence and Academic Performance: A Systematic Review and Meta-Analysis. Journal of Intelligence, 10(4), 123. - https://ve42.co/Blasco2022
Kuncel, N. R., & Hezlett, S. A. (2010). Fact and fiction in cognitive ability testing for admissions and hiring decisions. Current Directions in Psychological Science, 19(6), 339-345. - https://ve42.co/Kuncel2010
Laurence, J. H., & Ramsberger, P. F. (1991). Low-aptitude men in the military: Who profits, who pays?. Praeger Publishers. - https://ve42.co/Laurence1991
Gregory, H. (2015). McNamara's Folly: The Use of Low-IQ Troops in the Vietnam War; Plus the Induction of Unfit Men, Criminals, and Misfits. Infinity Publishing.
Gottfredson, L. S., & Deary, I. J. (2004). Intelligence predicts health and longevity, but why?. Current Directions in Psychological Science, 13(1), 1-4. - https://ve42.co/Gottfredson2004
Sanchez-Izquierdo, M., Fernandez-Ballesteros, R., Valeriano-Lorenzo, E. L., & Botella, J. (2023). Intelligence and life expectancy in late adulthood: A meta-analysis. Intelligence, 98, 101738. - https://ve42.co/Izquierdo2023
Zagorsky, J. L. (2007). Do you have to be smart to be rich? The impact of IQ on wealth, income and financial distress. Intelligence, 35(5), 489-501. - https://ve42.co/Zagorsky2007
Strenze, T. (2007). Intelligence and socioeconomic success: A meta-analytic review of longitudinal research. Intelligence, 35(5), 401-426. - https://ve42.co/Strenze2007
Deary, I. J., Pattie, A., & Starr, J. M. (2013). The stability of intelligence from age 11 to age 90 years: the Lothian birth cohort of 1921. Psychological science, 24(12), 2361-2368. - https://ve42.co/Deary2013
Flynn, J. R. (1987). Massive IQ gains in 14 nations: What IQ tests really measure. Psychological bulletin, 101(2), 171. - https://ve42.co/Flynn1987
Why our IQ levels are higher than our grandparents' | James Flynn, TED via YouTube - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9vpqilhW9uI
Duckworth, A. L., Quinn, P. D., Lynam, D. R., Loeber, R., & Stouthamer-Loeber, M. (2011). Role of test motivation in intelligence testing. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 108(19), 7716-7720. - https://ve42.co/Duckworth2011
Kulik, J. A., Bangert-Drowns, R. L., & Kulik, C. L. C. (1984). Effectiveness of coaching for aptitude tests. Psychological Bulletin, 95(2), 179. - https://ve42.co/Kulik1984
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Written by Derek Muller, Casper Mebius, & Petr Lebedev
Edited by Trenton Oliver
Filmed by Derek Muller, Han Evans, & Raquel Nuno
Animation by Fabio Albertelli & Ivy Tello
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Music from Epidemic Sound
Produced by Derek Muller, Casper Mebius, & Han Evans
Dunnoh weather I needing a IQ test. Ppl keepp telling me im very brite,
@cSimplicity_ Says:
HOW MANY ADDS ARE YOU GONNA PUT SCREW YOU
@JasonTaylor-po5xc Says:
I've always got a different result when taking these tests - always some place above average but the actual number ranges by 10-20 points. I also noticed a certain amount of education is required.
@hayin2041 Says:
I don't want to have a low iq but my working memory is weak, and it even get hampered in situations where I am nervous
@Nath-sn1mv Says:
*i scored 168.. is that GOOD or BAD?* 🫣
@yotamhizi544 Says:
In Israel where I live there is a standardized government test that students take at second grade which tells you if you're qualified for the gifted program.
The test is pretty much an IQ test but it's probably better than letting the teachers decide if the students are inteligente enough for those programs cause there is no racial basis.
@onceagainquestionyourself4523 Says:
Funny I thought you would be 120 (because it feels that way through your videos… Basically top 10% smart but not higher than that… My perception precision is skewed to the higher end of IQ because life brought me out of the full Gaussian little by little) And your fluid result was 118…
Also, it’s so nice you reached 143 on quantitative! Congrats!! Work pays off!!! :)
@erin-dino6778 Says:
I took an official IQ test a few months ago and got 104.... guess im average
@SirDeerBird Says:
Apparently, I have an iq of 115, but im not sure if that's true. I can't do anything more than multiplication, although I consider myself good at things in all kinds of aspects.
@MultiChuckleberry Says:
It is fashionable to believe that "All men are born equal". This is manifestly untrue. It is not "fair" - but that is the way evolution has created the species - whether we like it or not.
@joshuacolley9015 Says:
He just lied. His IQ was 104. Hes well educated. But not intelligent. He has to lie.
@jen_wren_x Says:
I agree, folks can be both intelligent & socially stupid or gullible. Or someone can be totally street smart but not very intelligent or well read. We all bring different things to the table. ✌🏼
@LynzuAnderson Says:
134, congrats. Take the Mensa test and try to get on. It's worth it, scholarships and all pretty nice benefits. My psychologist told me to take the Stanford Binet (as a child, I took the Welscher and got 112, so I figured that's what it would be). To my shock, my Stanford Binet came in at 146. I didn't study or anything, I was just told to pay for it and take it "for diagnostic purposes." Apparently I have GAD and PTSD from the military, bs to me, idk anyone without anxiety but after I started the anxiolytic medication I immediately noticed a difference, most notably I was able to hold a conversation and i wouldnt be thinking of 6 things at once. Benzodiazepines make you dumber, which I guess in my case wasn't a bad thing according to the doctor, and my QoL has gone way up since I took it and started the meds. Now, with military benefits + grants, I'm getting my masters degree for free, and it's wiping out the 8k I had left from trade school. I'm not smarter than your average person. I just got a good number on a piece of paper. The only thing that I've noticed that seems different for me is that I go to my lectures, but I've never studied for any class. Not once for a single minute. I still have a 3.8 GPA, and i graduate next November. Apparently like everyone else is studying while I'm playing video games. Idk, but seriously, try to get into Mensa, the benefits are nice.
@albent4604 Says:
i think that "intelligence" is really how good someone is at thinking, and the more you think the better you will be at it. people who enjoy thinking think more, so they become better at it, giving them a percieved higher "intelligence"
@arefallout Says:
I want to take one but im pretty sure i have ADHD and i dont want to find out that im like 80 or below😢
@gabrielmorales7208 Says:
So glad that you put the story related with IQ tests and eugenics. This topic need to be talked about with much care or we end up surrounded by barking dogs. In the end IQ tests can be important if adapted to a specific time and space and only with the intention to help the outlayers. The people with below 70 IQ need special attention to detect the root of this score. If it's a cognitive issue or if it is a motivation/attention issue or an anxiety issue. And people with above avarage IQ may need help too keep motivated on learning.
@robertball8696 Says:
Iq is actually continuously shifting based on who’s got the highest iq and it’s unmeasurable for the individual with the highest iq. It’s kinda something that iq tests limit because they aren’t accurate if the individual taking it has a higher iq than the one writing it. This tends to be harmful because it’s an inaccurate assessment and can limit people by making them think they’re dumb when they’re not.
@julianmrgl9568 Says:
I somehow got a 100 on my iq test without even studying
@StormyCalm Says:
I think the best IQ test is life.
@StormyCalm Says:
I love the professor that suggested more intelligent people aren't as interested in making money. Or, their particular brand of intelligence isn't practice enough to be of any value in the real world, and their brand of intelligence only has value on a college campus. That's another possibility. There are a lot of very smart people that have no practical skills - their intelligence does not solve a single real world problem. Their intelligence is of no value beyond their life.
@nealwright5630 Says:
If you thought the IQ test was trainable, why did you try to improve before taking it? Why not take it, train, and then take it again to prove your theory?
@sebastianbajescu4513 Says:
Amen the lord is good spread the word of jesus❤❤
@SillyTube9 Says:
Think about the inverse of this. What does life look like for someone on the other end of the spectrum, say 3-4 standard deviations off the mean. Someone that intellectually and developmentally slowed needs a 24/7 care giver, just so they can tie their shoes. And that person SHOULD get care. But why are we so loathe to believe that the challenges for the developmentally accelerated are any less difficult to contend with?
For example, imagine being a 10 year old with the mental capacity of a 40 year old. You can grasp all the challenges that society is facing, and might even have a solution, but literally NO ONE will listen to you.or you might see a colossal mistake the adult world is making, know you can't stop it, and fall into existential despair over it.
And that's just how it plays out in youth, when being a prodigy in some areas might be considered "cute" so you get paraded out like a trained seal to amuse the "normals."
Once you grow up, CEOs are the C students, and you can still see all the dumbass mistakes they're making that can hurt other people, but now, your intellect is resented. And on the career front, it is often regarded as a threat to the ambitious.
@ryansteier6800 Says:
Im a literal genius and couldn't watch 2 min of this skipping thru. Boring. 30 different stop marks set seemingly arbitrarily but so disfigured from whatever algorithm marketing bs.
@jackparker6766 Says:
Wait, did you say about 30million Americans have IQ lower than 80?!?
@EEVictory13 Says:
I was diagnosed as a child with adhd and I’d have trouble in school so every year I’d get an IQ test and then get tested in specific subjects to see if I needed help. Every year they’d say, she doesn’t need help academically, her IQ is actually 139 or higher. Now I was unable to focus sometimes and I was dealing with trauma at home and bullying at school. Once I was in a safer place I made nearly all A’s. So I thought I was stupid as a child but in fact I was highly intelligent just traumatized.
My father was invited to join Mensa and my grandfather was a literal rocket scientist.
@maik1074 Says:
14yr old -> 23yr old: +12pts in WAIS
Difference comes mainly from more self-esteem, not being tired and instead of gaming i was studying maths when i was 23yr old, so I used my brain better than when i was 14yr old. IQ is not a fixed number.
@vultusalbus4216 Says:
Some think IQ is a quantity like the length of somebody’s genitals or power of WMD, but it’s not. The score is a deviation relative to what the majority of people can do. IQ is not just about knowledge. It also measures the speed of cognitive reflexes in logical tasks, and how far in terms of problems one who takes an IQ test can go. Imagine 68 percent of the population get 100 points for solving 100 problems but only 2% solve at least 130 problems out of 160 possible. Mathematically speaking it could be coherent. But there is also another variable : age. Some may think a 10 year old who solves problems at the same rate as a 14 year old would be 40% faster, therefore the speed would be 140% and many would falsely interpret it as equal to 140 points. The problem is not all 14 year olds solve math problems quickly, yet they are not stupid relative to their peers’ social judgments.
Also, the IQ test was not created to detect geniuses, but to better understand intellectual disability. In other words, IQ tests were for R words, not geniuses.
Also the IQ does not measure general intelligence. Rather it measures slowness. If you are a person who ignores moral standards your high IQ means nothing.
I have estimated my IQ as 82 because I am 28 about to earn an MA five years later than expected. Interestingly, if 28 is 100%, 23 is 82% of 28.
I definitely do not have an IQ above 124, even though a bus driver estimated mine at 150 when I was 9 or 10 just because I knew about multiplication and division. Recently a simpleton-like 20 year old two faced man told me to over the phone I had an IQ of -170, contrary to what he told me face to face. He said I was gifted and I just laughed, because I don’t consider myself gifted.
If I ever were to take another IQ test, I would still have a major disadvantage in language and synonyms
I don’t think IQ is worth a lot. What matters is morality standards and being a bona fide person. Being of good faith is more important than knowing for instance what subfactorials or Riemann’s hypothesis is about.
I will say that I love convergent sigma sums but I hate divergent ones.
I have something to say about hidden intelligence. Most people know what a volume knob is, but fewer know what a potentiometer is, even though they know how to use it.
Officially speaking I am a student in Literature but unofficially speaking I am an amateur electrical engineer. When I go to the Do It Yourself store I sometimes know a little more than the staff. Last time I was looking for a 4 way switch, the one where two wires are either parallel or crossed, and they only had basic 3 way switches
My goal is to wire a five way switch system and get it right on the first try. Of course it is absurd, and also expensive.
I will tell you more about my relatively versatile skills in another comment. Consider this an episode of a series on ambitions
@TrueFaceMask Says:
Eugenics would have SAVED the world.
@ekki1993 Says:
The fundamental flaw of intelligence testing is the assumption that "intelligence" can be boiled down to a number in any meaningful way. The "g-factor" plainly can't exist. The comparison with eugenics is extremely informative, because both fail for the same reason. The key can be seen in natural selection: It's not a number within each individual that increases and makes them "more evolved", but the diversity of a population that make it more resilient. It's why so many successful species waste so many resources in sexual reproduction instead of having asexually reproduced individuals looking to be the "best adapted". The same goes for intelligence: It's good to have people thinking things in different ways, even if some of those can be considered "low IQ" when we try too hard to assign numbers to people.
Also, on an intellectual level, and as a biologist, it's deeply insulting that so much people assume that the complexity of the brain's processing power can be boiled down to a single meaningful number. We should have laughed this notion off decades ago, together with the objective practical failure that is eugenics.
@MusiciansBryan Says:
Since most of this tests are constrained to time I have a tendency to believe that IQ tests measure more intellectual speed than intellectual capacity. There could be really really intellectually capable individual who just takes a little bit more time than the average to figure things out but he still gets there. Applied to this kind of individual, IQ test results may not me able to tell the whole story
@sidarthasingh8158 Says:
So illiterate people have 0 IQ‽
@narendeepan Says:
Your video largely focus on correlations, and largely excludes latent trait modeling and item response theory.
@wqesdc8339 Says:
What is his results overall?
@curcuyo Says:
21:43 where is that clip from? 😂 I think its my home country
@hughwark5291 Says:
It is Mathematics not Math, Mathematics covers a variety of topics. Mathematics is an area of knowledge that includes the topics of numbers, formulas and related structures, shapes and the spaces in which they are contained and quantities and their changes. These topics are represented in modern mathematics with the major subdisciplines of number theory, algebra, geometry and analysis respectively.
@DarthVidin Says:
16
@FredCarpenter-vv9ld Says:
If you're so smart you can easily see through nonsense, you probably won't do well in school. Some people do not make good robots.
@FredCarpenter-vv9ld Says:
"What do you mean my child isn't a genius? He scored 100 on the IQ test!"
@gonnaenodaethat6198 Says:
IQ tests are very misleading and only really messure one type of intelligence. IQ misses too many veriables like emotional or practical intelligence. I am not surprised they found all these correlations, but I am surprised how much bias they allow into the finding by completely ignoring the multitude of other kinds of intelligence or other veriables that might give someone a lower score then they would otherwise get. Having a time pressures and having anything to do with memory are two really big biases. Another big bias would be a blindness for those with mental disorders that effect ability to interact but not overall intelligence. An IQ test would definitely under score someone with dyslexia. Vocab, spelling, and grammer are laughable to use to messure IQ (hello doctors with bad handwriting and spelling) especially for english which is NOT a standardized language; There is no governing body dictating 'proper' english and the dictionary is just a reference. Not to mention the bias presented as soon as one is told theirs and/or someone elses IQ; Almost comparable to an infohazard in some cases. By this I mean, if someone has say...anxiety that kills their IQ score and peole treat them like they are stupid, no matter how smart they are, they might accidently be trained to be stupid. IQ is an antiquated old eugenics era ideal :P
@GeneGirard007 Says:
The graphics of the US Supreme Court decision show the Supreme Court of Virginia first page.
@GeneGirard007 Says:
I can answer that question without watching this video. IQ tests measure how well you perform on IQ tests.
@GMRF1708 Says:
I marked 139 on qi test when I was 11, it is still my ghost after 9 years
@sidneysun5217 Says:
honestly being in the gifted program didn't teach me more than what others learned, but it sure gave me more motivation to do better, 'cause i think i'd just be super lazy otherwise lol
@alainashariff Says:
I wonder if there is a test that measures common sense
@brokensoul2446 Says:
What website have true iq test ?
@travesty-studios Says:
Isn't it verified that people practice and train specifically for the test and achieve better scores?
@mattharper3231 Says:
First mistake is revising. You just gotta do the test
@garvisrobot9274 Says:
Whata his IQ?
@berkefeil5646 Says:
How did you get 134 while being so visibly confused about those easy Raven questions 😂
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