QuizList

On a slow week for quizzes, I’ll return to a topic I promised you a long time ago to revisit.  That is the link (if any) between being good at quizzes and general intelligence.  In other words, if you are a quiz whiz, does it necessarily mean that you are also a brainbox?

The simple answer I gave you before was ‘probably yes, but it depends on how you define intelligence’.  If such a thing as general intelligence did not exist, it probably would have been necessary to create it.  Some break it down into ‘fluid’ and ‘crystallised’ intelligence, and the latter of these covers skills acquired through education and experience (so general knowledge falls into this category). Fluid intelligence is more about reasoning and problem-solving.

Authors of the more commonly used intelligence tests, when faced with the problem of how to measure intelligence, tended to break it down into components and provide a battery of tests which supposedly measured fluid and crystallised intelligence.  Then when you add them all up you get several measures;  if you add those together, for instance in the widely-used Wechsler tests, you can call that a measure of General, Verbal or Performance intelligence.  Now the conceptual flaws in this are obvious – who knows that the right abilities have been chosen?  What about all the other not so little things that seem to be part of intelligence – insight and the like?

If, however, you accept ‘general intelligence’ as a construct, and you look at the abilities and sub-tests which are chosen to measure it, you usually find that General Knowledge is part of this.  So the simple answer I gave last time is explained in more detail as ‘yes, people with good general knowledge usually are classified as intelligent, but you have to take into account that general knowledge is part of the measurement of general intelligence’.  And you also have to consider whether ‘General Knowledge’ exactly equates to the knowledge needed to win quizzes;  sometimes it is, sometimes it’s just another sheet of Mister Bastard Men…

So what happens if you take general knowledge out of the measure of intelligence?  Well, folks, some researchers at UCL apparently found that people with good general knowledge still scored moderately highly on measures of fluid intelligence (which is not related to book-learning or experience).  So people who have good general knowledge, who are somewhat likely to be good quiz-players, may be clever bastards in all ways.

Depressing?  No, because we all know people who have taken quiz smarts to excess and gone beyond any concept of intelligence, but that’s another story…..