Adaptive Intelligence: What the World Needs Right Now

There are those who wonder how presidents of countries can fail utterly miserably—and yet either get re-elected or come close. Are you one of those people who wonder what is the matter with voters who claim to have operating eyes and ears and yet vote for proven, certified failures?

Unfortunately, it’s not just foolish voters who support abject failures. Many people in the United States and other countries are doing the same thing, except with respect to failed standardized tests rather than presidential candidates.

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How do we know that standardized tests have failed? Well, it’s the same thing: having operating eyes and ears. During the 20th century, IQs rose 30 points around the world (the so-called Flynn effect). What, exactly, have 30 points of IQ bought the world? Not adaptive intelligence—or the ability to adapt to the environment. Global climate change is well on the way to becoming irreversible. Some leaders, such as in the United States, Canada, Australia, and Russia, are presumably reasonably generally intelligent but are contributing greatly to climate change. Air pollution is at such high levels that an estimated 7 million people are dying as a result of it. After World War II, liberal governments took over in much of the world, but now the world is seeing a rise in dictators and would-be dictators who are not taking over in coups but rather being duly elected. As many as 40% of bodies of water in the United States are too polluted for fishing. In all, 36,000 Americans die by gun violence every year, and 100,000 are shot and injured. Many of them are children. (In contrast, in 2018, 249 Canadians were killed by firearms.) What, exactly, are schools in the United States teaching children? What, exactly, did the 30-point rise in IQs buy the country? And in the United States, IQs are still rising, as the country battles with a turn toward authoritarian leadership.

We all, as citizens of the United States or any other country or of the world, have to consider the possibility that what we have called “general intelligence,” however useful it may be in predicting culturally valued outcomes such as grades in school, timely school graduation, college admissions, job placements and performance, and the like, is not a panacea, or even necessarily a useful partial solution for our societal problems. Rather, it is a red herring that has led us to focus on the wrong skills at the wrong time and in the wrong place. One can say, “we’ve been had,” but if so, we’ve been had by ourselves.

Why have standardized tests failed us in improving education and also in improving our behavior in the world? Because the characteristics of real-world problems are completely different from the characteristics of test-like problems. Test-like problems are well-defined—it is clear what the problems are; real-world problems are ill-defined—it is unclear exactly what the problems are. Test-like problems are well-structured, with a clear path to solution; real-world problems are unstructured, with no clear path to solution. Test-like problems are individual, with solutions accomplished by a single person; real-world problems are collective, needing to be solved by multiple people working cooperatively. Test-like problems are low-stakes and emotionally uninvolving; real-world problems are often high-stakes and emotionally involving. There are many other differences, but hopefully, the point is clear: There are so many differences between test-like and real-world problems, that performance on tests is a poor predictor of real-life performance.

Correlational data cited in articles and books, such as the now-notorious volume, The Bell Curve, make it sound like IQ tests are good predictors of future performance in many domains. Certainly, they should have some predictive value, but the predictive value is exaggerated. There are four ways which this distortion is accomplished.

First, correlations often are corrected for “restriction of range,” so that the results are alleged to apply to the “full” population rather than a population of restricted range of abilities. Of course, it never is clear what the full population is and should be. Does it include people in societies that value skills other than IQ? Does it include, for example, people whose adaptive requirements are based more on hunting and gathering, or on political-acquiescence skills (such as the current U.S. government), or on compliance to religious dictates?

Second, correlations often are corrected for “attenuation,” meaning unreliability. So now the results apply to hypothetical perfectly reliable tests (which do not and cannot exist) in a hypothetical population (that certainly does not exist).

Third, and most egregiously, the correlations fail to take into account self-fulfilling prophecies. In the past, only men were allowed into many universities and many occupations. The result was that all of the successful students at the universities and all successful people in the occupations were male. This was taken to show how these were “men’s jobs.” Women couldn’t do them. Of course, the women were never given a chance. Similarly, Blacks, Chinese people, Jews, people with handicaps, among many others were not given a solid chance to succeed. And then correlational analysis would show, again, that people of certain disrespected groups tended to be less successful, which was true, because those people were not given a chance. Today, is it really fair to compare the “success” of the top-performing students who go to Stuyvesant High in New York City to the success of students who go to the Wadleigh Secondary School for the Visual & Performing Arts, which is a low-performing school on tests? Do they have the same opportunities to succeed?

In sum, we have devised a system of psychometric self-fulfilling prophecies to make those who are privileged believe they somehow deserve that privilege. Meanwhile, much of the world goes to hell in a handbasket. We need to focus on adaptive intelligence for solving real-world problems, not general intelligence for solving problems of no consequence.