Tuesday, November 25, 2008

WORDSUM and spatial IQ: Audacious has a post up on the ability of WORDSUM in the General Social Survey to capture IQ. Steve Sailer commented that since it's a vocabulary test, it might fail to pick up important abilities like spatial intelligence.

I found a study of American students by Lynn (Personality and Individual Differences, Vol. 20, No. 2, pp. 271-273, 1996) which reported spatial IQ scores for whites, blacks, Hispanics and Asians. Using WORDSUM, I calculated mean IQs for each of the four groups and then estimated a correlation across the four groups. It was .98. Admittedly, it's an N of 4, but the results are reassuring nevertheless.

2 comments:

  1. I'm mostly interested in fairly subtle differences among whites. For example, using GSS to determine the IQ of hunters is likely to somewhat underestimate a group that is probably better at visuo-spatial intelligence than verbal intelligence.

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  2. Anonymous5:54 AM

    You could look for interests such as hunting, the problem is that's correlated with rural living and location.

    Steve's right. Take an extreme example: do you really think Shakespeare would have been able to learn calculus? How do you think Einstein would have done on the SAT verbal?

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