In the 1940’s, psychologist Raymond B. Cattell attempted to create “culture-free” tests of intelligence. Believing that IQ tests contain implicit biases in favor of particular cultures, he sought to partition intelligence into two components–fluid and crystallized. He described fluid intelligence as “a capacity to perceive relations and educe correlates.” In essence, this is the capacity …
In 1904, Alfred Binet was the director of the psychology laboratory at the Sorbonne in Paris. The Minister of Public Education commissioned Binet to develop tests to identify less capable students who should be provided some form of special education. To this purpose, Binet set out to develop a series of tests connected to everyday …
English psychologist, Charles Spearman, tested 23 boys in a preparatory school near Oxford on a variety of achievement tests in each of: classics, French, English, mathematics, discrimination of pitch, and music. On analyzing the test results, he asked, “What pervasive cognitive faculty accounts for the fact that a student who does well on any of …
In 2005, Professor Larry Summers, President of Harvard University, stated, “The physicists in the top 25 universities in the US are probably 3.5 standard deviations above the mean IQ.” This equates to an IQ of 100 + 3.5 x 15 or 152.5. IQ is a reasonably good measure of the ability to think in abstract …
Can you become a brilliant theoretical physicist with an average IQ (95-105)? Read More »
