Is intelligence overrated?

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0:44Walmart keeps prices low for 150 million Americans every week. They help families save on food, clothing, school supplies, and countless other necessities in every aisle. According to them, Walmart's Great Value product line saves shoppers up to 35% every year compared to national brands. This means families have more to spend on pizza nights, birthdays, and all the moments that matter. Because when Walmart says save money, live better, they mean it. Learn more at walmart.com slash save money. To me, intelligence is the ability to be able to think critically about things. We almost undervalue intelligence, but that's because we only prioritize a very narrow, very specific type of intelligence.

1:30The ability to seek out, understand, and hold multiple perspectives on the same subject. One of my favorite things to hear from an adult when I was growing up was that I was smart. It made me feel special. But as I got older, I started to wonder, does being perceived as intelligent really make you all that different? According to a 2018 survey, 65% of American adults think of themselves as more intelligent than the average person. So are we actually as smart as we think we are? And why does it even matter? I'm Jonquan Hill, and this week on Explain It To Me from Vox, we're going to put some brainpower towards intelligence. David Robson writes about science, and one of his books is called The Intelligence Trap, Why Smart People Make Dumb Mistakes.

2:36So what is intelligence exactly? Yeah, it's a great question because actually, you know, even within the field of psychological science, we've had a lot of different definitions of intelligence. But the way I understand it is that it's considered to be this kind of raw processing power that the brain possesses that underlies all cognitive abilities. So that includes, you know, abstract thinking and reasoning, mathematics, vocabulary, and reading literacy, you know, all of these different things that we know is so important for academic success. But academic success was always the kind of key thing that people were trying to predict with IQ. And then the definition of intelligence kind of followed

3:15that afterwards. I think that's so interesting, because I think when people think of intelligence, they think of IQ. How do you even test for that? And what does the number you get at the end of that test mean? So IQ can be measured through, there's lots of different tests that you can do. They all kind of basically correlate very strongly. So they all seem to be largely measuring the same thing. Some of them are totally nonververbal, so you would have these spatial puzzles that you have to solve. It might be asking people to kind of mentally rotate a cube. Imagine there's a cube sitting on a table. There's a red dot on its top face. Tip the whole cube a quarter turn towards you. Now, tip it a quarter turn towards your right.

4:05Is the red dot on the top, the bottom, or the side facing you? Or it can also be things like tests of working memory, that's our short-term memory, tests of focus and concentration, vocabulary, all of those things. Our next test was first pioneered by Jay Jacobs in 1887. It's called the digit spam test. I'm going to say some numbers. Listen carefully, and when I'm through, say them right after me. Three, eight, six. And then what you do is you get this kind of single factor that looks at how all of the different elements are related to one another, and that is meant to represent this underlying brain power or general intelligence. So, you know, you still have very many people who have an average IQ of 100, and then as you increase the

4:57score, it gets rarer and rarer. And so an IQ of over 140, which is often considered the kind of borderline of genius, you know, that is meant to be very rare in the population indeed. Why did we start testing intelligence in the first place? And why did we start using this to rank people? So Alfred Binet, the French psychologist who came up with the first intelligence test, you know, he very much was not trying to rank people. In fact, he spoke quite openly against the very idea. He was much more concerned with identifying the people who need extra support in their education and ensuring that that could be provided so they have the best chances in life as they began their academic career. The minds of these children are like a field whose method of cultivation

5:48a knowledgeable farmer has changed. Instead of uncultivated land, we now have a harvest. Alfred Binet, 1909. But then this guy called Lewis Terman in the US got hold of the IQ test and he basically, he translated it into English, he transformed the way it was scored, and he started ranking people based on their IQ for how, you know, how they fell within the population. And he was really interested in the upper strata of the population. So he designed his studies of genius, where he wanted to prove that people with high IQ were going to be the movers and shakers within society, that people who really would make a difference and help civilization to progress. That's why IQ is kind of controversial, though, right?

6:39Because, I don't know, it kind of sets up this system of this is smart, this is who isn't. And also, there are a lot of assumptions about who has what IQ. No, there really is. I mean, Sir Lewis Sturman, you know, he was a eugenicist. He was racist, you know, and he allowed those prejudices to influence his work. So actually, you know, reading some of his statements can be very shocking. ...represent the level of intelligence which is very, very common among Spanish Indian and Mexican families of the Southwest and also among Negroes. There is no possibility at present of convincing society that they should not be allowed to reproduce. Although from a eugenic point of view, they constitute a grave problem because of their unusually prolific breeding.

7:21Lewis Terman, 1916. And you know what I think him and a lot of his colleagues really ignored was the fact that, you know, people's backgrounds really made a big difference. Like if you come from a very educated background as a kid, you're going to have a higher IQ, especially at that stage of your life, you know, just because you've had those advantages where you have a bigger vocabulary, which would help you in the verbal parts of IQ, for example. Society has kind of tried to move on from that. I don't know whether it's done so ever so successfully. But yeah, that is one of the reasons I think why we still are and should be suspicious of IQ tests. You know, even if we do have this general intelligence, it actually doesn't capture everything that we

8:01need to make good decisions in life. That's so interesting. Like, yeah, you can be intelligent in this particular way, but that doesn't necessarily mean you're always going to do the right thing. I kind of compare it to the engine of a car. So you could have a great engine with like really high horsepower. That would be the equivalent of having a very high IQ. But that doesn't mean that you're going to get to your destination safely if you don't have all of these checks and balances and, you know, good GPS, good steering, you know, effective brakes, you know, all of these things that you need to navigate the world correctly. People with high IQs can still be very susceptible to cognitive biases,

8:42things like confirmation bias, for example. And so when you're lacking those checks and balances, your high intelligence can actually backfire pretty drastically. David, something I think that's really interesting about this conversation is there's a lot of work that even being perceived as intelligent does for us. And I wonder how you think about that, especially in the context of there being all these other types of intelligence. You know, I think one of the big problems about the way we've measured intelligence and appraised it is that we have come to associate certain characteristics of behavior with being smart and actually they're often a sign of bad thinking so my favorite one is that if someone

9:31takes a long time to answer a question we kind of think they're not as smart as someone who responds very rapidly and that's something we learned at school you know when the teacher kind of gets you to raise your hand and it's like the kid who's always got the answers raises their hand first and they're rewarded for that but But actually, what the cognitive science shows us is that the more reflective people who slow down, who check that they're right, you know, they're always kind of questioning themselves, they're actually more likely to make wiser decisions, they're less susceptible to cognitive bias. But I think that's totally lost in our social interaction. So we're actually, you know,

10:07we're rewarding the people who maybe should actually be treated with a bit more skepticism in what they say. Maybe one of the things we should be skeptical about isn't just who's intelligent, but what's intelligent. That's next. eating out, even on the tightest budget, there's no escaping them. But here's what you can control. Getting cash back every single time you fill up, hit the grocery store, or go out to eat with the Upside app. The free Upside app, believe it or not, gets you cash back on gas, groceries, and dining, as you might have assumed. The three things draining your wallet right now. Am I right, folks? Here's how it works. Open the app, claim an offer, pay with your card like normal and get paid. That's it. And yes, it's cashback, not points you'll never use. Take that.

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13:03My name is Jeff Sebo, and I am a philosopher by training, and I direct the Center for Environmental and Animal Protection and the Center for Mind Ethics and Policy at New York University. My most recent book is called The Moral Circle, and it examines the consciousness and sentience and agency and moral status of nonhumans like animals and AI systems. Okay, Jeff, it's really interesting that you look at non-human intelligence because we've been talking about human intelligence. I especially want to get into animals. How is animal intelligence different from human intelligence? This is a great way to phrase the question because a mistake that people often make is using human intelligence as the bar for any kind of intelligence, when in reality there can be different kinds of intelligence in the world and we need to study each on its own terms. is the ability to process information and solve problems and adapt to the environment. And they

14:05might not look exactly like ours, but they can help animals solve problems and navigate their environments and adapt to their situations really effectively. What is it about one animal's intelligence that makes us want to protect it versus another animal which can end up on our dinner table? I think of dogs versus cows and pigs or dolphins versus fish. There are many factors that shape how much empathy we have for non-human animals of various kinds. One question is, are they cute and do they look like us? Do they remind us of ourselves? And then another question is, what role do we assign them in our lives? We have more empathy by default for animals who play companion roles in our lives, as opposed to animals who play

14:52commodity roles in our lives. And this is why we can often have much more empathy for some animals over others, even if they display the same markers of sentience, the same markers of intelligence, even if their capacities are very similar to each other, we can still find it within ourselves to care much more about some than about others. What's a discovery about an animal's mind that might surprise people, that might make us think of that animal differently than we maybe do. So one example from insects is that there are really interesting studies showing that bees are capable of play behaviors. You can go online and see a video of a bee rolling a wooden ball around in a way that displays all the hallmarks of play

15:47activity. It's an extraordinary sight. A bee plays with a ball. Researchers say this shows, for the first time, insects interacting with inanimate objects as a form of play. Bees were put inside this clear plastic arena. One chamber had food, which they love, and another chamber had no food, but a bunch of purple and wooden yellow balls. And guess what? Instead of chasing sugar, many of the bees chose to play. This is done seemingly for the pure joy of rolling a wooden ball around. And then likewise, there are studies showing that, again, animals like insects even, have remarkable capacities for perception and learning and memory and adaptive, flexible decision-making and communication with each other.

16:32You know, we now know that counting isn't just a human thing. Crows count too, and they can do it out loud. And scientists researching African elephants have revealed that they appear to have names for each other. Researchers say they communicate using unique calls, low rumbles that can be heard across great distances. And so animals we might have written off as simple, as mechanistic, are in fact incredibly complex, seemingly sensitive, seemingly intelligent. And I think that that has allowed people to have a little bit more empathy for some of these animals than they otherwise might. You know, we hear that pigs are intelligent or that octopuses can solve puzzles. And we think, oh, wow, we should be treating these creatures better.

17:27I wonder, is there a problem with that argument, though? Because what happens to the animals that just never impress us, that don't do those things? Yeah, I think that learning more about animal intelligence and challenging our preconceived notions about animals is good. But I think it would be a mistake to treat a certain level of intelligence and especially a certain level of human-like intelligence as a necessary condition for moral consideration. Because then that might lead us to, yes, extend respect and kindness to elephants and chimpanzees and other relatively human-like animals while neglecting the other animals who are conscious and sentient, capable of feelings and emotions, and they have forms of agency and decision-making, even if it might not

18:20look like ours. I think that bar should be lower and should at the very least include consciousness and sentience, these basic feelings and emotions. This is so interesting because it makes me think of a couple things. I personally don't think of plants as sentient, but I'm a big house plant girly. I love my plants. And one of the things I love about my Monstera is whenever it's moved around in my apartment, it turns itself towards the sun. Like it's doing something. Does it make sense to call them intelligent when they do things like that? At least in a certain broad sense, I think that it does. Plants are remarkably sophisticated. Many plants have capacities, at least in a broad sense, for perception, for collecting information from

19:05the environment, for learning and memory, for retaining some information, for communication, sending signals to other nearby plants, and even for adaptive decision-making, for growing towards things that are good for them and away from things that are bad for them. Now, this might not mean that plants are sentient, but whether or not it feels like anything to be a plant, they might still be agentic and intelligent in the sense of being able to process some information, being able to adapt to their environment in some ways. And I think that can be worth acknowledging. Taking everything that you said seriously and thinking about it, you know, treating insects better, even maybe treating plants better, because they're intelligent or sentient.

19:57What would that change about our world and how it functions? I think that if we seriously considered non-human sentience and welfare, then it would have transformative implications for how we live, but ones that could be very good for humanity as well. So consider how we relate to food and consider how we relate to wildlife. On the food side, industrial animal agriculture is a leading driver of animal suffering, but then is also a leading driver of animal suffering, but then is also a leading driver of public health and environmental risks for humans. It creates more antibiotic resistance, more disease outbreaks, more extreme weather events via climate change, more biodiversity loss via deforestation.

20:40Similarly, we build an infrastructure primarily for humans, and that can lead to a lot of unnecessary conflict with wildlife. Wildlife can die because they fly into buildings or fly into cars or trapped in light pollution or trapped in parks with no exit for them if there is a flood or a fire. And if we simply considered their interests when building our infrastructure, then we might be able to build an infrastructure that can be good for human and non-human residents at the same time and reduce conflicts between us and reduce the need to resort to lethal measures in order to protect ourselves from them. But it does require considering human and non-human interests together when making decisions that affect everybody.

21:35Intelligent life exists all around us. But let's say you want to boost your own brain's abilities. Coming up, how to do just that. Support for the show comes from Talkiatry. I'll give you one clue what it is. Talkiatry is a 100% online, kind of like your colleague, psychiatry practice that provides comprehensive evaluations, diagnoses, and ongoing medication management for conditions like ADHD, anxiety, depression, bipolar disorder, OCD, PTSD, insomnia, and more. You get to meet with a medical provider who can diagnose mental health conditions and prescribe you medication when it's needed. And because it's 100% online, like your colleague, you have a lot more flexibility. You can head to talkiatry.com slash explain to complete the short assessment and get

22:32matched with an in-network psychiatrist in just a few minutes. That's T-A-L-K-I-A-T-R-Y.com slash explain to get matched in minutes. The name is Talkiatry. The website is talkiatry.com slash explained. Support for the show comes from sequencing.com. Oh, sounds interesting. Have you ever wondered what your own DNA could tell you about your health, your risks, or even how you might respond to certain medications? you can find out with sequencing.com sequencing.com reads 100 of your dna building a personalized health blueprint you get actionable insights from screenings for genetic variants linked to over 15 000 diseases conditions and traits that's a lot of diseases conditions and, and traits, folks. Right now, sequencing.com is offering our listeners

23:25up to 10% off your full genome test, plus free shipping. You can ship that DNA for free. Go to sequencing.com and use promo code EXPLAINED10 for 10% off. That's sequencing.com, promo code EXPLAINED10, spelled S-E-Q-U-E-N-C-I-N-G.com. In case you forgot, promo code EXPLAIN10. We're back with more Explain It To Me. I'm JQ. Intelligence can mean a lot of different things to a lot of different people. And according to Susan Yackey, it's also malleable. Susan's a professor at Northeastern University, and she's a director at the Brain Game Center for Mental Fitness and Well-Being. Typically, we distinguish between what we call crystallized abilities, which measure things like our vocabulary skills, our general knowledge skills, knowing that Paris is the capital of France,

24:31for example. But then there's also other aspects of intelligence, which are called fluid abilities, which have to do with our problem-solving abilities. So knowing how to solve puzzles or problems to which we typically haven't seen a solution yet. And these seem to be less related to educational experiences, and those have often been seen as kind of our raw capacity or ability. What's an example of someone becoming more intelligent, maybe even from your own research? So often kids who are born before or after a certain date, they either are being kept in kindergarten or they can start school. So what we did is we took kids who were essentially the same age, so within three months of each other, and some of them due to the school

25:19cutoff already went to school and the others were still in kindergarten. And what we did is we then measured these kids' IQ and lo and behold, the kids who were essentially the same age, but those who were already in school outperformed the kids who were still in kindergarten by a quite considerable amount, suggesting that schooling had something to do with these kids' intelligence, suggesting that this is malleable. But now it becomes a little bit more interesting, too, because we now gave an executive function intervention to the kids who were still in kindergarten. And then after five weeks of training, they were able to catch up to their schooling kids in these IQ scores later on, again, suggesting that we can do something very specific to help them

26:06improve their problem-solving skills. Okay, so that's an example of children becoming more and more intelligent through schooling, which, okay, that's great. That's why we send kids off to school. Yes, hopefully. But does that same thing apply to us when, I don't know, our brains are less malleable? Like, I don't know, I'm in my 30s, my brain is fully developed. Can I become more intelligent in that way as well? Yes. Kids' brains are generally more malleable, so they show more learning in general as compared to adults. At the same time, there's a little bit of a misconception that we think that we can't learn anymore once we hit a certain developmental milestone. Our brains remain remarkably plastic

26:54across our entire lifespan. And we have shown in our research that we can help people achieve or get to their potential by targeted training that focuses, for example, on improving executive function skills or working memory skills. Yes, the effects are typically a little bit smaller. If you are already performing at the best of your abilities, just moving the needle a little bit is harder, but you can still, through targeted training, improve your skills quite considerably nonetheless. There's this whole brain optimization industry that is promising to improve our intelligence. And, you know, I can download an app like Lumosity. I can get on my phone and play Wordle. I can take supplements like creatine. What should I expect? Are these things actually changing anything about

27:53my intelligence? Well, it depends. Like everything with science, right? It depends what exactly that you do, how long you're maintaining this regimen, and what are the different experiences or different approaches that you're combining. A lot of these brain game apps that are out there, so typically they don't give you a very good handle or sense of what is it from these different apps that you should train on, and how long should you train on, and what exactly should you focus on. So Lumosity is a good example because I don't know nowadays how many exercises they have on their platform. There are probably hundreds on them. And as a user, you don't really have a good sense of which ones should you play.

28:37Should you play each of them every day? Should you pay a selection of them what it is that you should do? So users are left to their own devices. And that makes it really hard to know whether or not you might improve. If I have a few hours a week that I want to put towards improving my intelligence, what would you suggest that I do? What should folks do in practice? Well, there's really lots of things that you could do. It could involve something like playing these brain games, for example, if that's something that you really like doing and you like challenge yourself. But there's also other activities that you could do that have more to do with the arts, for example, lifestyle experiences, learning a new language, playing

29:22a musical instrument, picking up other art-based activities that have also shown to improve people's general cognitive abilities, but then also well-being and quality of life. to broaden our experiences and that challenge our attention and executive function skills, ranging from trying to get better sleep, to optimize our nutrition intake, to engage in physical exercise, to also engaging in exercises that, again, engage our cognitive abilities. Playing board games with friends, for example, could be a useful activity as well. And in general, the broader these engagements, the more likely it is that it might also translate to broader areas of your daily life functions. Should we, as lay people, be thinking about this so much?

30:23Like, it makes sense for you to be thinking about our intelligence. You study this. But if you're just a person who is not doing that, how much should you be think about your IQ at all, because that's not super relevant or the most relevant outcome that we should be concerned about as humans. What we should be concerned about is our general brain health and what we can contribute to our cognitive and brain health that makes us successful in our everyday life. And that also contributes to well-being and quality of life as we are aging. Thinking of our well-being and cognitive health in much broader terms will give us much more leverage or helps us much more to maintain well-being and quality of life as we get older.

31:31That's our show. We have an episode coming up about cadults, grown-ups who buy and collect toys. Did you start buying or collecting toys and games as an adult? What's that added to your life? Give us a call at 1-800-618-8545 or shoot an email to askvox at vox.com. Also, consider becoming a Vox member. It's the best way to support the show and comes with a ton of cool perks. Head over to vox.com slash members to learn more. This episode was produced by Hadi Mawaddi. It was edited by Avishai Artsy, fact-checked by Melissa Hirsch, engineered by Brutra Dunnigan. Our executive producer is Miranda Kennedy. And I'm your host, John Quillen-Hill. Thank you so much for listening. I'll talk to you soon.