IQ tests are good at what they were first designed to do, predicting how well children will get on at school, and most psychologists who measure intelligence think they capture a real general ability. But they sample a narrow, culturally shaped slice of what a mind can do. Therapeutic Shamanism sees intelligence as far wider, found in the body, in relationship and throughout the living world, so an IQ score is at best a measure of one sort of human cleverness, not of intelligence itself.
What is IQ, and where did it come from? #
IQ stands for ‘intelligence quotient’. The first tests were made in Paris in the early 1900s, when the French Ministry of Education asked the psychologist Alfred Binet and his colleague Théodore Simon to find a way of predicting which children were likely to struggle at school. Binet tried hundreds of questions and kept the ones that predicted school success. He began with questions about the senses, but found that more ‘scholastic’ ones worked better, and from then on intelligence tests leaned heavily towards verbal memory, verbal reasoning, numerical reasoning and logical sequences.1
In 1912 the German psychologist Wilhelm Stern turned the result into a number, a child’s ‘mental age’ divided by their actual age, multiplied by a hundred. The tests then crossed the Atlantic, where psychologists such as Lewis Terman turned them into paper-and-pencil versions that could be given to whole classrooms and regiments at once. By the mid-1920s they were part of ordinary school life in the United States and much of western Europe. The Harvard psychologist E. G. Boring summed up how little anyone asked what the tests really measured: “Intelligence is what the tests test.”2
What do IQ tests measure well? #
School performance, above all. In 1996 a task force of the American Psychological Association, led by the psychologist Ulric Neisser, set out what was then agreed about intelligence. It found that the correlation between IQ scores and school grades is “about .50”, which leaves about three quarters of the differences in grades to be explained by other things.3 Most psychologists who measure intelligence also find that people who do well on one kind of test tend to do well on others, and this is the evidence for what the psychologist Charles Spearman called ‘general intelligence’.4
The same report was clear about the limits. It said that standardised tests “do not sample all forms of intelligence”, and gave as obvious examples “creativity, wisdom, practical sense and social sensitivity.” It also noted that average scores have been rising for decades, by about three points every ten years, and that the cause of the rise is “presently unknown”.5
Why do some say IQ is too narrow, and how do its defenders reply? #
The doubts are almost as old as the tests. In the 1920s the American journalist Walter Lippmann, debating Terman in print, criticised the questions as superficial and possibly culturally biased, and warned against judging a person’s intellectual potential by one short test. Later the palaeontologist Stephen Jay Gould, in The Mismeasure of Man, said that whether intelligence comes out as one thing or many depends on the assumptions built into the statistics, not on how the mind actually works. The psychologist Robert Sternberg found that people’s ability to deal with new problems and with the practical demands of everyday life could be told apart from their success on IQ-style questions, and the psychologist Howard Gardner proposed several separate intelligences in place of one.6 See What are the different kinds of intelligence, and how has the list grown?
Defenders of IQ reply that the tests do what they claim. The general factor keeps appearing whenever abilities are tested together, even in a study set up to test Gardner’s own intelligences, and in the debate among psychologists the majority still favours a general intelligence.7 On this view, IQ is not everything a person can do, but it measures an ability that really exists, measures it reliably, and is useful for the predictions it was built to make.
Is an IQ test fair to every culture? #
Not entirely, and the tests’ own history shows why. They were built to predict success in a particular kind of school, in a particular kind of society, so they reward the skills that society prizes, such as reading, writing, arithmetic, abstract reasoning, working alone at a desk against the clock. Not every culture even has a word for intelligence, and some define it in terms such as obedience, good listening or moral fibre, which no IQ test asks about.8
In Therapeutic Shamanism’s shorthand, most of what an IQ test rewards belongs to the left brain, the verbal, analytical, logical and orderly way of working, good at words, sequences, facts and maths. The right brain’s way of knowing, holistic, empathic, intuitive and alive to connection, hardly appears in the tests at all.9 Therapeutic Shamanism also sees the FallThe Fall. The catastrophe at the root of the whole diagnosis: the shift from animist, egalitarian hunter-gatherer life to owning, agricultural Taker culture. In domesticating other species we domesticated ourselves, cutting ourselves off from Mother Earth (Power-loss) and from parts of our own nature (soul-loss). When dated precisely, the Fall begins with the first city-state cultures, around 4000 BCE (Domestication begins earlier, with the Neolithic). A sickness, not our true nature. ‘Fallen culture’ is used interchangeably with Taker culture; the Great Rupture is a looser alternate name. Read the full answer, the turn to cities and hierarchy, as a time when the left side of the brain and the ego seized control and pushed the empathic, sensitive side down.10 One way to see it, then, is that the IQ test measures the very cleverness that a culture after the Fall values most, and misses much of what it has lost. See Who is Iain McGilchrist, and what do the two halves of the brain have to do with animism? and What is the Fall?
How does Therapeutic Shamanism see intelligence? #
As something much bigger than anything a test could catch, and not only human. The body has its own consciousness, intelligence and wisdom.11 Plants have a slow, rooted intelligence we simply do not notice because we move too fast, intelligence “just not as we know it.”12 Every one of the PeoplesThe Peoples. The Animal People, Plant People, Standing People (the Trees) and Stone People: our elder kin, of whom the Human People are the youngest and least wise. A family, not a hierarchy. Read the full answer, Animal, Plant and Stone, has intelligences of its own.
When a widened list of intelligences is run across all the Peoples, humans come out clearly ahead on only two, the logical-mathematical and the creative. Many animals match or outdo us in spatial and bodily intelligence, many are emotionally intelligent, and on naturalist intelligence, the ability to connect with and be part of nature, and existential intelligence, knowing how to live, humans may well come last. It is no accident, on this view, that IQ tests weight most heavily the kind of intelligence in which humans happen to lead. Defining intelligence in human terms and then measuring other beings by it is “garbage in, garbage out”.13 See What is naturalist intelligence?, What is existential intelligence? and Is the living world intelligent?
Seen this way, IQ is not wrong so much as small. It measures one corner of one species’ abilities, and the corners it leaves out, the intelligence of the body, of the heart, of relationship with the land and the other-than-human Peoples, are the ones animism cares about most. Separate answers look at several of them: embodied intelligence, interpersonal and intrapersonal intelligence, musical intelligence, artistic or creative intelligence, emotional intelligence and spiritual intelligence.
Does an IQ score say anything about a person’s worth? #
No. An IQ score says how a person did on one set of questions, on one day, measured against what one society counts as clever. It says nothing about their kindness, their sensitivity, their wisdom, their gifts or their place in the web of life, and the 1996 report itself listed wisdom and social sensitivity among the things the tests leave out. Therapeutic Shamanism also asks whether what our culture treats as normal has itself been shaped by domesticationDomestication. The process by which, in domesticating other species, we domesticated ourselves. When dated precisely, Domestication begins with the Neolithic era, before the Fall proper, which begins with the first city-state cultures around 4000 BCE. What rewilding works to undo. More about this, so a mind that fits the tests and the classroom less well may simply be closer to the Wild Mind than to the Domesticated Mind. See What are the Wild Mind and the Domesticated Mind?, What is neurodiversity, and how does Therapeutic Shamanism see it? and What is giftedness, and why can it feel like a burden?
