Many people assume that superior intelligence or ability is a key to success. But more than three decades of research shows that an overemphasis on intellect or talent—and the implication that such traits are innate and fixed—leaves people vulnerable to failure, fearful of challenges and unmotivated to learn.
Teaching people to have a “growth mind-set,” which encourages a focus on effort rather than on intelligence or talent, produces high achievers in school and in life.
We’ve hashed over the IQ debate lots of times here, so I hesitate to raise it again. But I saw this article, and it seemed to raise a related by slightly different question about what is the most productive way to view intellectual ability; not so much arguing whether it is a fixed innate quantity or strongly environmentally determined, but whether there is a difference in the utility of thinking about it in one or the other of these ways. I didn’t want to dig back through really old threads, so I thought I’d put this here, but I apologize for starting up the debate again, if this does.
[ Edited: 04 January 2008 10:25 AM by mckenzievmd ]
I think IQ is important, but only one part of being a successful person. Having supportive, loving parents to help the child have decent self-esteem and adjustment are also necessary. In addition, the child should be given challenges, often as a game, that can’t be answered by reading, but have to be determined by physical experience. I think rote learning, while often necessary, can stifle creativity and real life thinking.
The example given in the article of the very bright kid who fell apart in secondary school hits home. My first four years of school were in New England. When my parents came to Southern California I was about four years ahead of the other kids academically so I had a ball doing nothing and getting As. It caught up with me in the eighth grade social studies and English classes. I was now getting Cs and occasional Bs. The teacher who taught these called me aside and said, “Gerald, I thought you were just another spineless boy who would end up doing menial jobs for the rest of your life. I happened to see your IQ in the Counseler’s Office. So you will get only one of two grades in both classes, either two As or two Fs.”
I got two A’s, and she probably changed my life, but, geez, did I hate that woman.
I believe I had a major advantage in chemistry because I got interested in the sixth grade, checked some books out of the library and made all sorts of things (often fireworks that would get me thrown in jail now days). I get a great deal of first hand experience before I really learned the chemistry. That made the text far more exciting and alive than it was for the other kids.
There was a fascinating interview yesterday on a local public radio station, KPCC. The interviewee had written an article about recent IQ research. I’ll get more information and post it.
Occam
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I don’t know how to do the pretty blue link thing, so this is the summary in the Patt Morrison section of the KPCC.FM website. You can go there a listen to the interview or track down the original work on the Internet.
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I.Q. and Race: No Connection
[ Listen ]
“I.Q. measures not just the quality of a person’s mind but the quality of the world that person lives in.” This is according to Malcolm Gladwell, who compares the theories of social scientist James Flynn and I.Q. fundamentalists in his recent New Yorker piece on the connection between race and I.Q. Gladwell and Patt discuss the long-used and often misinterpreted intelligence test.
Malcolm Gladwell, staff writer with The New Yorker and author of The Tipping Point: How Little Things Make a Big Difference and Blink: The Power of Thinking Without Thinking (Back Bay Books)
I pesonally think an IQ test tend to usually check the person on mainly one level or facet and that is academic. To really “appraise” the person’s real capacity and potential, it should evaluate them on as many of their own facets as possible. Anything from mechanical, to artistic, to physical to practical to scientific to culinary etc. Many can be good or miserable with this or that but yet, brilliant or hopelessly stupid in other areas. Until they get tested in as many possible ‘routes’, their true potential remains hidden and unknown.
Having supportive, loving parents to help the child have decent self-esteem and adjustment are also necessary.
This sounds to me more like nature/nurture problem than an IQ one. As much as it scares the heck out of me, Occam, to disagree with you, I think you might be completely wrong on this one. At least according to Pinker, who in Blank Slate says that parents have no influence on how well their children will do in their future lives. I wouldn’t know where to begin to quote him, as only the chapter on children is almost thirty pages long. It seems that the only way parents can help their kids to have a decent self-esteem is through the genes. After that it is the kids’ little world made of their friends and pure chance that will decide what their life story will be all about.
I think in some respects we put too much focus on IQs. I say that because my older son tried so hard to get into the Gifted Program. He was two or three points off and tried to get those three extra points- which it was an IQ test. The problem is, he got the three points, but funding supposedly forced the district to raise the minimum IQ score (from 145 to 150). He was bored in regular classes because they didn’t challenge him and then when that happened, he seemed to have given up even in regular classes. The whole time they kept telling him how smart he was and all, yet he couldn’t into more challenging classes due to raising the cut off. Now to a kid, even though he knows it’s just a score, is a blow.
In which case, George, it’s not just the parents who need to change the focus, but the schools too. With schools telling kids they are so smart and telling them to go for programs that have set levels and tests to get in them it gives messages to kids. Raising the bar due to funds makes it worse, esp when they tell the kid to try again. I left it up to my son as to whether or not he wanted to go for it and I explained to him it is nothing more than a test score that is subject to change from day to day, depending on how much sleep you get, whether or not you before hand, etc. Meanwhile he gets a different message from the school, “You’re gifted, but you don’t quite score high enough. You can try again in X amount of time and we recommend you do.” I don’t think that helps or it didn’t my son at least.
In which case, George, it’s not just the parents who need to change the focus, but the schools too.
I believe that’s not what I said, Mriana. I don’t think anybody, parents or schools, need to change much as IQ is probably up to 70% heritable. Your last chance to influence your kid’s IQ is probably at the moment of deciding if you should go for a dinner with that guy or not.
No, I meant concerning self-esteem, not IQ. I think it is difficult enough for kids at one end scale or the other, without putting pressure on them and alike. I think it was a mistake how the school handled it and I’m not so sure I did a great job by saying it’s up to you if you try again, but understand it’s just another score… I think it was a blow to his self-esteem even though he made an excellent score.
George, I wasn’t saying that having supportive, nurturing parents would raise a child’s IQ. Rather, I think that there are many factors that determine one’s level of success in life (self-defined, not external). I’ve met quite a few people with high IQs who were real nut cases. Some of them couldn’t hold a job, some couldn’t maintain a relationship, some of them didn’t have too decent a grasp on reality, and some of them were generally unhappy.
That’s why I think there other characteristics like social and internal adjustment, awareness of the consequences of one’s actions, a positive outlook, a decent sense of balance and humor, creativity, wide ranging interests, desire to help others, etc. that all contribute. Some of these may be genetically determined, but I tend to believe that genetics set the rules of the game, but nurture determines how it’s played. To use an analogy: The rules of chess and the board setup are precisely determined (genetics), but your success is determined by how you operate within those rules.
Yes, I know that separated identical twins often have similar life outcomes, but the question is how different their family lives really were. As you’ve probably already recognized, I don’t have very high opinions of people who write books declaring crazy things just so they get a lot of publicity. The trouble is that so many people take books as major authorities. [If it’s in a book it must be true.] I guess I got innoculated against that when I was a freshman in college and was completely taken in by Dianetics, a delightful example of fiction written as scientific fact. It didn’t take too long to realize that its claims were crazy. I haven’t read Pinker, but I’m not too sure he’s completely different from L. Ron Hubbard.
I don’t have very high opinions of people who write books declaring crazy things just so they get a lot of publicity. The trouble is that so many people take books as major authorities. [If it’s in a book it must be true.] I guess I got innoculated against that when I was a freshman in college and was completely taken in by Dianetics, a delightful example of fiction written as scientific fact. It didn’t take too long to realize that its claims were crazy. I haven’t read Pinker, but I’m not too sure he’s completely different from L. Ron Hubbard.
You’re definitely right to be suspicious of some of the stronger claims in Pinker’s books (I’m not sure about them myself); but to be fair to him they aren’t things he’s just making up. He wouldn’t have gotten a tenured position at Harvard had that been the case! They are backed up by a raft of twin- and other studies that correct for things like family similarities. Now, we do all agree that the predictive and explanatory value of social sciences is less than perfect; but that said, they’re the best we have, and I don’t believe they can be dismissed simply on the basis of intuitions.
I too must agree that I find some of Pinker’s claims absolutely shocking; after all I am a parent and when somebody tells me that devoting my life to my children doesn’t account for much more than a healthy relationship with them (not that that isn’t much), I get a little confused. I am planning on continuing to find out more about the nature/nurture dilemma, but for the moment I must say that even though it looks as if the sun orbited the earth, it probably ain’t so.
And, Occam, I find your chess analogy somehow confusing. Is it not the genes that determine how well you’ll do in chess?
I am familiar with Pinker and it sounds like I missed a crucial element to his ideas. Please clear up anything I may have missed. I understood Pinker’s main point to be, that we are conditioned through evolution to learn from our experiences. I don’t remember hearing or reading anything about parents not having any effect on their children beyond genetics. Parents can have just as much effect as their kid’s friends. They play a crucial role in the experiences that their kids use to sharpen their minds.
As I understand the core of the article Brennen linked; we shouldn’t get so caught up saying “some people got it, and others don’t”. This line of thinking has qualities conducive to lowering self esteem, because everyone makes mistakes. Our biological differences may make us unique, but we are relatively very similar. Applied optimism can offer more fruits than most biological pre-conditions. Most people have an innate understanding of this value. That is why we trumpet stories of people who overcome great odds.
Have you read The Blank Slate? I don’t have the book with me and I would only do more damage than anything else trying to paraphrase what Pinker has to say in the chapter on children. But from what I remember, studies with identical twins, fraternal twins, siblings and adopted children have shown that the influence of the parents is pretty much a zero. If you haven’t read The Blank Slate, get it. It’s a good read. Next book on my list is the third edition of Evolutionary Psychology by David M. Buss, which came out last year, as I hope to find out more about the topic and Buss’s book appears worth a try.
IIRC Pinker’s point was that parents have virtually no influence on the basic personality traits of their children. 50% of the variance was genetic and 50% was not associated well with any particular environmental factor ... again, IIRC. It’s been awhile since I read the book.
I have not read the Blank Slate, but I did spend a few months chasing down a plethora of information and online lectures on twin studies and the blank slate. I also drove a 500 mile round trip to see Pinker talk in person. I will have to read this book now.
The broad consensus I found on twin studies was that somewhere between 48%-77% of personality traits are determined biologically. While environmental factors are left with somewhere between 23%-52%, I was not discouraged by this number. To quote one of the best comedies ever, “So you’re saying there’s a chance”.
I take the somewhat humble assumption that my biological adeptness may be sub par, so I better maximize my 23-52% to make up the difference and get whatever advantage and edge I can get.
I can’t understand an argument that James Mills had super genes and his son John was awesome because of those, and not because he and Bentham gave him a rigourous education.
I have not read Blank Slate but I cannot imagine that parents don’t have a significant effect on much of a child’s development. For example, what if the parents teach the child a second language. There would be clear advantages to being bi-lingual such as increasing vocabulary. I don’t think there are many children who can teach themselves Spanish by the age of 5.
Disclaimer here, I have no children (I have seen them on tv though) and as I have admitted earlier, I haven’t read the book but the second language point popped into my head so I thought I would post it.
Addendum: I had seen a study before stating that children who have been nurtured and read to come into kindergarten with significantly larger vocabularies than children who were not read to. The advantage of a larger vocabulary could be traced and linked to success in the childrens’ academic accomplishment. I could not find the study so I didn’t post the point. I think I found a similar study, at least enough to post the point:
JRM5001, you are exactly right, of course, about language acquisition. Since that’s Pinker’s specific field of expertise, he’s well aware of it too. But IIRC the language that children end up learning is more consonant with what they hear among their peers than their parents. Think of immigrant families: the parents may often never end up speaking the local language, but the children will speak it as well as a native, and often actually lose the language of their parents in the first or second generation.
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He was bored in regular classes because they didn’t challenge him and then when that happened, he seemed to have given up even in regular classes. The whole time they kept telling him how smart he was and all, yet he couldn’t into more challenging classes due to raising the cut off. Now to a kid, even though he knows it’s just a score, is a blow.
