Tag Archives: Intelligence

Academic Excellence Due to Efforts or Intelligence: Curious? Read on

There has been a long standing debate in intellectual circles: what leads to superior performance? Is it due to talent or intelligence or is it due to efforts and hard work? Reams of books have been written on the subject including some of my favorites:  ‘Talent is overrated’, ‘Outliers’ etc.

Applied to the classroom the question becomes why did Tom get an A or aced the JEE/GRE , was it because he is smarter that Harry or was it because he studied more and better? Answers to questions like these have profound implications for how children learn and grow-  believing that effort matters more (a growth mindset) will likely make them more persistent in face of failures while having a intelligence is all that matter mindset (a fixed mindset) will perhaps make them more self-conscious and helpless in the face of challenges just beyond their current capabilities.

Long time readers of this blog will know I am more sympathetic to the effort/ hard work/ grit / conscientiousness camp and there are good reasons for that. Consider your middle school classroom: perhaps the smartest / most intelligent student does come first in the class, while the most hard working student comes say second.  Now when you go to say college, then people with a minimum threshold of intelligence / smartness would be the ones who would make it to the college say due to winnowing due to SAT/JEE. Now in college, we can say that most students are already of high intelligence and this would not differentiate between their academic achievements. However, not all will be equally hard working/ conscientious . Those who are both intelligent and conscientious will have an advantage in college and will get higher academic achievement. This is not speculation, there have been studies demonstrating exactly that.

Consider again, the 10,000 hour rule of Anders Ericsson et al. What they found was that if you want to excel in any field you need to put in a minimum of average 10,000 hours of deliberate practice and to reach a genius level another 10,000 hours. Now what is clear is that for achieving well in any domain, say playing guitar, you do need to have some talent or ability in that area; but then you need to do riyaaaz or deliberate  practice to build your skills and if you really want to perform and be counted among the geniuses, perhaps at that level all will have the minimum talent required and you can differentiate yourself mostly by practicing hard and putting in superhuman efforts. Thus, effort is what will really differentiate you.

So is that all there is to superior performance: Talent x Deliberate Practice or more colloquially  Intelligence x Efforts.

When I teach grit and growth mindset to my students, I teach this equation by Angela that ‘effort counts twice’:

Talent x Effort = Skill

Skill x Efforts = Achievement

Today I think its time to modify the equation!!

Enter curiosity! This paper by Tomas Chamoro -Premuzic et al argues and makes a compelling case for adding a third element to the mix: curiosity measured as epistemic curiosity  or Typical Intellectual Engagement (TIE) or need for cognition or Openness to experience. They did a meta -analysis and found that

  1. Intelligence does predict Academic achievement; correlation as high as .35
  2. Efforts measured by Conscientiousness does predict academic achievement: correlation as high as 0.20
  3. Curiosity as measured by TIE does predict academic achievement: correlation as high as 0.20
  4. Intelligence , Curiosity and Efforts have independent effects on academic achievement; none of them mediates the other.
  5. TIE and Intelligence are correlated (remember Openness/ Intellect are aspects of a single trait)
  6. Conscientiousness and TIE are correlated ( general factor of personality?).
  7. Intelligence and Conscientiousness are uncorrelated.

Thus Curiosity is a welcome (and at equal footing)  addition to the (Academic) achievement equation.

I use VIA framework a lot so will try to reframe the equation using VIA strengths. I believe intelligence or talent is best reflected in Critical Thinking and  Creativity. Effort or hard work is best captured by Perseverance and  self control. Last but not the least comes Curiosity and Love of Learning.

Thus , combining the effort counts twice equations, my equation becomes:

(Creativity + Critical Thinking) x (Grit + Self-control) x (Curiosity + Love of Learning)  = Academic Achievement.

Yay! I love it. Hope more people focus on all the components that are needed for high achievement and Curiosity and love of learning to find their seat at the table. Scott Barry Kaufman has written so passionately about Curiosity and its underused role in schools here.

I was recently at the World Positive Education Accelerator (WPEA) AI summit and conference in Fort Wroth, US and a subgroup there had come up with a project requesting all participants to post about their equation. to thrive I hope you like my equation and it has some real impact on how students are guided towards higher achievement. I know that academic achievement is just one part of the equation for students to thrive- the bigger part of well-being and character strengths is also required for thriving/ flourishing, but yes given the current realities academic achievement *is* an important part of the equation!     #EquationToThrive

Research Summaries: Role of test motivation in intelligence testing

IQ is used synonymous and interchangeably with intelligence; however in this paper [pdf] Angela Duckworth et al argue that non-cognitive factors like test motivation also affect the IQ scores and have differential predictive validity.

Raven's Progressive Matrices Example

Raven’s Progressive Matrices Example (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

  1.  Intelligence, which is the ability to flexibly adapt to complex situations, is usually measured using IQ scores on intelligence tests. IQ scores however do not measure juts the raw intelligence; they also measure how motivated someone is to take the test and  achieve a high score.
  2. Intelligence tests, that lead to IQ Scores, are supposed to measure the maximal intelligence ability that a person has and not the typical intelligence that he/she uses. In all intelligence testing it is assumed that the person will devote his entire attention and exert the maximum effort possible so as to achieve the highest score possible.
  3. While the assumption that IQ measures maximal intelligence may be true in high-stake testing situations, where the IQ results would be used for academic admissions, job placement or promotions; in normal measurement of IQ, say in a typical school setting, the stakes are quite low (there are no real/tangible repercussions of doing bad or well on the test) and hence IQ does not typically measure the maximal intelligence, but is confounded by test motivation.
  4. Test motivation refers to the fact that some people will be less motivated to take the test or continue with it and may display behaviors that indicate low motivation. While others may be highly motivated to take the IQ test. Thus, there would be individual differences at trait level on test motivation.
  5. Test motivation is also a state variable that can be manipulated by incentivizing getting high scores on the tests. When such incentives are in place, the IQ score should increase from the baseline level or when the test was given under non-incentivized conditions.
  6. Intelligence, as measured by IQ, has been associated with a number of good outcomes. Non cognitive factors as measured by test motivation are also theoretically linked to important life outcomes. For the purposes of this paper, two academic outcomes (years of education and academic achievement) and two non-academic outcomes (employment and criminal conviction) were measured and analyzed.
  7. The study 1 performed a meta-analysis of various independent samples where a comparison was made between the IQ scores received in standardized conditions vis-a-vis under incentivized conditions. For analysis the sample was divided in high IQ (those with IQ greater than 100) and low IQ (those with IQ less than 100). The main results were that incentives did result in higher IQ scores, the effect was stringer for low IQ group and there was dose-response effect with larger incentives leading to greater IQ points gains.
  8. Thus, for low IQ group, the lower IQ scores in standardized conditions could be due to lower intelligence or lower test motivation. If you increase the test motivation, you could bump up the IQ score of some of them. High IQ group, on the other hand had higher scores because they had both higher intelligence and higher test motivation.
  9. In study 2, a thin-slice video of children giving the intelligence test was behaviorally rated for signs of low test motivation. This was a longitudinal study and the IQ scores, test motivation and four types of outcomes were analyzed to find the differential impact of IQ/intelligence and test-motivation/ non-cognitive factors on life outcomes.
  10. The main finding was that test motivation had a significant impact, independent of IQ, on important life outcomes. This was specially pronounced for nonacademic outcomes like employment and criminal convictions. Intelligence as measured by IQ still had significant effect on all adult outcomes. They also found that test motivation predicted IQ scores, thus IQ score measures both intelligence and test motivation.

This is an important paper [pdf] that shows that IQ scores need to be interpreted with caution, and that both cognitive and non-cognitive factors are important for life outcomes.

The Making of a Genius: Required Ingredients

What goes into the making of a genius? More mundanely, what factors are required for success in any field? Your answer will differ based on what factors you consider to be the most important for success.

Photo of the obverse of a Fields Medal made by...

Photo of the obverse of a Fields Medal made by Stefan Zachow for the International Mathematical Union (IMU), showing a bas relief of Archimedes (as identified by the Greek text) (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

No one can deny the large role that intelligence and talent play in the making of a genius, or to achieve moderate levels of success compared to peers. We can probably club these two factors together as ability, that is more or less inborn, and is not very easy to increase or amenable to interventions.

Let me be a be it more specific. I consider ability to be made of two components: specific talent in a particular domain, say singing talent or mathematical talent; and fluid intelligence, or the ability to solve problems in real time using cognitive resources like working memory and typically measured by IQ. While talent is domain specific, fluid intelligence is domain general, but both will be required to be successful in a domain. Intelligence (fluid) will enable one to learn at an exceptional rate and also to learn form ones mistakes and improve.

Both talent and intelligence have been shown to explain up to 50 % of variance, in say, academic performance. Thus they are definitely required to achieve extraordinary success/ genius.

However, another stream of research informs us that putting in 10,000 hours or more of deliberate practice is what does the magic. As per research by Andres Ericsson and colleagues to achieve and expertise in any domain you need 10,000 hours or more of focused, deliberate practice. Here two things are important to note:  you are not putting in brute force efforts blindly, but following a process of deliberate practice (picking up a weakness, working on it constantly to improve soliciting feedback etc) and the second is that you do put in more than 10,000 hours of such efforts to attain some expertise and then again 10,000 hours more to achieve genius level expertise.

Thus, one can subsume these factors under the common label effort: comprising of a daily ritual of deliberate practice or Riyaaz or smart efforts; and a long term fruits of putting in 10,000 or 20,000 hrs of such efforts in the form of expertise or domain specific crystallized intelligence.

Both indulging in deliberate practice daily and building expertise by putting in the required hours are correlated with genius level expert performance or success.  In more mundane terms, if you really want to make contributions to mathematics such that they deserve a Fields Medal, you need to systematically work on which areas of Maths need improving and actually spend hours daily honing your maths skills for a few years before hoping to get one.

and of course as Angela Duckworth says, talent * effort = skill and skill* effort = performance, so effort counts twice and is an important determinant of success.

But this brings us to the question is effort same as grit, another factor that has been shown to predict success/ achievement/ genius?

While to the naive mind they may appear same; to me effort is willingness and ability to work smart and work hard; while grit is more about being passionate about a particular super-ordinate goal and getting back on track and showing persistence in the face of setbacks/ adversity.

And of course another personality factor or character strength that is similarly predictive of success is self-control. Self-control is the ability to resist temptations and forego pleasure-in-the-now for gains-in-the-future. It reliably predicts success in many domains and is domain general trait.  Grit however is more domain specific. Also while Self-control works on a shorter time scale, Girt works on a longer time scale.

Both can be subsumed under goal-commitment: a in the moment domain general self control factor and a long term domain specific grit factor.

And this brings us to the final set of factors which are equally important for success: enjoying and being engrossed in what you are doing and being curious/exploratory about the things you don’t know/ haven’t experienced yet. These are emotional-motivational processes that ensure that you actually do put in the efforts required to meet the goal commitments and to actualize your ability.

Recent research has shown that a hungry mind is very important for predicting academic success. This hungry mind is conceptualized as intellectual curiosity. Curiosity as initially defined by Todd Kashadan et al was comprised of Exploration (or Curiosity as they define now per se) and Absorption. Later Todd et al have disowned absorption as a part of curiosity, and they are right to do so, but given the high correlations between  absorption and exploration, I think they were on to something. Important for us is to remember that curiosity or the appetitive strivings for novelty, complexity,uncertainty and ambiguity; and Absorption or flow or full engagement in specific activities, taken together are again strong predictors of success/ achievement.

Thus, we have a fourth big factor predicting and causing success, viz Engagement: one sub-factor of which is a domain/ task specific flow or absorption and the other a domain general or task independent curiosity or love of learning or intrinsic motivation.

With that we can probably summarize the ingredients required to make a genius:

  1. Ability, both talent and intelligence
  2. Effort, both daily deliberate practice and 10,000 hours of expertise
  3. Goal commitment, both self control and grit
  4. Engagement, flow as well as curiosity

As an aside, this fits my ABCD model: Engagement or flow/curiosity are Affective in nature; Effort is Behavioral; Ability (intelligence) I consider as Cognitive and goal-commitment as Dynamic/motivational.

So, what are you going to do different to achieve extraordinary performance after having learned this? Will you work on your curiosity, put in more hours of deliberate practice , ensure you are feeling flow and absorption or work or your self-control muscle. There are many paths to greatness, and you can choose to focus on one or more to take you where you need to be!

Research Summaries: Childhood IQ and risk of bipolar disorder in adulthood: prospective birth cohort study

Today’s research summary focuses on an article [pdf] that throws some light on the oft debated question of the association between intelligence, creativity and mental illness.

Age-standardised disability-adjusted life year...

Age-standardised disability-adjusted life year (DALY) rates from Bipolar disorder by country (per 100,000 inhabitants). (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

  1. It has been hypothesized that various mental illnesses like Bipolar disorder, Schizophrenia etc persist in the gene pool because they are associated with some positive mechanisms that also confer survival or mating benefits, either to the patients or their close relatives. One such mechanism is thought to be apophenia (ability to see patterns, sometimes when there are none:-) ) , which is related to divergent thinking, imagination and creativity; another such mechanism is thought to be intelligence or the ability to solve complex adaptive problems flexibly.
  2. One method to settle the debate is correlational in nature. Sweden maintains rich and exhaustive data about its citizens. Mining data form the Swedish population registries, it was found that bipolar patients, as well as their relatives,  were more likely to be in creative professions;  and that bipolar traits may be associated with leadership qualities.
  3. Another method is to look at twins, one of which has the bipolar disorder, while the other hasn’t; and it was found that the other twin had high scores on sociability and verbal fluency; hinting that these may be linked to the bipolar proband.
  4. Yet another method is to look at longitudinal studies like the Dunedin studies, which track a child cohort since birth or early age and track them over time. The Dunedin studies found that low childhood IQ was associated with Schizophrenia spectrum disorder, depression an anxiety in adulthood; but high IQ was associated with mania in adulthood.
  5. The authors of this study used a longitudinal study design, analyzing the results of ALSPAC, a large UK birth cohort. This cohort consist of about 15,500 participation, but after all the dropout etc only about 2000 subjects results were part of the study results.
  6. This study focused on association of childhood IQ (which is an imperfect measure of true intelligence) with propensity for bipolar disorder in young adulthood. This study did not look at creativity and did not look at actual occurrence of bipolar disorder, thus all the results should not be extrapolated wildly.
  7. Childhood IQ at age 8 was measured using WISC-III and separate verbal and performance IQ as well as Full IQ scores were used in analysis. Propensity towards bipolar was measured using HCL-32 (hypo-mania checklist) which consist of 32 yes/no answers to statements like ‘I am more easily distracted’ when in a state of ‘high’ not associated with drug use. Only 28 items from this checklist were used.  This was administered at ages 22-23 years.
  8. Childhood IQ was indeed associated with higher scores on HCL-32. The scores on HCL-32 were converted into percentile scores. Those subjects, who were in the lowest decile of HCL-32, or alternately had the lowest risk for later bipolar, had IQ scores that were 10 points on average lower than those subjects who were in the highest decile of HCL32 (had the highest bipolar risk).
  9. The IQ scores were also made categorical. Looking at data from another way, those who had the lowest verbal IQ scores (were in the ‘extremely low’ of VIQ) had on an average 7.1 points less score on HCL-32 than the ‘average’ VIQ group. The ‘ Very superior’ VIA group had scores  1.83 points higher than ‘average’ IQ group.
  10. As the age at which, HCL-32 was administered, not many people have the first manic/ depressive episode; so it might be capturing risk towards bipolar rather than actual incidence. Verbal fluency seems a more stronger predictor of bipolar risk than intelligence per se.
  11. As per my views, Bipolar pro-band may have more to do with creativity than intelligence and if future studies could operationalise and measure childhood creativity and look at later risk or occurrence of bipolar disorder, than that will settle the debate to an extent. Also important to remember that intelligence and creativity though correlated are different, with one perhaps requiring a threshold of intelligence to be creative.
  12. Lastly, if you are intelligent or creative, don’t fear, the risks seem to be too small and other factors like stress play a much more important role in triggering an illness. And even when triggered, it can be managed well!

If you liked the study and want to dig deeper, the full text  article [pdf] is online.

Autism and ADHD: the intelligent and the creative child!

ResearchBlogging.org
A new study by Ruthsatz and Urbach is doing the rounds nowadays. That study has nothing to do with Autism or ADHD per se. The study focuses on child prodigies and finds that they have high levels of intelligence, enhanced working memory and that they pay attention to details.

What the study also found was high level of autistic relatives and high scores on Autism spectrum for the prodigies. The relation between autism and prodigiousness was mediated by the endo-phenotype ‘paying attention to detail’ and none of the other symptoms of ASD seemed to play a role.

Many savants also are high on ASD and have exception working as well as long term memory. There too they pay excessive attention to details and are fascinated by speical interests.

 

On the other hand there is gathering literature that suggests that the ADHD kid is basically on the creative side of the spectrum – restless, trying multiple strategies,  having diffused and peripheral attention, and to an extent novelty and sensation seeking.

Also, if one thinks about that for a minute, autism and ADHD seem to be opposed on a number of dimensions. The three basic features of ADHD are 1) inattentiveness and distractibility vs  too much focus and fascination for an object shown by Autistic kid 2) impulsiveness vs restricted and repetitive motions and interests of the autistic kid and finally 3) hyperactivity vs restrained interactions and communications of the autistic kid.

There is also some data from fly models that suggest that autism and ADHD are opposites in a sense.

I may even go ahead and stick my neck and say that while autism is primarily characterized by emotion of Interest/ fascination/ attention ; ADHD is characterized by emotion of Wonder/Awe/surprise.

One theory of autism suggests that the social and communicative difficulties arise as the child hides in a cocoon to prevent over-stimulation and sensory overload; a theory of ADHS says that the child is under-stimulated and needs stimulants like Ritalin to achieve baseline of activation and sensory stimulus.

Another popular theory of autism posits that it arises primarily due to ‘weak central coherence’, or inability to see the context/ gestalt/ ‘the big picture’. The ADHD kid on the other hand is hypothesized to use a lot of peripheral attention and daydreams missing what is being centrally taught in the classroom.

And that brings me to the root of the differences in my opinion; while the Autism spectrum is characterized by a local processing style, the ADHD-psychotic spectrum is characterized by a global  processing style.

Some clarifications are due here. I believe ADHD to fall on the psychotic spectrum and have been proposing the autism and psychosis as opposites on a continuum model for close to eternity.

Also, when I say global/local processing styles I dont restrict the application to perception alone, but extend it to include cognitive style too.

There is a lot of work that has been done on global/ local processing styles with respect to perception, using Navon letter tasks and it is fairly established that normally people lean towards the global processing style.

Forrester et al extend this to cover there GLOMOSYS system that posits two basic types of perceptual/cognitive style- global and local.

It is instructive to pause and note here that psychosis is associated with a global processing style while autism with attention to details.

It is also instructive to pause and note that similar to autism-psychosis continuum , it seems Intelligence and creativity are also in a sense opposed to each other. Also while creativity  is associated with broad cognitive style that is divergent; intelligence is conceived of as narrow and focused application of abilities.

That brings me to my final analogy: while autistic kids may have pockets of intelligence and savantism and may be driving the evolution of intelligence; it is the ADHD kids who are more likely to be creative and are driving the evolution of creativity.

The romantic notion that psychosis is the price for creativity may not be untrue.

Joanne Ruthsatz, & Jourdan B. Urbach (2012). Child prodigy: A novel cognitive profile places elevated general intelligence,
exceptional working memory and attention to detail at the root
of prodigiousness Intelligence DOI: 10.1016/j.intell.2012.06.002
Jens F¨orster, & Laura Dannenberg (2010). GLOMOsys: A Systems Account of Global Versus Local Processing Psychological Inquiry, DOI: 10.1080/1047840X.2010.487849

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Genius are born or made? become or manifest?

Albert Einstein

Image via Wikipedia

There is long-standing debate in psychology regrading whether ability is inborn or a result of environmental interactions? Whether it is fixed and constant over time or malleable and subject to interventions.

We have also looked at research by Dweck et al that say that no matter whether  ability be actually fixed or malleable, the belief that it is fixed and malleable has important consequences. We are better off believing that ability is malleable as that enables us to be more persistent in face of obstacle , more creative and engaged while solving problems and enables us to to tackle hard problem as we are in a learning mindset and not in a  proving ourselves/ validating ourselves  mindset.

However the issue still remains as to whether ability is inborn or learned? whether genius is 99 % perspiration and 1 % inspiration or whether one can will oneself or choose to be a genius.

Like the other false dichotomies of psychology this one as to whether genius are born or made is not only false by pitching 2 things against each other where both have a role to play but also misses on the other aspects of being a genius like it being a result of sheer will power or the attitude that one has to see thins in a creative light.

While one group claims that talent/IQ is all that is there is to the genius story, the other camp is equally adamant that the 10,000 hours of practice rule suffices to explain genius.  To some other genius is all about determination or grit; while still others think that optimism, positive framing and attitude and how we deal with ‘lucky’ breaks is all it takes to become a genius.

There are truths to each of the story, but by focusing on one aspect to the exclusion of others they all miss the point. Its only when you see a genius as a combination of these can you really appreciate the complexity and multiple facets of being a genius.

 

To give us a framework of reference I refer readers to my ABCD model of psychology where A is Affect(genetics) , B is Behaviors (actions and environment)  , D is Desire  (developmental unfolding of motivation)  and C is Cognition ( Conscious decisions and manifestations) .

To see a genius in the light of ABCD model is to see him/her as consisting of talent/IQ (largely genetic and inborn), hard work (need to put the 10,000 hours pf practice to achieve domain mastery), grit (motivation and determination , maybe unconscious , to succeed and overcome obstacles)  and attitude (positive re-framing, optimism and choosing to see things in a creative/positive light) .

Out of these talent /IQ is something that we can least work on while positive and creative attitude and mindset is what we can easily change by changing our conscious thought and thinking styles and patterns alone. Hard work (related to conscientiousness) or grit (related to how intrinsically motivated and determined we are) are also more or less in our control . Thus to me becoming a genius is both a choice, that is within everyone’s reach, and a difficult journey that one has to necessarily undertake (a quest that challenges you to self-actualize)

Genius both become what they want to and manifest what their hidden potentialities are . to state otherwise or to assert that they are either born or made is to continue paying homage to a false dichotomy that has longed outlived its usefulness.

 

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