Transcript for:
Lecture on the Big Five Traits - Openness and Intelligence

[Music] well we're going to continue our discussion of the big five traits today and I'm going to talk to you about openness and intelligence um roughly speaking so the first thing I want to do is put them into context you need to understand where in Ence fits in the in the trait hierarchy structure and so we've we've looked at this before but you can break the big five into the big two plasticity and stability we'll start with stability here and stable people are conscientious high in stress tolerance or emotional stability or low in neuroticism depending on how you look at it and high in agreeableness and then conscientiousness breaks down into industrious and orderliness um neuroticism breaks down into volatility and withdrawal and agreeableness breaks down into politeness and compassion and then for the second major trait you have the the big two trait you have plasticity and plasticity is made up of extraversion and openness and those look like the reason they Clump together the reason the first three Clump together we think is because they're roughly associated with serotonergic function um and the reason that latter two Clump together is because they're roughly associated with dopaminergic function and the dopamine system mediates exploratory behavior in the face of the unknown but it also mediates positive emotion and and it's because in order to move forward into the unknown it isn't that you have to experience positive emotion it's that the emotion you experience when you're motivated to move forward into the unknown and explore is a positive emotion and positive emotion is very much also associated with interaction in the social environment and maybe that's because a tremendous amount of what you're doing in the social environment is essentially exploratory Behavior right because for example when you're communicating with people that's primarily exploratory behavior um so it's not surprising that the circuitry overlaps in in that manner um openness is the one we're going to concentrate on most particularly today and it it's openness to experience technically and it seems to break down into intellect and and openness proper which is it's it's intellect which is interest in ideas maybe facility with ideas and openness which is more like creativity that's that's now you can't divide them into interest and ideas and creativity so precisely because they they overlap to a to a great degree but there is there is reason for differentiating between them so for example women are about a third of a standard deviation higher than men in openness SL creativity and men are about a third of a standard deviation higher than women in interest and ideas and intellect and that's actually quite a substantial difference within a trait that's when the two traits are so highly correlated so there's reason to do the to do the fractionation so anyways so we're going to concentrate on openness today and the reason that I'm presenting the trait description first rather than moving immediately into say IQ and creativity is because it's reasonable to it's useful to know that you can take intelligence and put it in the big five taxonomy and you can actually measure intelligence a lot more accurately with an IQ test and perhaps also with a creativity test than you can with a self-report personality test that relies on adjectives you know because I could ask you guys well how smart are you on a scale of 1 to seven and that would be roughly correlated with your IQ but if I really wanted to know how smart you were roughly speaking it would be much better to give you an IQ test and if I was wanting to know how creative you are rather than asking you how creative you are and getting you to report even though there would be some accuracy in that it would be better actually to give you some of the different tests of creativity that we'll talk about today now the weird thing about the big five or one of the weird things about it is that we don't have great tests for the traits independently of self-report for almost all of the traits so for example one of the things that I've been trying to do in my lab for the last 5 years is to find some sort of laboratory task that conscientious people do better on or unconscientious people do worse on and you think that would be simple because conscientiousness for example is a very good predictor of long-term life exess success it's also a very good predictor of University grades it's not as good as IQ but it's still a good predictor but we have had one insanely difficult time trying to find a non-self-report test that associate that that that actually predicts conscientiousness so much appreciated yesen sare no it's neuroticism neuroticism is associated with being more self-aware and it's actually it loads on negative emotion so being self-conscious is associated with being high in negative emotion I mean you can assess neuroticism using tests that that ask you about anxiety and emotional pain or depression but that's also not much different than than than self-report anyways we're going to concentrate on openness today and we're going to concentrate both on creativity and intelligence and there's actually almost nothing in Psychology that's more contentious generally speaking than the investigations into the the the technical or the what the the set of skills and abilities that falls under Trade openness and the reason for that and this is especially the case with intelligence is that intelligence is actually quite measurable we've been able to measure it since roughly the beginning of the of the of the 20th century um Benet originated the first I would say reliable and valid IQ tests and they've been used quite extensively for a long period of time and IQ I'll tell you what IQ is as we go through this but there isn't anything that social scientists have been able to measure more successfully than IQ and there's nothing that socialist or very little one there's one exception the relationship between income inequality and male homicide is a power more powerful relationship than the relationship between IQ say and General Life success or IQ and general school Success it's it's even a little stronger than the relationship between IQ and the rate at which you learn something new but other than that it's pretty slim pickings and so we're going to walk through very carefully how IQ is IQ tests are created and formulated and exactly what it is that they measure and why and we'll equate that to some degree to creativity and also differentiate it from creativity as well making the assumption that the aspects of openness intellect and and openness proper are the proper aspects and that they're usefully differentiated so the first thing that you might want to consider is that the world is a very complicated place now we've talked about this before and the way that you handle there's way too much complexity for you to handle in its in its entirety so for example in a room like this there's an endless number of phenomena that you could focus your attention on right from the sort of macro phenomena which would be the overall say color or appearance of the room to the micro phenomena which would be the details at the highest level of detail that you're able to perceive that litter the landscape anywhere and so one of the problems that you have to solve when you're operating in the world is how you perceive the world and we do that in part by making would say that we perceive low resolution representations of the world and we also confuse those with the world so when I'm looking at you I'm really looking at a low represent what I perceive consciously is a low represent low resolution representation of you right I only see the front of you to begin with I only see your surface and in some sense you know I even perceive you in some sense as a more or less uniform color it's hard to tell exactly what color skin is it's sort of a light pink roughly speaking but my my perception is fairly is fairly I don't know a better way of putting it than low resolution and I seem to perceive you at the level of resolution that's that's sufficient the the lowest resolution that's sufficient to facilitate our interactions because I don't want to clutter up my perceptions of you when we're just talking with excess detail so there's lots of things about you I don't need to see I certainly can't see any of your micro structures below the below the phenomenal level like I can't tell without tremendous further investigation What You're Made Of biologically for example and I certainly can't perceive the networks of society that you're engaged in your family or the other sorts of networks that you're embedded in I see you here now the front of you at low resolution and you can tell that to some degree and we've talked about this before because if you see say animated movies that use very low resolution representations of people like South Park is a really good example because the imitate or the animation in South Park's very iconic and and and and simple it actually makes almost no difference to following the story and so that shows you how iconic your perception really is can be replaced by very simple icons and you instantly adapt to that you know and so we can go and see The Lego Movie Batman Lego Movie for example and the fact that it's Batman which is an abstraction to begin with and then it's made out of Legos is almost irrelevant to following the plot so some people have compared our perceptions to the user interface on a computer you know when you're interacting with your computer you don't really interact so to speak with the computer there are iconic representations on the screen of the computer that you interact with and those represent obviously they share some functional relationship with what's going on in the computer but mostly they're there so that you using your perceptual structures can interact with the computer in a manner that's easy for extremely intelligent Apes roughly speaking now so one of the problems that you have to solve in the world because it's so full of detail and so complex is how do you actually see the world how do you actually perceive it and it isn't really self-evident that that's a problem because you think when you look at the world that it just presents itself to you but it's a tremendously complicated problem and that's partly why developing artificial intelligence systems that can actually see the world and act in it in any real way has proved to be a much more difficult problem than people had originally supposed because you know we were told maybe from the early 60s onwards that such things as speech to text or object Rec recognition or robots that could operate in the world we're only two or three years away and well I mean we're in we're in a situation now where there are some fairly complicated robots built but they're still really in their nent form and it's because perceiving the world and then figuring out how to act and it turns out to be a much more complicated problem than we originally thought because the borders between things are not self-evident and what level of resolution you should be perceiving things at for say maximal functional utility is also not self-evident it's also tied up very strangely and in ways we don't understand with the nature of your embodiment you know so for example we tend to see see things that are handy because we can pick them up and manipulate them and we can make use of them and so to some degree our brains are evolved to make the world manifest itself to us in a set of discret usable tools that's that's a reasonable way of thinking about it and they're discreet and usable because we have a certain kind of biological platform you know because we have hands and mouths and because we walk in a bipedal manner then it's logical for us to break up the world in a manner that makes operating in this body maximally useful but that doesn't mean that there's a straightforward one-to-one relationship between our perceptions of things and the things themselves quite the contrary and that's partly of course we know that because with any perceptable object like I could con cize you as one thing for all sorts of purposes but if I'm trying to solve a complex problem in relationship to you it's going to be very difficult to determine how to conceptualize you so if I'm if you come to me because you're suffering from a psychological problem of some sort then I have to figure out you know is it organic is it is it there's actually something physiological wrong with you and I need to know what level of analysis I would probably conceptualize you at is it psychological is it and if it's psychological is it functional like do you lack the skills or do you lack the ability to apply the skills or is there something really gone wrong with your family or maybe it's even a reflection of an overarching sociological problem we know for example that when the unemployment rate goes up 1% psychiatric hospitalizations go up 5% and so then you might ask well you know if you're if there's a huge rise in depression and anxiety across the population and at the same time there's a huge increase in in unemployment you have to ask yourself what level of perception would best be suited to solve that problem because it isn't self-evident that it's psychological at the level of the individual anyways my point is is that perception is a very difficult problem and so now here's here's something interesting you can think about this for a minute I went and saw an autistic woman speak at one point her name was Temple grandon she's really worth looking up Temple grandon is a very interesting person she's very seriously autistic when she was a child but her mother and her worked her out of it so that she could be she's very functional she works as a professor I don't remember where it's in the midwest somewhere now she's famous not only be for being a highly functional autistic person who talks a fair bit about what it's like to be autistic but also for Designing slaughter houses across the United States and the reason she can do that as far as she's concerned is because she thinks she thinks like an animal thinks and so she doesn't and and she's identified maybe at least part of what the core problem is with autism so she the talk I heard her at was in Arizona and and it was a was a really uh entrancing talk she showed some showed some really interesting pictures of animals so what she's done is she's redesigned slaughter houses so that when the animals enter the slaughterous they go in a like a spiral basically they can't see what's around the corner and the walls are high so they're not distracted by anything outside so one of the things she showed for example was a bunch of cows was going through a standard uh sequence of of gates essentially and off to the side there was a windmill spinning and the cows would stop because the windmill they didn't understand what the windmill was and they'd stop or showed other pictures where cows were going down a pathway too and there was a Coke can sitting in the middle of the pathway and the cows would all stop because they didn't know what to do with it or she had another picture of cows out in the middle of the field all surrounding a briefcase and they were all looking at the briefcase and the cows didn't like anything that shouldn't be there and had a hard time mapping it now she said here here was a little exercise she did she said think of a church okay so maybe you think you imagine a child's drawing of a church it's like your standard house like a pentag pentagon right which is basically how children draw the front of a house with a steeple on top and maybe a cross on top of it or something like that which actually isn't at church it's an icon of a church and you think about how children draw houses too Pentagon rectangle what is it trapezoid chimney almost always with smoke which is quite interesting it's I don't know where kids get that exactly but they almost always draw a chimney with smoke even though chimneys with smoke aren't that common anymore but anyways you know you you can see what a child's picture of a house looks like in your imagination one of the things that you might want to think about is that is not a picture of a house at all right it's an iconic representation that's kind of like a heroglyph because no house looks like that and then you think about how a child will draw a person Circle stick stick stick stick stick and you show it to someone they go that's a person it's like really it looks nothing like a person right it I mean you you immediately recognize it as a person but it looks nothing like a person well what grandon said was that when she thinks of a church she has to think of a church she's seen she can't take the set of all churches and Abstract out an iconic representation and use that to represent the set of all churches she has she gets fixated on specific Exemplar and she thinks that one of the problems with autistic people and they have a very difficult time uh developing Language by the way is that they can't abstract out a generalized representation across a set of entities they can't abstract and then they and well and of course if you can't abstract then it's also very difficult to manipulate the abstractions and you see very strange Behavior with autistic children for example so they don't like people and that's because people don't stay in their perceptual boxes like a human being is a very difficult thing to perceive because we're always shifting around and moving and doing different things like we don't stay in our categorical box so autistic people have real trouble with other people but they also have trouble so for example if your autistic child gets accustomed to your kitchen let's say and you move a chair then then especially if they're severely autistic they'll have an absolute fit about it because you think kitchen with chair moved they think completely different place because they can't abstract the the the constancies across the different situations and represent them abstractly so I I made this little diagram I made this little diagram here to to kind of give you a sense of what you might be doing when you're abstracting perceptually and so you could say think about something that's that complicated it's sort of my model of how complex the world is but the world is a lot more complex than that but the world is made out of everything is made out of little things and those little things are made out of little things and so forth and those things are nested inside bigger things and so forth and where you perceive on that level of of abstraction is somewhat arbitrary it has to be bounded by your by your goals that's the other thing is that your perceptual structures are determined by the goals that you have at hand I mean some of that's that's not completely true because your perceptual systems also have limitations right there's things you can't see or hear even if you need to so there limitations built in but within that set of limitations you're still trying to tune your perceptions to your motivated goals and that's also very useful to think about when you're trying to understand artificial intelligence because for human beings without goals there's no perception because there's no filtering mechanism that you can use to determine the level of resolution at which you perceive anyway so there's the there's a thing made of smaller things which are made out of smaller things and it's so it's kind of my iconic representation of the complexity of the world and then you could think well what is this how can you see this object and I think if you just look at it you can detect it's like a Necker Cube you know those cubes that that are line drawings that you can see the front of and then it'll flip to the back have you seen those so this is kind of Necker Cube like or at least it is for me in that when I look at it my perceptions play around with it sometimes I focus on the kind of cross-like shape in the middle and sometimes I can see these other lines and then sometimes I'll focus on that square and sometimes I can see the little dots there maybe one dot and my perceptions are going like this trying to fit a pattern to it and I you can kind of detect that when you're watching it and so I would say well you have the options of perceiving this in its full complexity or you can simplify it essentially there's lots of ways you can simplify it but some of them are laid out there so you take the comp complex thing you make a low resolution represent ation of it so that's its rough that's the rough area that all those dots occupy that's the rough area broken down to its four most fundamental quadrants that might be how you would look at it if if this was a map of an orchard and you were trying to walk from south to North that would be a useful representation this combines this and this that's the that's the highest level of resolution that you can perceive this object at that's lower resolution than the object itself so the first issue is how should you look at things well that's a problem that intelligence has to solve so that's one of the problems that intelligence goes after and then I think what happens is we have the thing in itself and then we simplify it with a perception and that's like a an iconic representation and then we we nail the iconic representation with a word and that's how we compress the world's complexity into something that we can manage we take the complex thing make it into an icon and represent the icon with a word and then when I throw you the word so to speak you decompose it into the icon and then decompose it even further into the thing if you can't if you know the icon and you know the thing and so then we can use shorthand right because you have representational structures and so do I and I'm just tossing you markers about your representational structures and you can unfold them that's what you do when you're reading a novel because the novel comes alive in your imagination in your own idiosyncratic way and it would if you didn't understand the references of the novel right the novelist has to assume that your basic perceptual structures and your intuitions and your instincts are basically the same as his or hers because otherwise they have to assume that because otherwise they would be lost in an infinite regressive explanation so and it's problematic often for example if you start reading Victorian novels you may find that it takes a while to get into them because the presuppositions the expectations are slightly different and so is the language you have to update the representations but anyway so that's roughly as far as I'm concerned that's roughly a representation of what intelligence is doing in the world it's or a big part of it it's how in the world do you look at things so that you can use them for the purposes that you need to use them for and then the next problem that intelligence has to solve which is related is once you've got the perceptual landscape sorted out how do you abstractly represent the action pattern p s that you're going to implement in the world so it's how do you perceive where you are now how do you perceive where you're going and how do you construct up and then Implement strategies that enable you to move from where you are to where you're going so it's a continual process of mapping and movement and so it's it's it's navigation that's what we're doing in the world all the time is navigating through it because we're mobile creatures we're navigating through it attempting to make the world manifest itself in accordance with our wishes and that's the fundamental problem that intelligence has to solve and animals have their perceptions to rely on but we have our perceptions and our ability to abstract from those perceptions multiple times and then to abstract finally into into language so we live in a very abstracted world and it also means that we can learn a lesson in one place and generalize it across many other places which is also something something that animals have a hard time doing because they they don't know how to do that perceptual initial perceptual generalization so okay so then the question might be well if intelligence has to solve the problem of how to perceive in and perceive and navigate within the world towards ends towards in order to fulfill uh in in order to uh to make the world manifest what it needs to manifest so that you can maintain yourself and stay alive what ends is it orienting itself towards and I think that's a good way of thinking about the traits the traits the traits motivate the perceptual frame and so you might think that well extroverted people are after social success and you can understand why that would be because social success brings with it all sorts of rewards social failure brings costs and you could also understand why that would frighten you away from it and social success also requires the expenditure of effort and introverted people seem to be much more conservative in a sense in terms of expending social expending energy socially and I suppose they're protecting themselves to some degree against the possibility of social failure we don't really know we know more about how extroverts in some sense how and why extroverts Orient themselves the way they do in the world we're not so sure about introverts um what it is that what the what the proper landscape is for introverts I I can show you a word cloud I'll do that at some point that introverts that were generated from introverts on Facebook and they seem to be into fantasy and gaming a lot and and I don't know why that is exactly because the fantasy element should be more local localized in openness but the the the introverted types I mean I suppose they're the people that are on The Big Bang Theory roughly speaking you know they seem to be the introverted types and um but don't understand that much about them exactly how it is that they're orienting themselves in the world people are high neuroticism are oriented towards security and safety agreeable people versus disagreeable people are oriented say towards cooperation versus competition conscientious people are oriented towards order Duty obligation and implementation and open people are oriented towards abstraction in I both ideational and in representation and so those are also to some degree you might also think about those value systems right because what you value is definitely not only what you pursue that's too narrow a view value is also what you perceive and pursue and so thinking about these things as this entire frame of reference I think is a much better way of doing it we talked about this earlier this sort of structure earlier as a micr personality and I mentioned that determination of micr personalities by fundamental underlying biological systems like defensive aggression and sexual ual um sexual uh uh desire and hunger and thirst and so forth those are all systems that can grab your perceptions make you look at the world in a certain way make you pursue something else in a certain way and Prime action responses that are in keeping with all of that the the traits seem to be something like higher order agglomerations of those more fundamental biological motivations although we don't quite understand the relationship between the underlying biology and the traits we're starting to sort it out so we know for example if you look at the function of the hypothalamus the hypothalamus regulates the basic biological motivations that I just outlined but it's also the place where the exploratory systems find their ultimate physiological grounding and openness and extroversion seem to be variant manifestations of the exploratory impulse and that's grounded into in the hypothalamus so we're starting to be able to put the traits to sort of nail the traits down to their underlying biology with regards to neuroticism um well if you're high in neuroticism you're more sensitive to anxiety and that's regulated at least in part by the hippocampus and and generated in part by the amydala there's another part of the brain called the per aqueductal gray that seems to be associated with the experience of pain and pain is quite a complex phenomena depression is pain-like grief is pain-like social isolation is pain-like dis disappointment is pain-like there's anxiety components to that too and so neuroticism seems to be something like threshold for Activation in those negative emotion systems so if you're higher in neuroticism one unit of uncertainty might produce let's say three units of psychophysiological response whereas if you're lower in neuroticism one unit of uncertainty might produce one unit of psychophysiological response it's heart you know obviously that's a simplified schemata but there's variability because if something unexpected or threatening happens to you it isn't obvious how upset you should get one answer would might be brush it off it's nothing another answer might be it's a bloody catastrophe and often when something uncertain or threatening occurs you don't have enough information at your disposal to make a full determination of the potential import of this of the circumstance especially if it's uncertain and so then you have to guess at how upset you should be and where you are on the normal distribution with regards to trait neuroticism say that sort of determines what your guess on average is going to be so you know the other with conscientiousness say you might say well how hard should you work well that's a really difficult question if you're going to die tomorrow and then you probably shouldn't work very hard today at all so one one thing you might say is that the degree to which you should work hard is dependent on your assumptions about the stability of the future we actually know this to be true because if you put people in wildly uncertain circumstances they discount the future which is exactly what you should do right it's only makes sense to store up goods for future consumption if the future is likely to be very similar to the past and the present you need a stable Society for that and conscientiousness only works in in a stable Society because all you do otherwise if you're piling up Goods which is kind of what conscientious people do is leaving them there for the criminals to take or waiting for the next chaotic upheaval to wipe out everything that you've stored and so even conscientiousness is a kind of guess hardworking people say well you know M uh sacrifice the present for the future that's great as long as the future is going to be there and you can predict it but if it's not going to be there and it's unpredictable then the right response is take what you can take right now well the getting's good now you know obviously there are troubles with that too and I'm speaking you know I'm I'm offering rough rules of thumb but I'm trying to provide you with some indication of how and why these difference in value structures exist because they're applicable in different environments you know sometimes in a dangerous social environment it's not obvious that being an extroverted person is a good idea because extroverted people they stand out especially if they're extroverted and creative right because not only are they noisy and and dominant and assertive they're also colorful and and flamboyant and provocative well that's great if you're in a society that rewards that sort of thing but if you have you know if you're ruled by an authoritarian King who wants absolutely no threat whatsoever to his stability ever then dressing in Gray and shutting the hell up is a really good survival tactic so the utility of the trait depends on the structure of the environment that surrounds it and that's why there's variability in traits and so you you have to be careful when you're thinking about it from a strict scientific perspective to make the assumption that positioning at any place on the normal distribution is preferable preferable to positioning anywhere else now one exception to that maybe might be IQ because one of the things that you can see in I with IQ is that people with higher IQs seem to do better but that's also only true in complex societies and then there's another problem that seems to emerge with IQ and I don't know exactly what to make of this but we know that as women's IQ increases the probability that they're going to be to remain without a mate also increases because women tend to mate across or up dominance hierarchies and so if you're a woman with an IQ of 130 then you've already eliminated about 95% of the men and that's only using one criteria that's just straight intelligence and so there also might be limitations to the to the utility of intelligence with regards to reproduction that we don't really understand very well yet so anyway so you get the point so there's these underlying I kind of put down two value structures there capitalize on social groups that would be an extroverted value structure saying maintain order that would be a a conscientious strategy and conscientious people are going to want to maintain order because they don't want things to shift across time because if they shift too much across time then the things that have been stored up for the future start to become increasingly irrelevant there's lots of other reasons to maintain order as well but that's one of them so all right so that your cognitive ability get allows you to do modeling now this is where human beings have have leaped ahead of their competition so an animal animals can think but it isn't exactly obvious how they think they think strategically I think they think the same way that children think in some sense when they're playing with Legos when they're not thinking about the Legos you know when they're when they're just moving them around we know like if you watch a smart Predator group like lions go after a you know their target or watch chimpanzees hunt down a monkey you can see intelligence at work because hunting behavior is very very complicated obviously you know especially if you're chasing something intelligent but there isn't that level of abstract representation so where is so let's look at this so here's here's a here's a a picture of the of the human brain um with someone facing this way right so here's the here's the primary motor cortex okay so you're using that to voluntarily move your body okay now then I might say to you close your eyes and imagine doing something so just close your eyes and imagine picking up the cup that's in front of you and just visualize it okay so then you might say well what part of your brain are you using then and the answer is use part of this part this part because it that's where you have your body represented but use this part here the premotor cortex to Envision potential actions now what's happened is that this part of the brain evolved out of this part and that makes sense because the first part is just how you would move but the second part is how you would think about how you would move and then the next part which is this part huge in human beings is how you would think about how you would think about how you would move so be because that enables you to start to do extraordinary extraordinarily abstract planning so I I could say well Envision how you would pick up the cup and obviously that's something that you've separated out as a as a potential simulation from the actual action but we can talk about extraordinarily high level abstractions that have effects across multiple specific domains way into the future and the more abstract that your manipulations become the more they seem to be moved away say from the primary motor cortex out into the prefrontal cortex hierarchies of abstraction and the the reason for that as this was Carl poer this is really really worth thinking about why think let's say you're an animal and you act and it doesn't go very well then you die well you've learned that acting that way didn't work but now you're dead so that's not that helpful and then you might think well maybe you should represent how you're going to act so you know here's a box with a snake in it and your coffee cup is inside the box with the snake in it and I say to you imagine picking up the coffee cup and you imagine it you think oh I'll pick up that coffee cup and then the snake will bite me and I'll die and so then you do you decide that implementing the strategy of picking up the coffee cup is probably not a very good idea and so that stupid idea has to die and not you and so Popper's idea was that the reason that we developed the capacity to abstract was so that our stupid ideas could die instead of us and that's really it's almost impossible to overstate how brilliant an observation that is because what mean what it means is that like as a standard animal you would have to produce variants of yourself reproductively to go out into the world and try their hand at survival and that's pretty costly because you have to produce all the biological replications of you so you could only probably manage that maybe 13 times if you really really worked at it and then then the cost of their failure is extraordinarily High because they die while you can just sit there and produce like 20 different ver versions of you extending out over the next week or the next month and you can run them through a simulation and kill off all the ones that you don't regard as suitable and then only implement the successful ones now you know you could debate about how accurate you might be at doing that because it would depend on your knowledge but we do know that intelligent people tend to do better across the course of their life and so it does seem that there is some utility with regards to survival or at least with regards to positioning in the dominance hierarchy which is somewhat of a proxy for survival and for Reproductive success there's some association between that and the ability to abstract so we could say that part of the reason that people got smarter was because smarter people were more likely to stay alive now I think it's more complicated than that too because I believe that human males and females are in an evolutionary cognitive arms race roughly speaking and so as men get trickier women get trickier to understand them and then as women get trickier to understand men get trickier to understand them and so we've been chasing each other around this cortical expansion Loop pretty much since we parted ways with our common with the ancestor that we had in common with chimpanzees and so that's roughly about 7 million years ago we've undergone a tremendous cortical expansion since then and there's there's lots of reasons that that have been propelling that so so what do you have to do when you're thinking well you have to figure out where you are and how to see that you have to figure out where you're going and what that should be and then you have to you have to um generate and represent appropriate action strategies and simulate those in time and space and then one of the things that's worth noting is that's what you do when you read a story or when you tell a story and so part of the reason that you like to read stories is because that's exactly what story stories are telling you how someone is going about doing that and so then you can see how if you think about preference for fiction which is actually part of openness preference for fiction the utility in fiction is that allows you to experience a plethora of simulated worlds and to embody the consequences in abstraction without having to go through the trouble of doing that for yourself and we do know there's good empirical literature now showing some of it done by ex students from my lab showing that reading fiction does improve your interpersonal intelligence for example your ability to understand the position of other people logically enough because that's what you're doing when you're reading so okay so I'm trying to give you some background so that you can understand what it means to abstract and also why it's useful because we need that in order to move forward with the idea of intelligence so here we go okay so that's how you act voluntarily and then that's how you represent how you act voluntarily and then that's how you think about how you represent acting voluntarily and the reason I'm telling you this is because it's useful to think about intelligence as abstract action because we tend to think about intelligence as abstract representation right intelligence is the manipulation of facts or the understanding of facts but if you look at it neurologically I would say that's a misapprehension because the part of the brain that does the highest level of abstract thinking is actually something that's emerged from the motor cortex now you can that doesn't mean you don't use your intelligence to represent you do but the purpose of intelligence is to represent potential action patterns and we're embodied creatures and we need to move in the world and so that's the proper as far as I'm concerned that's the proper way to conceptualize intelligence so and here's a here's a a study I'll read you the study imagery in the premot cortex well studies on healthy subjects have shown a partial overlap between the motor execution and motor imagery neural circuits few have investigated brain activity during motor imagery and stroke patients with hemiparesis so a partial overlap between the motor execution and motor imagery neural circuits well here's an interesting side consequence of that so let's say I'm thirsty and I look at that glass of water and part of what happens when I look at the glass of water is that my eyes activate this directly so you know I've already talked to you to some degree about how your eyes work right there's patterns there out there in the world the patterns are mapped onto the the retina so it's a pattern display uh Matrix and then that pattern is propagated along the optic nerve and then that pattern manifests itself in the visual cortex and then that pattern manifests itself in the motor cortex and it manifests itself in bodily movement or preparation for bodily movement technically you don't need conscious imagery for that to happen now that's something really useful to know is that your eyes can activate your body without you being aware of the image because you think there's the world I see it then I determine how to act it's like yes but also no there's the world and seeing It prepares me to act forget about the damn imagery so when I look at that cup part of the part of the act of looking at it is preparing that gesture and that's a especially the case if I also happen to be thirsty because if I'm thirsty the cup signifies something that I can use to quench my thirst which makes it a very different thing than what it is when it's empty or when I'm not thirsty so I'm not even going to use the same part of my brain to perceive it because it's not the same thing in relationship to me so I look at it and then just just even just understanding the size of it there's not much difference between understanding the size of it and doing this so you let's see how I got that so that's pretty good so that's my under when you ask well what does it mean to understand something well that's what it means in so far as this is a cup because it could be Tinder for lighting a fire for example or something to stomp on to make a noise in so far as it's a cup then understanding it means pattern mapping it onto exactly this and if I do that successfully then I get a little reward a little hint a little kick of dopamine and that dopamine makes me feel a little bit better but it also bathes the neural tissue that I use to make that perceptual that to to to structure that perception and also to undertake that act and it makes it just a little bit more likely that I'll see it that way and act that way in its presence again and that's how you learn right you lay out a perceptual scheme it's got a goal if the perceptual scheme and it's associated action patterns make the goal manifest itself then you get a little burst of positive emotion click then that makes it those little the neural circuits that instantiated that thrive a little bit and get a little bit more predominant and that's also why you got to watch yourself if you're taking psychomotor stimulants like cocaine or alcohol even for that matter because they produce hyperlearning and so you know I'll glance at that and maybe it'll trigger off a bit of thirst but if that was if I was a cocaine addict and that was cocaine par parhelia and I glanced at it was like w that thing that I've built in my head out of repeated you know massive hits of dopamine is going to grab my perceptual structures and my actions and bring me that'll be that craving which is an Impulse to move forward towards it you'll feel that instantiated in your body that's the craving it's very very difficult to get rid of that even if you're if you're a cocaine abuser and you've gone to a treatment center for several weeks and got over the worst of the least initial parts of of the relearning not to abuse the second you go back into your natural environment and take a look at the cues bang that thing will be right back there directing your action and what happens is when one of those perceptual systems comes up you can see this when you're hungry it supresses all the other potential perceptual systems you can see this when you're angry too right you get angry and you're angry with your partner and all you can think of is all the stupid things they've done for the last 10 years you don't even remember that you like them it's like you could remind them I know you're but remember you like me well not right now you know so so it just it shows you how those micro personalities cond Dominate and suppress that's that's what happens because if they didn't suppress the other micr personalities they wouldn't be able to run themselves to conclusion and then you'd never get what you want okay so anyways um Studies have shown a partial overlap between the motor execution and motor imagery neural circuits so what happens is you see something and it primes you for the appropriate action few have investigated brain activity during motor imagery in stroke patients with hemiparesis hemiparesis is is uh motor impairment from from uh from the stroke this work is exam aimed at examining similarities between motor imagery and execution in a group of stroke patients 11 patients were asked to perform a visal motor tracking task by either physically or mentally tracking a sine wave Force Target using their thumb and index finger so they're doing this during fmri scanning results whole brain analysis confirmed shared neural substrates between motor imagery and motor execution in bilateral premotor cortex so that's the part that I was talking about I won't tell you about the rest of the brain in parial lulle is is partly associated with body recognition so so basically I I I showed you that study because it it it's one it's one of the studies that lend Credence to what I was just describing is that imagery is the precursor to action and that it's Associated you get the imagery going here and the action there think about think about thinking think act that's roughly how it works okay now now down to cognitive ability well how can you conceptualize intelligence well this is a major problem because your initial conceptualization determines in part the strategies that you're going to use to investigate intelligence and when you say when you when you pair a sentence down to what is intelligence the sentence is problematic because part of it is a question about H if and how such a thing might manifest itself in the world so there's a fact out there that or set of facts that corresponds to intelligence but the other problem is well what do you mean when you say intelligence and you kind of have to nail that down if you're going to have a conversation about intelligence that doesn't go entirely astray and so you've got a you've got a definitional problem as well as an empirical problem and so there have been and this was especially true in the 1990s people have been studying intelligence IQ intelligence since the 1920s and and is a very wellestablished branch of psychology one of the things I have to tell you about IQ research is that if you don't buy IQ research you might as well throw away all the rest of psychology and the reason for that is that the psychologists first of all who developed intelligence testing were among the early psychologists who instantiated the statistical techniques that all psychologists use to verify and test all of their hypotheses so you end up throwing the baby out with the bathat and the IQ people have defined intelligence in a more stringent stringent and accurate way than we've been able to Define almost any other psychological construct and so if you toss out the one that's most well defined then you're kind of stuck with the problem of what are you going to do with all the ones that you have left over that are nowhere near as well defined or as well measured or as or as uh or or whose predictive validity is much less and has been demonstrated with much less Vigor and Clarity anyways despite all that people have posited a number of different intelligences and reasonably so because there's if you think of intelligence as that which might move you forward successfully in the world obviously there's a fair number of phenomena that are associated with individuals that might fit into that category so we have people have made these distinctions Bob Sternberg for example is distinguished between practical versus analytical intelligence and he kind of thinks of practical as like Street smarts and has attempted to dissociate that from the kind of analytical intelligence that um that characterizes more straight IQ research I I don't think he's done it successfully as well at all and since the 1990s interest in his practical intelligence has declined precipitously because when it is matched head-to-head with with standard IQ intelligence the IQ intelligence eats up all the variability what's really happened as far as I can tell so far is that when we're trying to predict people's course through life IQ does a very good job and then one of the traits does a very good job as well which is conscientiousness but it doesn't do as good a job as IQ now that partly might be because we can't measure conscientiousness very well we're stuck with self-reports or maybe I could gather peer reports about you or I could gather your parents reports about you or teachers reports and each of those seems to pick up a little bit more of the pattern because you know yourself but other people know you differently than you know yourself and there's still some accuracy in that you can get multiple rer reports of something like conscientiousness and that'll up its predictive validity but in the final analysis the best you seem to be able to do with conscientiousness is about a point4 correlation with long-term performance whereas with IQ in complex jobs you can probably get 0.5 and maybe 6 and so 0.5 is 25% of the variance you got to square it 6 is 30% 36% of the variance and 04 is 16% of the variance so even at the low end let's say high end for conscientiousness is 04 or 16% low end for IQ is 0.5 or 25% low-end estimates of IQ make it one and a half times more powerful than the high-end estimates of conscientiousness and I think that's about right you'd think why do we even have to debate this and because it's so bloody obvious to me that intelligence is a major predictor of Life success I mean you people I measured the IQ of University of Toronto people you know people in this room who have an IQ of less than 120 are rare well why well smart people go to university now is that actually a contentious statement well it shouldn't be a contentious statement it's self-evident universities were actually set up so that smart people could expand their abilities that's why they were there and you're selected on the basis of Assessments that are essentially there to assess something like intelligence yes but that that well that's that's well that is part of the controversy is it reasonable and this is a measurement issue and that's why we're that's why I've been instructing you to some degree in psychometrics because we actually know how to do this we know how to answer that question so let's take a look at how at how intelligence has been assessed and why and then you can make up your own mind anyways here's some of the examples of other forms of intelligence and so then the question is well what does it mean to have a different form of intelligence would would form a and Form B be completely uncorrelated like extroversion say in neuroticism or would they be slightly correlated or would they be highly correlated and then you might ask well how highly correlated do they have to be before they're the same thing or how uncorrelated do they have to be before they're different things and actually the answer to that comes down to something like practical utility it's like imagine I'm trying to figure out how well you'll do in University and I measure one thing and it's correlated at 7 with another thing I measure about you then I might say well are those two things the same or different they're pretty highly correlated you're high in one it means you're going to be high in the other well so what is there any utility in measuring both things and the way you figure that out actually is you do it statistically so we take the target which might be your performance across University then we say well can we predict your performance across University better by using one variable or two variables so we would enter them both into a regression equation all a regression equation does it's quite simple so you're trying to predict the Target and the regression AG the regression equation tells you how well you can predict that Target if you know another fact now then gets a little complicated because that's a correlation how well you can predict B with a well a regression will say how much you can predict C if you know a and b or a and b and c and d and e because you can use multiple predictors and you can waight them so it might be 2 * a + 1 * b equals c and that's all a regression equation does it's just multiplication and addition very very straightforward and so two variables are sufficiently different functionally if you can use both of them simultaneously to predict something of Interest so again it's a tool likee approach this is how the psychometricians do it is something real well it's real if you can measure measure it and it helps you predict that's that's how it's defined so then you might say well are are there these multiple intelligences well the first question would be well what do you mean by are there and the answer to that would be well let's specify the question since we're going to be scientific about it let's predict how well people do in University we'll start with the assumption that intelligence if intelligence isn't associated with University success then you're probably not talking about intelligence now you could argue that right because you could say well intelligence has nothing to do with University success but that's a definitional matter we'd have to agree to begin with is it reasonable to start with the presupposition that intelligence and University success share something in common well I think you have to be daed to to deny that initial proposition although you could because you could say it was privilege or socioeconomic status or or or or any number of sociological phenomena and some of those are obviously relevant social class for example because you know if you're in a higher social class and all things being equal intelligence included if you're in a higher social class you're more likely to go to university than you are if you're in a lower social class so there's other there's other factors that are going to influence whether or not you do well in University but we're going to assume that one of them might be intelligence well then you would ask well if you measured social intelligence so that's what do they call that social intelligence no emotional intelligence which does not exist by the way emotional intelligence moral intelligence linguistic musical logical mathematical spatial body kinesthetic interpersonal and interpersonal all different forms of intelligence okay so to answer the question question of whether they exist what you do first is pick a Target prediction of University performance then you make a measure for each of them then you test to see if the measure measured the same thing across multiple instances within the same person that's a reliability test because what the hell good is your ruler if it stretches when you use it it has to measure the same thing multiple times and then you would say okay we'll take all these different intelligences measured the way we've decided to measure them the first thing we'll do is see how highly correlated are CU if they're complete two of them are completely correlated then you have one you don't have two CU that's the virtually the definition of one instead of two you can Factor analyze them and see if you can pull out what's common across all of them that's another thing because then you might say well intelligence is what's common across all the measures of these intelligences it's it's a proposition it's not a fact you have to decide if you're going to agree with it but that if you were going to do that you'd use a factor analysis and you'd say well if someone was more likely to be musical if they were also high in linguistic ability and more likely to be logical and mathematically inclined if they had high spatial ability Etc then you'd be hypothesizing that there was one factor behind all of those manifestations that's somehow similar and maybe there wouldn't be and then you'd take all your measures and you'd put them in something like a multiple regression analysis and you'd predict your Target University performance and then maybe you'd say well wait a minute let's not just use University performance let's use Junior high performance high school performance University performance and job success and then let's say that only things that predict success across all of those categories and that are the same we're going to Define as intelligence well that's basically how you end up with IQ you could say that IQ is what's common across all possible sets of of intelligence tests now people are going to debate that because you still have to Define what constitutes a test but the way the psychometricians have managed it and have taken care of this at least to some degree is to say well we're going to we're not going to Define everything that we measure as intelligence so extroverted people are more socially fluent are we going to call that intelligence no we're going to call that personality we're going to call that extroversion and we're going to call stress tolerance you could say well if you can tolerate more stress you're more intelligent it's like well no that isn't how we've defined it we're going to Define that as being lower in aism if you're Cooperative you're more intelligent that's emotional intelligence well what you're less intelligent if you're competitive well no so we parsed that off to agreeableness so then the question might be is there anything left of these so-called intelligences once you control for personality and IQ and the answer is no nothing nothing left of them and the people who keep pushing these ideas keep trying to push them because they don't like the idea of real individual differences and to me that's just a matter of sticking your damn head in the sand because it's obvious here you're going to have a child you want the child to have an IQ of 65 or 145 decide okay so you're all going to vote okay you think any one of you is going to vote to have a child with an IQ of 65 that child's going to have a hard time developing even linguistic ability they're never going to learn to read right they're never going to leave home in all likelihood so which child are you going to pick well so do you believe in intelligence or not well obviously if you have any sense um so let's say we took off all the labels and we just for every time something statistically came out other we just gave it a lab so all these things just have their statistical validity and just names so then we're going to assign Nam to them after are we assigning the names based on what we consider to be reasonable okay that's a good question so look here here's one thing so let's say this is actually what happened when people developed the big five so I'm going to give a very large number of people every question every a huge set of questions that cover every element of their personality I can think of it's agnostic right what I'm really trying to do is come up with the biggest possible set of descriptors that someone could actually fill out that's a li you know I can't give you 10,000 questions that's just so maybe i' take a set of 10,000 questions and randomly select a few sets of a 100 right because then I I would have represented the entire set then I give them to a th people agnos then I do the factor analysis bang five factors come out and then the factor analysis tells me which questions load on each factor and what the factor analysis is saying here's 20 questions and there's something about them that's the same so then I read the questions and I think well those questions are referring to something the same what is that well then maybe I talk to three colleagues and we think well that's something like sociability bang we have a name and then we could go see now that we have a measure of sociability we could go associate it with other measures of sociability like we might say well are people who score high on this measure of sociability more likely to go to parties and the answer would be yes because what happens if you take 10,000 questions about personality and randomly select sets of a 100 and give each of them to a thousand people and do a factor analysis the first factor is extroversion and it's the it's the factor in human personality that seems to pick up the biggest amount of variant and so so then we say from a statistical perspective Ive extroversion is real but we Define real real means that if you use linguistic representation randomly applied across large sets of people and you factor analyze it these come out as Clump together because you have to Define what constitutes real if you're going to play that this is real game which is basically what you're doing in science and so that's what happened with the big five and then people started to look well okay is there a biological substrate for this bang turns out there is incentive reward that's the positive reward system so and then well neuroticism that's often but not always the second Factor well is there a biological basis for it yes threat sensitivity and pain sensitivity they seem to lock together agreeableness that's the care system that yak PP has identified so that's basically that's basically maternity it's something like that you had another question people intelligence well it's because we found out how to measure intelligence so and I'll get into that right now so then the question is well how do you measure intelligence okay well it's similar it's similar to this linguistic approach but here's how it differs generate 10,000 questions that require knowledge and you get get 50 people to do it and have them and have them be of diverse opinions about what constitutes knowledge so much the better then you cover the you want to over sample the territory so you want to have some qu questions in there that only one person out of 50 would think that measures intelligence because you can oversample the statistics will take care of that so you want to answer ask more questions than you think are reasonable and that's part of the way that you get rid of bias in the sampling it's like you think go find out 10 questions that someone could answer if you think they're intelligent I don't care what they are and then 50 of you do that bring me the questions well let's say we get a nice set of 10,000 questions then we can take random sets of a 100 and give them to a th people and then we can score their answers to the questions and then we can rank order we could say correlate their performance across different sets of questions so I give you one set of 100 questions you score 90 I give you another set of questions you score so 90 out of 100 you score 10 out of 100 well then we would think if a bunch of people did that those aren't measuring the same thing because if you're high on one you should be high on all of them well with IQ it's like if you do that the reliability is like 0. n it's unbelievable you take one set of 100 questions you rank order people you take another set of 100 questions you rank order people you correlate the rank orders it's like this it's 0. n the people who did well on one do well on all of them the people who did bad on one do bad on all of them that's IQ or more technically this is what IQ is take a thousand people and give them 20 tests of 100 items and then Factor analyze the 20 tests and extract out the central Factor that's G that's fluid intelligence so then what do you do with that well then you can try to use it then you can see well is there a biological basis for this is there something about if you're higher in the ability to operate across these sets of questions are there things about you that are physiologically different and the answer to that is yes your reaction time is faster just simple reaction time so light turn on you push a button light turns on you push a button okay there's a lag between the light going on and you pushing the button the shorter the lag the smarter you are well what is it and that's really interesting because you know if you're perceiving something complex it takes a lot of neural connections to generate the perception but simple reaction time is like two neurons whack there's no complexity in that at all and yet how fast you are at that is still correlated only at about 0.25 but that's not trivial if you're doing research in Psychology generally speaking and you come out with a 0.25 correlation between whatever you're measuring and whatever you're interested in you're having a pretty good day 0.25 is not bad at all and so it's not accounting for all of it but it's accounting for a fair bit of it how big your head is that's also correlated how how big your brain is physically and then even more accurately how big your brain is in relationship to your body now again these are small correlations but they're not they're not nonsignificant what else nerve peripheral nerve conduction velocity that's this study two studies with sample sizes of 90 and 90 roughly speaking are reported that investigated relationships among measures of intelligence speed of information processing and peripheral nerve conduction velocity in both studies neural conduction velocity was significantly correlated with IQ scores 042 and 048 man that's a whopping correlation how do I know that because a guy named hemp Hill where is he right there you might say well how big is a correlation coefficient before you call it Big and the answer to that is generally let's guess so if you talk to psychologists and they talk to you about how big effect sizes are they use guesses that were generated by statisticians in the 50s and so they radically underestimate the actual magnitude of correlation coefficients because they never studied it empirically well this guy hhal because how big is a correlation coefficient to be big how do you answer that take a thousand psychology studies rank order the effect sizes and break them into percentiles right that's an empirical way of doing it how big is the effect that the typical study generates then you can use that as a way of assessing how impressive the effect is that you generated okay so this is it here hemp Hill 2003 interpreting the magnitude of Co correlation coefficients now you could say that's a Dopey way to do it because wide defined size in accordance with the size that people have discovered and hemp Hill would say well that's because I'm doing it this way with this paper if you want to do it a different way go right ahead but there's utility in this you come up with an R of point2 How likely is it that your next paper is going to have an effect size of that magnitude how happy should you be well the answer is a lot happier than you think so to get an R of 05 that's 25% of the variance so you still have 75% of what's ever explaining your phenomena left to be explained R of5 90 to 90 97th percentile so 19 out of 20 psychology studies that are published and that's a hell of a lot more fewer psychology studies than exist right because this tiny fraction of them get published 95% of them show a a correlation coefficient of less than 0.5 for for third. 35 to 050 it's that's greater than 75% of them 0.15 to35 is pretty typical and the typical correlation between a personality trait and the target of interest is usually something in the neighborhood of 0. 2 to 0.25 with IQ you get up to 0.5 the relationship between income inequality and male homicide is like 75 it just covers all of it which is to say that everywhere that everyone's poor there's no male homicide and everywhere that everyone's Rich there's no male homicide but places where there's poor people and rich people the male homicide rate goes way the hell up right especially if it's a steep distribution because the men at the bottom think somebody has a lot more than me and that's not very fair I'm going to do something about that and that usually means killing other men and so it's a it's unbelievably powerful relationship that's a useful thing to keep squired away in your imagination poverty does not cause crime relative poverty causes crime that is a completely different thing so and it's dominance hierarchy issue fundamentally it's man man are generally the criminals and as the dominance hierarchy gets harder to climb the young men especially the aggressive ones get more likely to turn to violence you really need to know that it's a incredibly important fact I'm going to interview the guy who figured that out Martin Dy I'm going to interview him for one of my podcasts in the next month or so so you might be interested in tuning in on that if you're interested in this sort of thing okay so back to these correlations look peripheral nerve conduction velocity is correlated with IQ at like Point let's say 045 it's a whopping effect man and that's that's a pretty straightforward thing speed of electrical propagation along your neural tissue determines how intelligent you are well is that really so surprising you'd expect if that's associated with neurological integrity at least to some degree it's exactly the sort of thing you'd expect but it shows you how biologically based it is too faster neural conductance velocity was associated with higher IQ scores and faster speed of processing why who knows here's a hypothesis um what if you're trying to remember a phone number just the seven digigit one what do you do when you're remembering the phone number you say it over and over again right or you or you if you don't say it you think it over and over again and if someone distracts you then you lose it that's working memory roughly speaking and your working memory capacity so imagine you could do four digits and remember them you could do six you could do eight you could do 12 likely not 12 is really pushing it that's a great estimator of IQ working memory in fact there's almost no neuropsychologists like to think that working memory is something in and of itself but that's because they don't know a damn thing about psychometrics generally speaking there's almost no difference between fluid intelligence and working memory and the reason for that is that all measures of intellectual function collapse into G and so we can take a look at what that means this is from this character here Carol John Carrol if you want to know everything there is to know about IQ this is a book that everyone who's a psychologist should it should you shouldn't be able to be a psychologist unless you've read this book in my estimation there's a couple of key texts and this is one of them this guy Carol wrote this thick book you don't have to read the whole thing because a lot of it's just in some sense demonstrations and proof of what he's saying but what he did for IQ is the same thing that psychometricians did for the big five you've got the big two at the top they're not very highly correlated I think it's about 2 something like that so they're pretty independent then they fragment into the big five and then you can differentiate them further into the Big 10 and there really are five different traits because they're only correlated with each other at about 2 to3 they're really quite distinct um the question is if you fractionate IQ how correlated are the things that you fractionated into and the answer to that is 08 or 0.9 there's one factor IQ roughly speaking you if you if you take imagine that you you took an IQ test and you took it was 100 items long and you took the 50 items that were the most correlated with each other and then the 50 items that were the least correlated with those 50 items so you broke it into two as much as you could you maximally differentiated it you might ask well how correlated would the scores be on those two different subsets and the answer would be like 0. n because there isn't two things that you're measuring even if you break it up that way post Haw and say well it's unfair but we're going to say because these are the 50 most highly correlated and these are the leftovers like we're really capitalizing on chance there you're still going to get an almost identical readout from both sections of the IQ test and it's just not the same with personality so and so this is this is Carol's model basically stratum 3 that's the highest level of abstraction that's fluid intelligence and then you can break it down into these subcategories of cognitive ability and you might say well how different are those subcategories and the answer is not very if you're high in one you're very likely to be high in all of them now there's a bit of a coda to that which is that the lower your IQ the higher the correlation between these sub aspects of intelligence the lower your IQ the higher the correlation between the sub aspects of intelligence as you get up into the higher strata of IQ your your intelligence differentiates more across the potential range of differentiation which is to say there's one way of not being very bright but there's multiple ways of being bright so but even even so if you're high on one you're still quite likely to be high on the rest of them so then the question is what's the correlation between G and each of these sub elements of G and then what's the correlation between the sub elements of G themselves so if this was PL itic it and we were looking at openness and extroversion the correlation here would be about point I think it's about 0.5 something like that and the correlation between openness and extraversion would be about. 3 quite a bit of difference but with this there's G there's the sub elements there's the correlation coefficients 0. n almost 0.95 Point what is that 6 or 8 88 6889 pretty much n pretty much well you can fractionate it the best you possibly can doesn't matter it's one thing it's one thing and it looks like it's the ability to abstractly represent and then to manipulate the abstractions I said with working memory you know you can get it that simply how many digits can you keep in your head simultaneously without dropping one that's it God it's unbelievable it's pretty straightforward and then it's this viciously powerful predictor long-term life success probably prediction of around 05 now psychologists okay psychologists hate this they won't admit that it exists and I think it's because there's something about intelligence that rubs against our intrinsic egalitarianism right there's two things that do it first let's say you're successful you like to think I'm successful you know and you like to attribute it to your own doing and fair enough you know I'm not saying that there isn't an element of it that's your own doing whatever means but if your nerve conductive velocity happens to be high there's a lot more probability that you're going to be successful and it's kind of hard to blame that on you or to attribute it to you for that matter so it it indicates a kind of statistical arbitrariness about the distribution of success and failure in our society okay so that's one thing people don't like that idea the second thing is is that it turns out to be very difficult to raise IQ now It's Tricky because it looks like you can raise IQ across whole populations because at least fluid intelligence looks like it's been rising quite substantially over the last 100 years maybe as people are better nourished and better educated but also more prone to continually manipulate abstractions in their life because I I mean kids start with computers when they're like two you know so but if you take a group of people and you try to if you take a group of low IQ people and you try to raise their IQ it's very very difficult to manage it without a tremendous amount of investment that doesn't necessarily mean the investment isn't worthwhile but it does mean that it's very difficult well the best thing to do as far as we can tell the best thing to do is get nourishment right that seems to be the most effective yeah yeah yeah so part of the reason part of the reason the theory is part of the reason that population IQs have been increasing over the last 100 years is because there's just no one left who's seriously enough malnourished so that it's going to profoundly impact their intellectual capabilities so breastfeeding seems to raise IQ so it's two two points three points with every year of breastfeeding it's something like that so it's it's it's and that's actually quite a lot two or three points actually makes a difference as it turns out so okay so so is IQ real depends what you mean by real IQ is averaged performance across averaged sets of questions that require abstraction to conceive of and and answer is it real well it's real statistically and you can use it to predict important outcomes that other things can't predict and from a scientific perspective and and it's also correlated with various physiological and biological phenomena well that's that's how you define real scientifically so yes it's real are there other factors that determine people's success and worth I keep isn't a measure of people's worth in any intrinsic sense it's a it's an estimate of their ability to succeed in AB in hierarchies that are dependent on the ability to manipulate complex sets of information there's lots of other things about people that differentiate them in terms of quality and quantity and all of those things and the the most evident of those are the big five traits now if you're a psychologist this is another thing every psychologist should be taught if you want to discover something about human beings that hasn't already been discovered the first thing you should do is make sure it isn't IQ and it isn't any of the big five traits and psychologists almost never do that because what happens is that if they control for IQ so in a regression you'd say okay here's the thing I'm interested in predicting the first thing we're going to do is add IQ and not a measure that you took in five minutes either like a real IQ test because you want to use a good measure to test your hypothesis against and not a 10 item measure of the big five either like a 100 item measure so you get a reliable measure you throw in IQ you throw in the big five and then you throw in your Dopey construct and then you see if it can predict anything and the answer is no and so psychologists don't do it because whenever they do it properly it destroys their construct and that makes them irritated because their claim to their position of authority in the educational dominance hierarchy is predicated on the validity of their construct now if you're a real scientist what you try to do is destroy destroy your construct you think okay it looks like this is real then you think it's probably not and I don't want to spend the next 10 years chasing a ghost and a chimera so I'm going to try to destroy the damn thing so you say well we'll match it up against a good measure of IQ and a comprehensive big five and it still survives we'll do a couple of replications to make sure that we can't kill it any other way and maybe we'll do the statistics three or four different ways to make sure that the thing just doesn't disappear when you use a diff different statistical procedure and people don't do that and that's why the replication rate even among wellestablished psychological findings so to speak ones that have been highly cited is extraordinarily low and if you talk to psychologists they'll wave their hands and they'll say well I don't really believe an IQ it's like okay you know we're not talking about uh what do you call those what did the Ghostbusters hunt down we're not talking about paranormal phenomena they're not things you get to believe in or not right they're rules TOS for defining what constitutes something that's real from a scientific perspective and a psychometric perspective so you don't get to say well I'll apply one definition of reality because I don't like IQ and then I'll use the same definition to justify my own constructs like sorry that isn't how it works not you can do that if you're a postmodernist you can do that but if you're a person who actually thinks scientifically you don't get to play that game so now you know part of the reason that we need to know about these sorts of things let's see how are we doing for time here oh yeah we're doing good I think we need to know these things partly because they have policy implications first of all you need to know them for your own life because you got to know that there are differences in intelligence it's really important if you go into a job and you're not smart enough for that job you're going to have one bloody miserable time and you're going to make life wretched for the people around you because you won't be able to handle the position and as you climb hierarchies of competence the demand on fluid intelligence increases and so unless you want to fail you don't put yourself in over your head well what's over your head well that's a tricky thing to figure out I mean you have to figure that out with intelligence you have to figure it out with conscientiousness you have to figure it out with creativity you have to figure out with stress tolerance with agreeableness because you want to go into a Cooperative environment and not a competitive one if you're agreeable and with neuroticism you want probably want to keep the stress level of your job relatively low because those are all places that you can break down and most people have at least one significant weakness in their intelligence personality makeup and you got to be careful not to place yourself in a position where that's going to be a fatal flaw but what you really want to do as far as I can tell if you want to maximize your chances for both success and and let's say well-being is you want to find a strata of occupation in which you would have an intelligence that would put you in the upper cortile that's perfect then you're a big fish in a small pond and you don't want to be this you don't want to be the stupidest guy in the room it's a bloody rough place to be so and you probably don't want to be the smartest guy in the room either because what that probably means is you should be in a different room right you should look at a place where if you're right at the top it's you've mastered it it's time to go somewhere where you're a little lower so that you've got something to climb up for so and I can if you're not hyper conscientious for example you're probably not going to want a job that you have to work 70 hours a week at because you're just not wired up that way you'd rather have some Leisure and like more power to you if that's how you're wired up there's nothing wrong with having some Leisure but if you're someone who can't stand sitting around doing nothing ever then maybe you can go into a job that's going to require you to work 75 hours a week and almost all jobs that are at the top of complex dominance hierarchies require very high intelligence and insane levels of conscientiousness as well generally speaking as pretty damn high levels of stress tolerance you know because that can knock you out too because there's going to be sharp fluctuations in your career generally speaking at the higher levels of a of a of a of a structure and you have to make very complicated decisions often with very short time Horizons so you have to decide if that's what you want okay so here's some IQ items so this is this is from a test roughly it isn't from the direct test but it's an analog of the Ravens Progressive matrices now here's how the Ravens was derived so imagine that you have you got your 100 questions and you can take out the sum of those and call that IQ okay so now you have a score then you can do a correlation between all of the items and that score and you can find out which single item is the best predictor of the total score because you might see that question 39 has no correlation with with the with the mean with the average you say well that isn't a very good question you'd actually throw that out of the next test but you'd say well item number 15 is correlated at 75 with the total score so that's a good single item so then imagine that you went across sets of IQ tests and you took out the best single item predictors of fullscale IQ what you'd end up with is something like this so the Ravens Progressive matrices is a very good test of fluid intelligence and it's relatively non-linguistic which is also an advantage right because imagine you wanted to assess the intelligence of a very diverse range of people and they all came from different linguistic backgrounds well as long as they can understand the instructions which are all almost self-evident then they're going to be able to do this okay so this is you see you have to guess in case you didn't already figure this out which you would have had you been using your intelligence and applying it you're trying to replace the question mark with one of these and so here's how you do it roughly speaking it's also a it's probably a working memory test because you have to hold a variety of variables in imagination at the same time okay so the first thing you say see is every row has a star a triangle and a square and each row has a DOT two dots and three dots and so every row has to have a triangle square and star and one two or three dots okay so this one first of all what's it missing in terms of shape triangle excellent see that's why you're at the UFT and then okay and then what's it missing for dots two dots excellent so we do a little scan here and we see oh look well it could be that one or it could be that's it it's that one and so is that right yes aren't we smart no that was easy so no you're not very smart if you figure that one out because pretty much everybody can figure that one out I think this next one is more difficult okay so in the first row you see that there's two objects each are different color and they move together right they join that one they're separate there they join they're together they're separate there and they join there so this one should be halfway in between those two and the other thing that happens is let's see oh this item actually might be incorrectly represented because the blue should be on the other side whatever um what's that three yeah yes did they flip okay well anyways you see that it's three see I'm not very bright because I've just lectured for an hour okay so so that was a more difficult item and then this one is more difficult if I remember correctly so let's see so they're all three different colors so that has to be color then what's the other thing the relationship between the colors change so what's the answer ha you're all you're you're all scared to answer aren't you cuz you might be wrong yeah and the the more anxious people are even less likely to answer number three okay so if you want to test someone's IQ then you put together a like nice batch of these at different levels of difficulty and then you sum them and then you rank order and then you correct for age and then you have IQ and that's that and then you can say well then you can sort people into the complexity of their occupations and isn't that dismal and wretched but it's true so here you you go this is from the wonderlick people they're a commercial company that makes General cognitive ability tests and it's often used by corporations even though it's actually illegal it's actually illegal to use IQ tests but the wonderlick doesn't promote themselves as testing IQ I think they I think it's General cognitive ability which is the same thing but whatever the SATs the Gres the lsats all of those are IQ tests so now they're more crystallized than fluid we'll get to that in a minute but crystallized knowledge is what you acre across time so you could say that fluid intelligence is what programs your brain it fills it with facts let's say it fills it with knowledge and then but you can get an estimate of your intelligence by sampling your domain of factual knowledge and the reason for that is that well obviously the better the programmer the better the content and so what that also means is that you can you could if you were prefrontal cortex was damaged later in life your fluid ey could plummet but your crystallized IQ remain more or less intact so even though they're not different one produces the other and then once the producer has produced then the producer can disappear and you still got the encoded knowledge so at that least that's how it looks to me so okay so how smart do you have to be to be different things in life well if you have an IQ of 116 to 130 which is 85th percentile and above so so it's one person in 8 up to one person in 130 I believe is 85 90 95 is it 95 I think it's 95 one person eight to one person in 20 then you can be a attorney a research analyst an editor an advertising manager a chemist an engineer an executive manager Etc that's that's the now that's not the high-end for IQ by the way you know that it can go up well it can go up indefinitely although there's fewer and fewer people as it goes up so if you want to be the best at what you're doing Bar None then having an IQ of above 145 is a necessity and maybe you're pushing 160 in some situations and maybe that's make making you one person in 10,000 or even one person in 100,000 and then also to really be good at it you probably have to be reasonably stress tolerant and also somewhat conscientious so you know people and you think well why is it that smart people are at the top of dominance hierarchies and the answer to that in part is because they get there first right I mean everything's a race roughly speaking and the faster you are the more likely you are to be at the Forefront of the pack and intelligence in large part is speed that's not all of it is so if you're moving towards something difficult rapidly the faster people are going to get there first so IQ of 115 110 to 115 so that's 85th to 73rd to 85th percentile copywriter accountant manager sales manager sales analyst general manager ping purchasing agent registered nurse sales account executive uh if you look at universities the smartest people are they're Above This who are the smartest people at University what do you think mati mathematicians physicists and mathematicians right right I could tell you who's on the other end but I [Laughter] won't yeah I'd like to though anyway anyways okay going down the now 103 to 108 is slightly above average right 60th to 7 percentile store manager bookkeeper credit clerk lab tester general sales telephone sales accounting clerk computer operator customer service rep technician clerk typist so you see at this level people are people have some technical skill and some ability to deal with complex things okay that's dead average 100 is average dispatcher in a general office police patrol officer receptionist cashier General clerical inside sales clerk meter reader printer teller data entry electrical helper 95th to 98 machinist food department manager quality control Checker security guard unskilled labor maintenance arc welder die Setter mechanic good good IQ range for relatively qualified trades people 87 to 93 messenger factory production worker assembler food service worker nurses aid warehouseman custodian janitor material handler Packer now what you're seeing what you're starting to see is that as you move down the hierarchy the jobs get simpler they're more likely to be assigned by other people or they're repetitive because what IQ predicts to some degree is how rapidly you can learn something but once you've learned it it doesn't predict how necessarily how well you do at it and so the more repetitive jobs tend people with lower IQs are more suited to more repetitive jobs under 87 is there something well no right that's a big problem and it's something our society has not addressed at all jobs for people with IQs of less than 85 are very very rare so what the hell are those suppos people supposed to do it's like one it's 15% of the population what are they supposed to do well we better figure it out because one of the things that's happening too is that as the as the high IQ Tech Geeks get a hold of the world the demand for cognitive power is increasing not decreasing right you want to be a teller well you know those checkout machines they're not so simple you want to work at McDonald's you think that's a simple job you don't see robots working at McDonald's and the reason for that is that what McDonald's workers do is too complex for for robots to do so well so this is a discussion that no one wants to have but that's okay it's still a problem and it has to be dealt with so the US government I think I told you this at one point already it's illegal to induct anyone into the US Army if they have an IQ of less than 83 right it's about 10% of the population because the US Army and they've been doing IQ testing since IQ testing began because they want everybody they can possibly get into the army because in peacetime they use it as a way of moving people up to socioeconomic ladder and in Wartime well obviously you need as many soldiers as you can get your hands on and so you're not going to be any pickier than you have to be so when the US Army says it's illegal to induct anybody into the Armed Forces if they have an IQ of less than 83 then you know that they've done it for absolute necessity right and when people have made a finding that contradicts what they want to hear and they're doing it out of absolute necessity you can be reasonably true that it's one of those facts that just won't bloody well go away and so you might think well if there's nothing for someone with an IQ of less than 83 to do in the Army what makes you think that there's something that they can do in the general population and then the issue is you know because the conservatives will say well they should just work harder like sorry that ain't going to fly and the Liberals will say well there's no difference between people anyhow and you can just train people to do everything and that's wrong so they're both wrong and they're seriously wrong and the fact that neither side of the political perspective will take a good cold hard look at this problem means that we're going to increasingly have a structural problem in our societies because we're complexifying everything so rapidly that you can't find employment unless increasingly unless you're intelligent you guys are really going to face this you know lawyers are disappearing like mad and the reason for that is you can look it up online increasingly you can do things yourself if you're smart and so like the workingclass people have been wiped out pretty nicely over the last 30 years by by Automation and various other things it's the low end of the white collar class that's coming up next so I'm not saying that low lawyers are in the low end but lowend lawyers are in the low end of the white color class so there's still going to be plenty of positions for people who are creative and fast on their feet and super smart in fact those people are going to have all the money that's already happening to a great degree you know cuz if you're smart and you can use a computer you're so smart it's just absolutely unbelievable right and if you can't use a computer and lots of people and I don't mean you know you can open word that isn't what I mean I mean maybe I mean you can program and if you can't program well you're right at the next end so if you haven't got that with you you're you're going to be left behind what's going happen when a lot of them will take demoll that's what's happening in the United States yeah it's a no it yeah so there's a massive drug problem emerging in3 yeah no I'm telling you that is what's happening there yes drugs yeah drugs of abuse fallet well that what H what is is happening to a large degree is people drop out of the employment race they get very depressed they develop chronic pain problems especially if they're men because chronic pain and depression are very much the same thing and then they subsist on opiates which are subsidized by Medicaid in the US I'm not kidding about this this is exactly what's happening what what else is going to happen to people for whom there's nothing to do they have a terrible time especially if they're conscientious that's a good question you know the AI guys are pushing hard on this what's the biggest employment category driver think about it what's Tesla doing what are all the AI guys working on as fast as they possibly can driverless cars no problem except that's the biggest employment category for men so what are those guys going to do yeah they're going to sit home and you know be miserable with their wives and take opiate because they have chronic pain problems right nasty and you might think well could they think up something else to do well if you have an IQ of 83 or less you're not going to be doing a lot of thinking about something else to do you know that isn't how it works because you're more of a to to you're an act person not a thinking person roughly speaking you know and so if you have a task at hand especially if you're conscientious you can diligently go about it but you know I've tried to train people with IQs of 80 and less to do what I would consider tasks that that that one of you could learn to do in 10 minutes and and never make a mistake again and it's like tens of hours with bare minimum Mastery of the tasks so yeah it's ugly situation no doubt about it okay openness so creativity well I can talk more about this on on on Thursday maybe we'll just stop and I'll go into creativity on Thursday so we've got about 5 minutes so if anyone has a question I'd be more than than happy to entertain a question so did it what I tell you like what you need we're in a technical area to some degree right so you need to understand how these tests come about because you can't understand the concepts without understanding it so I'm hoping that the way I told you that the IQ tests were derived made sense I mean it's a fairly straightforward thing but that's what you want to concentrate on you had a question y y you can't change you can't train simple reaction time it's really hard you top out very rapidly and here's but let's take your question a little further so let's say um IQ predicts how fast you'll Master a video game so then and it does so then let's say we're going to train the hell out of you on a video game so you get super good at it and then you'll get like Tetris everyone does everyone know what Tetris is okay well Tetris is really an i an IQ test for all intents and purposes it's spatial rotation test so you can get really good at Tetris right you think hey my IQ is increasing it's like well here's the problem let's say I produce a variant of Tetris that requires that that that the idea is basically the same but it requires different operations being good at Tetris won't help you be good at that test you don't get crossover and people have been trying this for a long time it's like well maybe you could practice a bunch of IQ tests and you'd get better it's like no you get better on the IQ test you practice ractice but you don't get better on IQ tests and you see even fluid you can't move it there are people who come up with claims all the time like the Lumosity people it's like well here's a bunch of complex so then they thought look practice one test that doesn't work to make you smarter so then practice a whole bunch of tests and then maybe what you learn across all the tests will make you smarter no it doesn't work and it really sucks because one of the things you'd hope is that once you had extracted out a central factor for intelligence that you could get people to practice the micro skills that were associated with it and it would boost IQ it's like it doesn't work and you know about every five years someone comes out with a claim that says hey we've developed a new test and if you just do this test you'll get smarter and then someone tests it out and they usually use the Ravens Progressive matrices as the marker and they show no it's the same thing domain specific knowledge doesn't generalize to other areas so it's a hell of a thing if you if if you can figure out how to raise people's fluid IQ you will be a billionaire but you won't be able to do it because it looks like it's impossible but you never know you know you know maybe someone will crack it at some point but we certainly haven't yet so no transfer no there's no General no no generalizability of a specific skill to IQ so you know if you practice one thing and it there's something that you're doing that's close to that there's going to be some generalizability it's kind of hard to Define what close means though pro pro well it depends on it would depend on how big the factor you changed was but the general rule of thumb is no transfer yes oh yeah the higher the higher IQ oh yeah the higher IQ person will learn learn the new thing faster pretty much no matter what it is yes yes but even so then you might think well what if you practice learning a bunch of new things fast would that make you faster at learning new things and the answer is a people are doing that all the time so you're probably maxed out on that to some degree and B no it won't so and it believe me people have tried this for a long time so and for for good reason and we haven't got anywhere yes yep yeah the language one is tougher because like if you say say you learn two languages can you pick up the third faster and well the answer is how it depends on how linguistically close this the new language is to the two that you've already learned and then if you learn 30 you can probably learn a new one in like two days because once you've learned 30 you've covered the domain of languages so the language issue is a little bit more complex because languages have a fair bit of commonality in their underlying structure so but you don't learn one language faster after you've learned three because you've got smarter you learn one language faster after you've learned three because you know more about languages so okay we should stop we'll see you Thursday