Tag: international development

Stupid? No. Unfamiliar? Yes. The meaning of low mean IQs in developing nations

Illiterate people’s thinking probably remains grounded in their everyday experience. When these people take a test that solely measures abstract thinking, they perform poorly. This does not make them stupid. Instead, it shows the disconnect between their natural mode of thought and the unfamiliar test content.

Thoughts on low national IQs, intellectual disability, and data quality

Jul 19, 2020Russell T. WarneIn the Know: Debunking 35 Myths About Human Intelligence, intelligence, intelligence testing, international development, IQ testing, national average IQ

[February 2023 update: I recently published an article analyzing national IQs. The article incorporates some of the ideas in this blog post.] A recent now-retracted paper in Psychological Science by Clark et al. (2020) caused some controversy lately in the psychological community. The authors found some correlations with other national-level data that could be theoretically…