The search for Albert Einstein’s IQ
I have concluded that any currently existing claims of an IQ score for Albert Einstein are not credible.
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.
More articles by Stephen Breuning that need retraction
What I have found makes it likely that Breuning’s fraud started while he was a graduate student.
Notes on videos of Arthur Jensen defending his work
The most important name in intelligence research in the second half of the 20th century is educational psychologist Arthur Jensen (1923-2012). From the late 1960s until his death, Jensen was the world’s foremost intelligence researcher who singlehandedly made methodological and scientific breakthroughs that greatly advanced intelligence research. I never got to meet Arthur Jensen, but…
Successful task training does not invalidate intelligence tests
Sometimes the fish does not realize that it’s wet. That was my realization this week after I posted a brief description of a study that was recently published. The study (Schneider et al., 2020) showed that a short training video led a randomly selected experimental group to have IQ scores over 15 points higher than…
The lost intelligence tests
Last year, I co-authored an article with my student where we identified the first known publication of the subtests that appear on the Stanford-Binet 5, the WPPSI-IV, WISC-V, and WAIS-IV (Gibbons & Warne, 2019). Much to our suprise, we found that the majority of subtest formats on these popular intelligence tests were created by 1908.…
Terman’s non-geniuses: Shockley and Alvarez
Over the years, I’ve become a scholar of Lewis Terman’s Genetic Studies of Genius, which was a study that followed the lives of 1,528 high-IQ children from 1921 to 1999. It’s a landmark study in the history of psychology and was groundbreaking in the fields of methodology, gifted education, intelligence research, and developmental psychology (Warne,…
Comparing the 1975 and 1996 APA statements on intelligence
One of the most highly cited articles in intelligence research is a 1996 report commissioned by the American Psychological Association’s Board of Scientific Affairs to provide an authoritative statement on the science of intelligence (Neisser et al., 1996). What many people do not know, though, is that this was not the first time APA’s Board…
Thoughts on low national IQs, intellectual disability, and data quality
[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…
How open science creates new knowledge
During the 2010s, I gradually adopted open science practices. With each study I started, I began to take more and more steps to make my research transparent. I started uploading my data, documenting analysis procedures, pre-registering my work, and taking other steps to ensure my research was transparent. After adding components of open science to…
