topics: |  psychology | creativity

insightful discussion on the limitations of IQ tests.  Delightful writing
style laced with humour.

Prejudices

declares his "few and simple" presuppositions at the outset:
- much of educational psychology is trivial:
	much of educational psych becomes "measurement" for its own sake.
	One has visions of titles like "The Blotsky art appreciation
	inventory: A study of test-retest reliability."
 - a distrust of complex statistics:
	reliance on purely statistical methods is a powerful tradition in
	psychology; a "defining characteristic of the mental testing
	movement".  Although my own research derives to a large extent from
	this tradition, it is one which seems ... to have led us astray.
	Unlike the conservatism of pioneers like Binet, Terman, and
	Thorndike, instead of developing new analytic tools, psychologists
	concentrated more on analysis of results from existing tools...
	IQ tests have not developed much since the initial decades...
	Central failing: Inconvenient evidence is neglected; a form of
	scientific solipsism...
	among the exceptions:  Terman's famous longitudinal study
 - a rejection of psychological theorizing which is unduly rigorous or
	       precise.
	Experimenters realize that either the theory is not precise enough to
	test; or that it is too simple to be true.  At this stage, there
	follows a stage of patching up...
	back journals of experimental psycholoogy bulge with detailed, highly
	artificial studies of learning, memory and perception, which few
	psycholoogists now consult. p. 17

bathetic : abrupt change in style from high to low - anticlimactic;
	 "measure lofty traits, but treat them bathetically" p.12

Arts and Sciences

started research in 1957 on "Arts / Sciences specialization".  Originally
wanted to investigate verbal vs numerical and diagrammatic biases in
intelligence. It was pointed out to me that the problem of the Two Cultures
was fashionable, and that my application would be more favourably received if
my interest in intelligence was tied to the problem of the arts and
sciences.  31

Convergers and Divergers p.49

Getzels and Jackson's "creativity" tests: distinguish "high IQ" child from
"high creative" ones.
[In IQ tests] the victim knows there is one answer which is correct, and his
task is to ferret it out.  p.50

whereas creativity tests have open answers : e.g. How many uses can you think
of for a brick?

Most arts specialists, weak at the IQ tests, were much better at the
open-ended ones; most scientists were the reverse.
in general, arts specialists were divergers, science ones were convergers.
divergers 3:1 for arts (history, lit, languages), vs
convergers 3:1 for physical sciences (mathematics, physics or chemistry)


---
Liam Hudson was director of the Research Unit on Intellectual Development at
King's College, Cambridge.