Why there’s more to being smart than intelligence

Graphs of IQ scores seemed to form a “normal distribution”, shaped like a bell centred on the average score of 100 points, meaning there are as many people that are above average as below, and IQs at either extreme are incredibly rare. “There is nothing about an individual as important as an IQ,” declared Terman in an article on the subject, and predicted that a child’s score would predict great achievement in later life. Beginning in the early 1920s, Terman started scouring California’s schools for pupils with an IQ of at least 140, which he considered to be the threshold for genius. More than 1,000 children made the grade – a cohort that he and his colleagues would study for the next seven decades. Many of these “Termites”, as they were affectionately known, went on to have successful careers. There was Shelley Smith Mydans, for example – a war reporter and novelist, and Jess Oppenheimer, a producer and writer who became famous for his work with the comedian Lucille Ball. (She called him “the brains” behind her acclaimed hit series I Love Lucy.) By the time of Terman’s death in the late 1950s, more than 30 had made it into the Who’s Who in America – a book of influential people – and nearly 80 had been recognised in a reference book outlining the US’s most prominent scientists, called American Men of Science. (Despite the name, women were eligible to be included, although the book’s name did not reflect this fact until the 1970s.) When you look carefully at the data, however, these statistics do not offer strong support for the idea that people with high IQs are destined for greatness. It’s important to control for potentially confounding factors such as the socioeconomic circumstances of the Termites’ families. Children with educated parents and more household resources tend to score better on IQ tests, and this privilege could, in turn, make it easier to have success later in life. Once this is taken into account, the Termites did not perform much more remarkably than any children of similar backgrounds. Other studies looked at the IQ differences within the Terman group to see whether the top scorers were proportionately more likely to succeed than those who had only scraped in. They weren’t. When David Henry Fieldman examined measures of professional distinction, such as a lawyer being made a judge, or an architect winning a prestigious award, the people with IQs of more than 180 were only slightly more successful than those scoring 30 to 40 points less. “High IQ does not seem to indicate ‘genius’ in the commonly understood sense of the word,” he concluded. It is telling that Terman’s initial study had rejected two Californian boys – William Shockley and Walter Alvarez – who went go on to win Nobel Prizes for Physics, while none of the children who had made the grade would receive such an accolade. Growing up in New York, Richard Feynman would have never had the chance to take part in the Genetic Studies of Genius, which took place in California. But even if he had been living near Stanford, where Terman was based, his alleged childhood IQ score of 125 would have meant that he would not have qualified either. A multifaceted mind The Termites’ life stories should not undermine the usefulness of IQ as a scientific tool. Although it is far from perfect, we know that IQ scores are correlated with educational attainment and income across the population. It will certainly help someone to grasp abstract concepts that are important in many disciplines – particularly those in mathematics, the sciences, engineering, or philosophy. But when it comes to predicting the extraordinary achievements that could be considered genius, it seems to be only a small part of the picture.