A Modest Contribution to Science

I have never been a good judge of reactions to my work. Some of what I think are my most innovative ideas and experiments seem to attract little attention. I have to rely on others and such things as citation counts to get some idea of the contribution. I consider my research on the psychology of culture shock, the psychology of alternative medicine, and the psychology of money to be my best work, but I am going to discuss another issue: self-estimated intelligence. I believe this is important for science as much as for application.

I got the idea from reading a very short paper by a fellow academic at Edinburgh University. Hanna Beloff, an early feminist and social psychologist, wrote a short, semi-academic paper in the British Psychological Society journal The Psychologist. She reported in 1992 that she asked students to estimate their own and their parents’ IQ scores and found striking sex differences, which she attributed to the modesty training given to girls.

I thought it might be really interesting to replicate this finding, which I did. It seemed surprising to me that the difference was so large, particularly among bright students who had benefited from the women's liberation movement and from much gender equality legislation.

This, in turn, led me to do around forty studies looking first at cross-cultural differences, then at differences in estimates of multiple intelligences as well as at the relationship between psychometrically measured (“actual”) intelligence and self-assessments.

I started simply by showing students the well-known bell curve of intelligence and asked them to “honestly and accurately” estimate their score. With colleagues, I collected data in countries from Argentina to Zambia, always showing a sex difference.

Then I started asking about different types of intelligence, using first Gardner's model but then others, including Sternberg's and Cattell's work on different types/facets of intelligence. I then got the subjects to estimate how they would do on the various tests that make up the best IQ tests, such as the Stanford-Binet or the Wechsler Adult Intelligence Test.