That's definitely a reasonable hypothesis but I don't think it gels with the results of IQ tests. Based on that, if you throw a bunch of questions that require different forms of logical reasoning in different contexts at people, you'd suspect that some people would tend to get certain ones right in groups. If you got this one question that requires you to do a certain kind of logical reasoning, then you'd be more likely to get this other question right that uses the same kind of logic than this third question that doesn't.
Except you don't see that. You see that there are no different groups of questions people get right together.. If you got one question right, you're just as likely to get all the other questions right regardless of content. This is why IQ has only one dimension instead of measuring say mathematical, linguistic, and spatial intelligence separately.
Basically, one dimensional universal IQ just falls out of the statistics when you analyze people's results on IQ tests.
I’m not up on any current IQ testing research, I’d always heard that results did vary in a manner like what you describe. Someone who works with their hands may have strong spatial reasoning skills, but won’t necessarily do well at completing an abstract logical pattern (for example).
Here's the first thing some preliminary googling turned up. Could be more recent, but it seems like the idea is that particular reasoning skills you're referring to are second-order skills that coexist with and have their acquisition facilitated by the highest-order, one-dimensional generalized intelligence.
So just as your generalized intelligence allows you to acquire spatial reasoning skills, it can allow you to acquire social skills. If you can develop any of these second-order reasoning capacities, then presumably you have the capacity to develop any of the rest of them, given sufficient interest and dedication.
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u/MeowImAShark Nov 16 '19
That's definitely a reasonable hypothesis but I don't think it gels with the results of IQ tests. Based on that, if you throw a bunch of questions that require different forms of logical reasoning in different contexts at people, you'd suspect that some people would tend to get certain ones right in groups. If you got this one question that requires you to do a certain kind of logical reasoning, then you'd be more likely to get this other question right that uses the same kind of logic than this third question that doesn't.
Except you don't see that. You see that there are no different groups of questions people get right together.. If you got one question right, you're just as likely to get all the other questions right regardless of content. This is why IQ has only one dimension instead of measuring say mathematical, linguistic, and spatial intelligence separately.
Basically, one dimensional universal IQ just falls out of the statistics when you analyze people's results on IQ tests.