There are a variety of reasons why a person might wish to know their IQ. When Stephen Hawking was diagnosed with ALS, he feared that it might bring cognitive impairment, destroying all his dreams to become a theoretical physicist. In these early years of his disease, he tested his IQ regularly to ensure that his mental acuity remained intact. Of course there many more common reasons why people are interested in knowing their IQ.
Intelligence is at a premium in fields that demand high cognitive skills. For many highly intelligent people, the existence of others who might be even more intelligent poses a threat to their supremacy. An example of the anguish experienced by those in the top intellectual echelon was captured in the 1997 movie Good Will Hunting. When Fields Medalist, Professor Gerald Lambeau, acknowledges that the young janitor at the University, named Will Hunting [played by Matt Damon] has superior mathematical talent, he says:
I can’t do this proof. But you can, and when it comes to that it’s only about, … it’s just a handful of people in the world who can tell the difference between you and me. But I’m one of them… Most days I wish I never met you… Because then I could sleep at night, and I wouldn’t have to walk around with the knowledge that there’s someone like you out there… And I didn’t have to watch you throw it all away.
Many people believe that they have superior intelligence and wish to confirm this with an IQ test that gives them a percentile ranking, indicating what percentage of people their age have a lower IQ. For example, someone who has an IQ of 130 is two standard deviations above the mean, indicating that their IQ is greater than 97.7% of people their age. This gives them a feeling of self-confidence that may inspire them to tackle cognitively challenging tasks without trepidation.
Perhaps the greatest benefit of knowing your IQ, especially if it is high, is its contribution to your self-esteem. We live in a world where the media highlights high achievers, glamorous celebrities and articulate people, creating for many people, the feeling that they lack the innate talent to compete or to find a personal niche. A high IQ score can help a person feel empowered to embark on a career they wish to pursue.
However, an IQ score is a double-edged sword. Discovering that you have an IQ of 130 also indicates that there are 2.3% of people your age with a higher IQ. This is the greatest downside to knowing your IQ. It may cause you to put a ceiling on your personal expectations. To avoid this downside, anyone who takes an IQ test and receives a disappointing score must remember that an IQ test is a brief snapshot of some of your cognitive skills– a snapshot that has a reasonably large margin of error.
Scoring 110 on an IQ test may convince you that you are not exceptionally intelligent and that you are not able to pursue a goal that you wished to attain. However, achievement in life involves a lot of things not measurable on an IQ test. Intensity of purpose, passion, imagination and long-term problem solving skills are things that are not measurable on IQ tests.
You must think of an IQ test score as one of several indicators that provide a rough approximation of your cognitive ability. Other important indicators are the ease at which you learned ideas in school, the level of your interests in the mysteries of life and the comfort you feel in learning new things. Highly intelligent people are interested in a wide variety of subjects including philosophy, literature, history, the arts, science and even some mathematics. If you are excited by the prospect of learning in these areas, then the results of an IQ test are not to be taken too seriously.
