When I was a young child, I used to watch movies on television that featured good cowboys and bad cowboys. Hopalong Cassidy was a good guy and Black Bart was a bad guy. I cheered when the good guys beat the bad guys. The drama was simple and uncomplicated.
I loved Hockey and cheered for the Toronto Maple Leafs. It was raw tribalism, hardwired into my DNA. When the Leafs scored a goal, I cheered, convinced that it was the result of pure skill. However, when the other team scored it was just a lucky shot. A penalty against a member of the other team was deserved, but a penalty against a Leaf player was an indication that the referee was biased against the Leafs. This “binary” view of the world was purely visceral. I didn’t have to think or dig deeply into an issue because my tribal affiliations told me who or what was good and who or what was bad.
As I moved into adolescence, it became apparent to me that these representations of life were overly simplistic. Rational considerations began to overrule a knee-jerk visceral response. The simplistic movies of the “western” genre were no longer interesting because they didn’t reflect the complexities of life. People are neither black nor white, but rather shades of gray. Shakespeare’s insights in the complexities of human nature offered greater interest than binary “good-vs-bad” drama.
Most people, as they move through adolescence, experience a similar change in what they find entertaining. Slapstick humour derived from someone slipping on a banana peel gives way to more subtle forms of humour such as satire, as the crystallized component of our intelligence continues to grow.
However, there are many people who never make much of a transition into a more rational state as they move into adulthood. They cling to the comfort of viewing issues through the lens of simplicity. This attraction to cognitive simplicity is reflected in the things that interest them. They prefer action movies with dramatic pyrotechnics, car chases and good people combatting the forces of evil, to a movie like Oppenheimer that explores some deep issues in history, with some subtle nuances.
But how does this difference in interests reflect itself on IQ tests? The language component of an IQ test examines the subtleties of language, identifying words and concepts that are most alike or dissimilar in meaning. The component of IQ tests that measures fluid intelligence, examines a person’s ability to see patterns in information and draw conclusions. If these capacities are lacking in an individual through either impoverished experiences during the formative years or neural limitations, that individual will score a low mark on an IQ test relative to others. In short, IQ tests measure the extent to which an individual has grown from the visceral world of childhood to the more rational world of analysis and synthesis, and their migration is manifest in their changing interests.
For an interesting discussion of the two modes of thinking, see: Kahneman, Daniel. 2011. Thinking, Fast and Slow. New York. NY: Random House. p. 77.
