Importance of cultural context in defining and understanding intelligence

Despite much controversy over the accurate definition of intelligence, most researchers agree that it is only a concept labelled by a word, or several related concepts represented by a word (Howard, 1993). This theory defines concept as a person’s unique and individual information about a category, where the category is considered as a set of things in the world. Generally, there are three major concept of intelligence: Spearman’s g, as a property of behaviour and as a set of abilities. Each concept have different information, and should be used in various ways (Howard, 1993).

I took the Koori Test and could not understand almost all questions. Everything sounds like ‘alien’ language to me. As expected, I scored badly with merely 40 marks, which stands for below average intelligence. Of course, this test clearly demonstrated that intelligence is bounded by the culture context. Sternberg (2004) further supported this by stating that work on intelligence within a single culture may fail to fairly acknowledging range of skills and knowledge that may constitute intelligence broadly defined. It is also more likely to draw wrong conclusion with over generalisation problem. The knowledge, which is learned in one culture context may not applicable to others who have different culture. For example, long time ago I took a IQ test online from a popular website, which claimed to be scientifically accurate IQ test. I thought I am supposed to be a language type who shouldn’t score badly for language ability, but the IQ test only able to test my English standard, which is second language for me. In the way, I believe that IQ test is very hard to determine one’s actual ability by using one standard test of intelligence for universal.

In terms of individual differences, everyone may have different knowledge regarding a particular category. Thus, it is inevitably creating a culture-free standard IQ test seems to be impossible mission. Even psychologist manages to come out with a measure standard of intelligence, doing translation into different language might be slightly different from the original text, which cause test bias. From the Koori Test, it shows that culture shapes language. For example, in Chinese language, it comes up with a complex vocabulary with detail classifications to address different relatives as Chinese culture emphasize on big family and stronger kinship. In contrast, in English, we use very general terms such as uncle, aunty, and cousins to describe relatives. This is probably due to western culture is more individualistic on one nucleus family compared to Chinese culture.

Different racial will probably have different culture, and whether racial differences in IQ are due to differences in intellectual ability, or to differences in exposure to information is a question (Fagan & Holland, 2007). Intelligence, was defined by Fagan and Holland (2007) as information processing. In fact, this definition is encouraging a better awareness of racial equality in intelligence, hence provides a multidisciplinary and broad understanding of intelligence. They concluded that cultural differences in the condition of information explain for racial differences in IQ. This might be helpful to explain why certain racial have higher intelligence and cognitive achievements than the other racial. Lynn and Longley (2006) suggested that the over-representation of Jews among Nobel prize winners possibly partly due to the higher average Jewish IQ. The reason behind it could be due to environmental and genetic theories of the high Jewish IQ, as for other ethnic and racial differences (Lynn & Longley, 2006).


References:

Fagan, J. F., & Holland, C. R. (2007). Racial equality in intelligence: Predictions from a theory of intelligence as processing. Intelligence, 35, 319–334.
Howard, R. W. (1993). On what intelligence is. British Journal of Psychology, 84, 27-37.
Lynn, R., & Longley, D. (2006).On the high intelligence and cognitive achievements of Jews in Britain. Intelligence, 34, 541–547.
Sternberg, R. J. (2004). Culture and intelligence. American Psychologist, 59, 325-338.