What is your opinion on IQ tests in general?
There’s growing consensus that intelligence is multivariate. A score from any single test could be accurate or inaccurate based on what you’re trying to measure; and it’s not entirely clear if the correlation between, say, spatial reasoning and analytic thinking is structural or a consequence of environment and upbringing. The brain is scarily adaptable to daily tasks; which is both a strength and a danger.
Basically, using them to compare two people is like comparing a truck to a sedan. They have similar systems and characteristics; but have wildly different strengths and purposes. There is no better or worse, only fitness for a specified purpose.
The goal of psychology is, first and foremost, human health. There’s no application for intelligence tests outside diagnosis. Even in an employment context, we’d want to use such diagnostics to make appropriate accommodations for people or to design jobs fit for the workforce, not to discriminate.
At least in a healthcare setting, it’s very rare we use IQ tests. Differential diagnosis techniques work best with more specific tests; and, even then, we would only use them to probe the severity of a disability, not to determine appropriate care. And I would never rely on them to determine, say, a conservatorship is warranted. A low IQ score does not necessarily indicate mental illness.
And it’s important that, in a psychological context, I talk about what I mean by a disability. All a disability is is an inability to perform some task designed by a society that is able. It makes no statement on what a person is capable of outside that.
So even if it were true, what Murray posits (which it is NOT), it would make no statement on the abilities or capacity of any given individual.
That’s rambling and a tiny bit incoherent; but I’ll answer any other questions. lol