Shankar Vedantam

There was a second area when Nick McIntosh started to sway Scott's pre-existing views about IQ tests.

Scott's foray into the lion's den of IQ testing hadn't turned out the way he'd expected.

When we come back, how Scott responded to his moral quandary.

You're listening to Hidden Brain.

I'm Shankar Vedantam.

This is Hidden Brain.

I'm Shankar Vedanta.

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Early in his career, intelligence researcher Scott Barry Kaufman set out to tear down the edifice of IQ testing.

He felt it had greatly limited his own prospects as a young person.

But then he found himself convinced by much of the science behind IQ.

It left him with a quandary.

Should he trust his own experience with IQ tests, or should he trust the data?

As he finished his undergraduate studies and went on to get a PhD in cognitive psychology, Scott came to feel that the real question was not whether the science of IQ was wrong, but whether it was incomplete.