Shankar Vedantam

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.

One thing that IQ tests hadn't looked at was how much a person cared about what they were doing.

Teachers, managers, and coaches can testify to Scott's insight.

Talent matters, but sometimes passion and drive matter more.

Along with deep engagement, creativity is another driver of performance that is overlooked by IQ tests.

In fact, researchers have found that there can be an inverse relationship between intelligence and creativity.

And why do you think it is that in artistic fields you're not seeing a connection between IQ and outcomes?

What do you think is happening there if you're a painter or a poet or a musician?

You've also said that IQ tests fail to capture the full range of human potential in that they focus on the explicit, the conscious, the controlled forms of thinking.

What does this leave out, Scott?

Solving puzzles involves logic and analysis, but logic cannot help you read someone's expression in a crowded room.

That requires cognitive skills that are often learned unconsciously.

Scott is not merely saying that the cognitive ability that IQ tests measure is different than the abilities that allow us to apprehend unwritten patterns and relationships in the real world.

He's saying that sometimes these different cognitive abilities might come at the expense of each other.

And in some ways, it complicates the notion of how we think about people, right?

We think about smart people as always being smart, dull people always being dull.

And what you're doing partly with sort of this 2E label is basically saying, no, people are more complicated than that.

So the story that has stuck with me, I think, through this whole episode is the one that you told me about the school psychologist who looked at your IQ test and showed you where you fell on the bell curve of intelligence and started with the gifted and moved the pencil over and over and over to the left and then to the left and then more to the left.

That moment was really crushing for you in all kinds of ways.