g reflects the encouragement people receive as they grow up. Children who are
encouraged to learn and perform well, or are made to feel secure, may try
harder and/or be less anxious when taking the various subtests of the IQ test.
Such children would be expected to do well on the subtests of the IQ inventory
and well in academic situations. Certainly it has been established that measures
of a person’s attitude and motivation tend to correlate with that person’s per-
formance on IQ tests (see Anastasi, 1988). For example, people who have posi-
tive attitudes toward learning and have a desire to succeed tend to do better in
school and score higher on tests of intelligence (Anastasi, 1985; Dreger, 1968).
The connection between performance in information processing paradigms
and performance on IQ tests may also be interpreted as a matter of attitude and
motivation, and not necessarily a matter of the intrinsic efficiency of the cog-
nitive system. Consider that from the perspective of the subject, tasks like the
inspection time task are tedious. Subjects who try hard, especially by concen-
trating on every trial, will tend to have short inspection times. Subjects who
occasionally let their attention wander, on the other hand, will get the occa-
sional long inspection time that will increase their overall average (Mackintosh,
1986). If the subjects who try hard on the information processing tasks are
also the ones who try hard on the IQ test, then there will be correlations be-
tween measures of the information processing task and IQ performance, as is
observed.
Expanding the Concept of Intelligence: Creativity, Sociability, Practicality
To some extent, the issue of whether a given test of the intellect correlates with
other tests depends on what sorts of tests one wishes to consider as revealing of
intelligence. When people are given tests that are dissimilar in content to those
found in conventional IQ inventories, researchers often find that performance
on such tests (e.g., writing plots from descriptions of short stories) does not
correlate with performance on the conventional tests (Guilford, 1964, 1967;
Thurstone, 1938).
Creativity One way to expand the concept of intelligence is to consider cre-
ativity as an aspect of intelligence. Recall that I first discussed creativity in
chapter 8: Problem Solving. Most IQ tests have no measures of creativity, an
admittedly difficult concept to define and measure objectively. Creativity usu-
ally refers to ideas or works that are novel and valuable to others. Einstein was
creative when he declared that ‘‘E¼mc^2 ,’’ because the equation was novel and
valuable, at least to physicists. Had he declared ‘‘E¼mc^3 ’’ his equation would
still have been novel, but not valuable.
A variety of research suggests that creativity, as measured by peer assess-
ments, number of publications, and so on, bears little relationship to scores on
IQ tests (Baird, 1982; Barron, 1969; MacKinnon, 1962; Wallach, 1976; see Per-
kins, 1988). For example, Yong (1994) studied Malaysian secondary students
and found that a test of figural creativity was unrelated to scores on the Cattell
CultureFairtestofintelligence.
Some disciplines requiring creativity tend to be populated by people who
score high on IQ tests. For example, if one were to examine the general popu-
lation, one would find a positive correlation between creative achievement in
Individual Differences in Cognition 789