A High IQ Isn't What Makes People Succeed (Part 1)

Tests designed to measure IQ first appeared in the nineteenth century, and later generations applied them widely — to screen candidates for advancement, to identify military prodigies or social elites, and at one point even as a gatekeeping criterion for immigration. For a parent, having a high-IQ child is a kind of envied good fortune: something you might chance upon but can never demand. For the ordinary person, a high IQ is rather like being tall, rich and handsome — you can only look up in awe, never daring to dream of catching up, your heart a mix of jealousy and longing. Standing before a member of Mensa, all you can do is grumble at God for rolling the dice so unfairly. Thanks to a century of the media over-glamourising "IQ", the public really is especially fixated on it. And it is understandable, as the saying goes: "Better to raise a wastrel than a fool." What parent doesn't wish for their child to achieve something extraordinary, to leap through the dragon's gate? But is a high or low IQ really the key to success?

K. Anders Ericsson, author of Peak, and Malcolm Timothy Gladwell, author of Outliers, have both published widely read work on "IQ and achievement", attempting to use scientific evidence to settle the question of whether a high IQ really leads to extraordinary success.

The Matthew Effect

"For whoever has, to him more shall be given, and he will have an abundance; but whoever does not have, even what he has shall be taken away from him."

Matthew 13:12

Robert K. Merton proposed in 1968 that the advantages of the strong keep accumulating while the weak are stripped of what little they have, so that a tiny initial gap gradually evolves into an enormous difference.

Take the classic case from Outliers, known as the "early advantage". Among players on Canada's national ice-hockey team, those born between January and March vastly outnumber those born between October and December. The reason is not that players born in the first three months of the year have more talent or flair for ice hockey; it is simply that, when God was rolling the dice, those who happened to be born between January and March were handed an inborn advantage. The underlying cause is that Canada's youth ice-hockey leagues use a hard "one-size cut-off": even within the same age bracket, a child born in January can be almost eleven months older than one born in December. Children born between January and March therefore enjoy every advantage in this selection contest. They are several months older than their peers, and never underestimate those few months — a little taller, a little stronger in build, a little more psychologically mature. Add up all those "littles" and it is already enough for players born in the January-to-March group to edge out those born in the October-to-December group, win a place in the youth squad, go on to accumulate experience in training, and ultimately make the national team.

Apply the same theory and try to imagine yourself back in your first year of primary school: if you had been a little stronger in build and a little more mature, would your teacher have recognised you a little more? Would your achievements today be a little higher? In the example above, IQ seems to play no great part — so how should we interpret the relationship between IQ and achievement?

Is IQ the Key to Achievement?

"A higher IQ does not equal greater achievement." Say it is true, and it isn't quite; say it is false, and it isn't entirely wrong either. In the short term, IQ does in fact play an extremely important role, because people with higher IQs do stand out in their capacity to learn — this is beyond doubt, and there is a great deal of research behind it. They tend to pull ahead very easily during the primary and secondary school years, then receive encouragement from all sides and are showered with every kind of resource. As a result, the higher a person's IQ, the more resources they receive — and the more opportunities to develop. Judged by outcomes, then, people with high IQs really do achieve more.

But the passage above raises a logical question: if you gave the same resources to a person of high IQ and a person of medium IQ, would the results turn out the same? K. Anders Ericsson, author of Peak, set out to answer this in the world of Go, running a long-term tracking experiment that followed Go players of differing IQ scores to see whether identical resources would produce different outcomes. In the end he found that the most formidable player on the rankings had scored only at a medium level on the IQ test taken years before. Why was there such a gap between the outcome and what most people would expect?

K. Anders Ericsson found that, in the early stages of learning Go, medium-IQ players did indeed lag behind — falling some way behind their higher-IQ counterparts. But because of that early disadvantage, players of ordinary IQ knew their level was lacking and that there was still plenty of room to improve. In the long run, that group of medium-IQ players was willing to spend more time than the higher-IQ players practising and correcting their mistakes; with time they made up for their early lag, laid down a solid command of the fundamentals, and made themselves hard for high-IQ players to surpass. An IQ advantage can certainly show itself in the early stages: the greater one's sensitivity to language, thinking and logic, the faster one grasps the rules, and a player can quickly build confidence. But once players of ordinary IQ all begin to master the rules and put in the practice, the effect created by IQ gradually dissipates over time.

        The key, in fact, lies in the method of practice. With the right method of practice, "making a genius" is not impossible. This article comes in two parts; the second part will go on to focus on the ingenuity of K. Anders Ericsson's method of practice.

*Mensa: a worldwide organisation that uses IQ as its membership criterion — a gathering place for the gifted.