Marcia Malory began her academic career as a chemistry student but ended up receiving a Bachelor of Arts in Political Science from Brooklyn College of the City University of New York. Since then, she has worked in various industries in the United States and the United Kingdom. She is interested in how science, culture and politics interact. Visit her website or follow her on Twitter @sciencefindout.
Do you ever downplay your intelligence when you are around others? Recently, an experiment was performed to determine how being in a group setting affects IQ test results. University students took pencil and paper IQ tests to determine their baseline IQ scores. They were not told their results.
Afterwards, the subjects had to take another IQ test – a multiple-choice exam given on a computer. Subjects were divided into groups of five. After answering a question, each was told how she or he ranked compared with the other four members of the group and the relative rank of one other group member. The researchers focused on subjects who had scored about the same on the baseline IQ test; they had a mean IQ of 126.
Although all of the subjects had similar baseline IQs, the results on the computer test varied widely. The IQs of some subjects stayed about the same, but the IQs of other subjects dropped dramatically. The researchers divided the test takers into two groups – “high performers”, who scored above the new median, and “low performers”, who scored below that median. The IQs of the low performers dropped by an average of 17.4 points. Continue reading
David Ropeik
