I was there, and I remember closer to a flat distribution between 0 and 5 IQ points. At any rate, I think 4 was a bit on the high side. Also, most people noted that they had a poor idea of how much difference an IQ point makes, and that this made them very uncertain about their answer. Someone suggested that if IQ was measured with a mean of 1000 and standard deviation of 150, people might still be giving answers of about 1 to 5 IQ points (as in, answers that would translate to 0.1 to 0.5 IQ points the way we actually measure them).
Someone suggested that if IQ was measured with a mean of 1000 and standard deviation of 150, people might still be giving answers of about 1 to 5 IQ points (as in, answers that would translate to 0.1 to 0.5 IQ points the way we actually measure them).
But people have a clear analog for this: SAT scores. Someone willing to give up 5 points of IQ to smoke marijuana probably wouldn’t balk at having to give up 20 points on the SAT.
An SAT is of limited use after you’re admitted to college, though, so the question is plausibly not the same—I would be willing to trade hundreds of points on my SAT scores now, since I am not in high school—and if they’re interpreting SAT scores to be the same, then you might as well have asked about IQ in the first place.
I interpreted the point AlexMennen raised as “people like dealing with small integers, and so may be giving poor answers because they don’t have the right context.” My response was that there is a larger scale measure of intelligence that Americans have meaningful context with. That context is both where their scores / their friends’ scores are and what life outcomes are impacted by those scores. For example, the 25th percentile SAT reading scores for Stanford / UC Berkeley / UCLA / Sac State are 670/600/570/410, and so one could interpret a 30 point drop on each SAT test as about the difference between being a C student at Berkeley and a C student at UCLA. 11 IQ points is about the difference between being a C student at Stanford and a C student at UCLA (but IQ-SAT score conversions are wonky now that they clipped the right side off of the SAT distribution).
I was there, and I remember closer to a flat distribution between 0 and 5 IQ points. At any rate, I think 4 was a bit on the high side. Also, most people noted that they had a poor idea of how much difference an IQ point makes, and that this made them very uncertain about their answer. Someone suggested that if IQ was measured with a mean of 1000 and standard deviation of 150, people might still be giving answers of about 1 to 5 IQ points (as in, answers that would translate to 0.1 to 0.5 IQ points the way we actually measure them).
But people have a clear analog for this: SAT scores. Someone willing to give up 5 points of IQ to smoke marijuana probably wouldn’t balk at having to give up 20 points on the SAT.
An SAT is of limited use after you’re admitted to college, though, so the question is plausibly not the same—I would be willing to trade hundreds of points on my SAT scores now, since I am not in high school—and if they’re interpreting SAT scores to be the same, then you might as well have asked about IQ in the first place.
I interpreted the point AlexMennen raised as “people like dealing with small integers, and so may be giving poor answers because they don’t have the right context.” My response was that there is a larger scale measure of intelligence that Americans have meaningful context with. That context is both where their scores / their friends’ scores are and what life outcomes are impacted by those scores. For example, the 25th percentile SAT reading scores for Stanford / UC Berkeley / UCLA / Sac State are 670/600/570/410, and so one could interpret a 30 point drop on each SAT test as about the difference between being a C student at Berkeley and a C student at UCLA. 11 IQ points is about the difference between being a C student at Stanford and a C student at UCLA (but IQ-SAT score conversions are wonky now that they clipped the right side off of the SAT distribution).