Fluid and Crystallised Intelligence

10 August 2005


By: Ali Ismail

E-mail: aliismail_uk@yahoo.co.uk

Telephone: 0778-842 5262 (United Kingdom)






In some countries such as the Russian Federation, specialised schools for gifted children (pictured) are established



FLUID INTELLIGENCE IS THE WAY OF THE FUTURE


The heights of the future ‘global village’ will be based on genes more than effort



Several days ago my mother who does Islamic art work lost contact with the usual illustrator and told our Lithuanian lodger, Karl, of her problem. He offered to look into it although he had no Photoshop training and I followed him into our front room to see what he would do.

With me sitting a few feet away he opened up the Photoshop programme, took out the unfinished image of a bird and trawled through the various options. The cursor would hover questioningly over various icons and buttons and open up a few of them. Most would be discarded but some were taken up and analysed. Radio buttons, dialogue pull-downs and analogue scales were tasted and tested. Eventually, the image of the garden bird was altered to his and my mother’s satisfaction. It was then that I remembered that several weeks previously it had been Karl who had stood a few feet away from me on our garden patio while I was unpacking our brand new electric lawnmower and who had advised me how to put the German machine together so that I could mow the lawn that very afternoon.

Now, everybody who knows anything about Photoshop realises that it is an enormous software programme. One man, Nikos Erodotu, who looked over the package told me: “No man who walks the Earth knows the whole of Photoshop.” Most people who have qualifications in Photoshop have done courses that covered only selected basic features which were sufficient unto the purpose of enabling him or her to be employed at a firm.

Much as it may stick in the gullets of all of us, what I was watching when Karl was familiarising himself with our elephantine Photoshop package was a European mind in action, driven by European genes and doing what Europeans do best – probing the unknown.

By way of contrast, I had a conversation with some Sri Lankan men about eighteen months ago on the subject of how schoolboys at ‘elite’ schools on that island get to pass public examinations in order to enter universities and the professions. Since Sri Lankan A Levels are on a par with their British equivalents the standards are as over here. In many or most cases, the pupils cannot learn enough when the masters teach them in classes. The masters’ words fly past them uncomprehended and the squiggles on the blackboards are meaningless as far as they are concerned. Their families circumvent the cognitive block by paying the masters to coach the pupils after school hours at their houses. The coaching takes the form of spoon-feeding the youngsters with language usually associated with remedial teaching in the United Kingdom. Eventually, with the teachers pulling from the front and the parents pushing from behind most of the boys pass their examinations.

Another story I have heard on the grapevine is that prior to and after WWII many students from the sub-continent used to come to England to study accountancy. The headquarters of the Institute of Chartered Accountants of England and Wales, Accountants Hall, was in the practice of posting up the names of newly qualified accountants on a wall in the building in strict order of merit, with the prize-winners at the top and those who had just scraped through at the bottom of the list. Until the mid 1960s the prizewinners were mostly Asian with names such as Khan, Patel, Mohammed and Singh. The English names followed afterwards. When the final examinations’ syllabi were changed to include several ‘soft’ subjects such as management and matters involving social awareness, the top of the list was dominated by European names such as Smith, Jones, Wilson and Aitkens. There has to be a reason for that.

Now, there is a hypothesis in the field of psychology to the effect that there are two kinds of intelligence – fluid and crystallised. In a nutshell, fluid intelligence is to do with potential and crystallised intelligence is to do with what has been learnt already.

Dr Colin Cooper of the Queen’s University, Belfast specialises in the study of human intelligence. He said: “Fluid intelligence has a substantial genetic component from the parents. It is only slightly moderated by environmental influences from outside the family. Studies have shown that children brought up in homes with many books do not benefit greatly as a result. It happens that intelligent parents tend to have more books that less intelligent ones but the books do not make the children more intelligent to a great extent.” In other words, the books in the home were results of the parents being intelligent and not a cause of either the parents or the children being bright.

Dr Raymond B Cattell who developed the hypothesis of fluid and crystallised intelligence about three decades ago used what he called ‘investment theory’ to explain crystallised intelligence. He reckoned that a young person with a certain amount of fluid intelligence in various branches of ability has a range of options as to how to ‘invest’ his talents. Depending on his ‘investment plan’ his fund of crystallised intelligence in later life develops. If he has a high degree of mathematically oriented abstract reasoning power he would be advised to ‘invest’ in a career in mathematics or one or other of the hard sciences. If he excels in verbal ability, a career on the stage, in salesmanship or in the law might be advisable.

What tends to happen in every country in our homeland region – Bangladesh, India, Sri Lanka and Pakistan – is that the people placed low in the social hierarchies get treated so badly that they are willing to do almost anything to rise socially and the educational system is a major ladder leading upwards. It does seem to be the case that some people with only modest intellectual ability, that is to say fluid intelligence, ‘invest’ in relatively high prestige professions such as medicine and the law and by monumental cramming manage to pass their course requirements to become qualified individuals. However, no matter how highly qualified they may be, their fluid intelligence remains the same.

Dr Cooper said: “General (fluid) intelligence is more important than specific knowledge.” This minefield of psychological research uses adoption studies heavily and has discovered that after reaching adulthood the adoptee resembles his/her biological parents much more than the adoptive parents. There have been a few trans-racial studies which seem to support this.

Dr Chris Brand, formerly of the department of psychology of Edinburgh University paid the final price for upsetting people on 8 August 1997 when he lost his job at a disciplinary tribunal on account of race based intelligence ‘findings’ and opining that paedophilia, in some instances, is not harmful to the younger party concerned.

On account of Dr Cattell’s viewpoints seeping into public conscientiousness implicitly, persons who control entry into the higher professions and the most difficult universities have made various adjustments. The phrase of choice at this time is ‘thinking outside the box’. There is a tendency to make sure that candidates know what they are supposed to know as a preliminary and then to probe further to see whether or not they can think independently of their training.

For example, the scholarship examinations to the United Kingdom’s public schools lean heavily on the aptitudes and potentials of the examinees – fluid intelligence. The mathematics examinations test their abilities to problem-solve abstractly. The foreign language (French) examinations concentrate on English to French translation instead of the other way round because recall is much more difficult than recognition. By way of contrast, the Common Entrance examination for the other pupils is more about seeing whether or not he or she has diligently learnt what has to be known and can do what has been taught and can reproduce the same on paper.

Several years ago I went to a party where I overheard a small group of Asian doctors talking amongst themselves about the professional examinations which foreign doctors have to take to practice medicine in the USA. “But they ask questions which are not found in any book!” one of them complained.

Both Oxford and Cambridge universities have recognised the problem of fluid and crystallised intelligence implicitly for a long time. They assume that good A Level results indicates that the person concerned has been a diligent school pupil and is probably suitable for general university entrance. However, to get into Oxbridge more is required. They want to take only those persons who are capable of thinking independently of their previous training and self-navigate sensibly and effectively. When I was at Rugby School, one of my contemporaries went to Oxford for an interview to study a science subject. During the interview, one of the dons asked: “If the circumference of the Earth is 25,000 miles and a rope was put around the equator in such a way that it was exactly one foot above the surface, assuming that the surface is flat, how long will the rope have to be?” Somebody thought the answer was 25,000 miles and one foot long. Myself, I have no idea.

Returning to accountancy, Maureen Chambers of the training department at the Association of Chartered Certified Accountants said: “The final examinations are problem based and use case studies. An examinee has to draw on many different fields of his studies to answer the examination questions. Decision-making is tested. The candidates’ abilities to make policies for organizations are assessed.”

Nowhere is this more apparent than in the military establishments in virtually every major power on Earth. The American Seals’ officer selection procedures result in a great many young men and women with excellent academic records and health getting rejected. They have to get through personality tests and show that they can think on their feet in short order in highly stressed situations for which they have had no previous guidance from any source whatsoever. The British armed forces are similar in that regard. Those applying for below commissioned officer levels simply have to show that they are trainable, have appropriate educational backgrounds and health and will follow rules and regulations well and sensibly.

About a decade ago I invented a creativity test to identify people with the ability to innovate. It is based on simple pattern recognition. The hub of the procedure involves the ability to spot which of segments of circle arcs together, as a group, belong to the same circle.

The implication of all this and the importance for our readership is that the directing levels of future humanity are likely to be the province of people like Karl. They are the ones who can self-navigate well with guidance amounting to little more than a wing and a prayer. The conscientious plodder will probably no longer be able to get to the top by effort alone. Perhaps in tomorrow’s world, the famous race between the hare and the tortoise from Aesop’s Fables will be won by the hare because the poor old tortoise just will not be able to climb over the obstacles on the rough ground – even while the hare is sleeping.

THE END