A new study underscores the degree to which cognition is shaped by social environment — and, indeed, that cognitive and social processing can’t be disentangled, its authors say.
The study involved 70 high achievers, including students from Cal Tech and Baylor College of Medicine. The participants first took an IQ test in isolation and then in a competitive situation—getting real-time feedback about how they ranked against peers.
Performance declined for everyone in the implicitly competitive environment, but two clear groups emerged: One group, by the end of the competitive session, was performing roughly as it had in isolation, and the other’s performance remained low throughout. (Among those who performed least well when ranked, women were overrepresented.)
Here’s how the experiment worked: After taking a paper-and-pencil IQ test, the test subjects entered a room, five at a time, and took a test on a computer; after each question, they’d see how they were doing, relative to the others in the room. They were ranked on their previous 10 answers, so a bad start wouldn’t doom them to a low ranking throughout.
The low-performing group lost 17 IQ points in the competitive scenario, while the high-performing group lost only 8.
The study also involved brain scans, which revealed that both groups showed signs of physiological stress, at least at first — namely, heightened activity in the amygdala and lowered activity in the frontal cortex. But for the high-achievers, signs of stress decreased markedly as the test went on; not so for the low achievers.
The study showed how the expression of intelligence is dependent on social setting, and may have lessons for teachers as well as managers. In the workplace, managers might want to reduce competition between peers, for example, to maximize overall performance. Or, if competition is part of the job, then assistance and coaching might be important for those who “lose” IQ in such scenarios, the researchers said.
“We could envision behavioral therapies that could help individuals better cope with these situations,” said Kenneth Kishida, of the Virginia Tech Carilion Research Institute, one of the authors. But the prime lesson, Kishida said, is that there is no one kind of intelligence that will surface in every test. To those who design “meritocratic” selection tools, he counseled: “Be aware of what you’re selecting for.”
Source: “Implicit signals in small group settings and their impact on the e...Kenneth T. Kishida, Dongni Yang, Karen Hunter Quartz, Steven R. Quartz and P. Read Montague, Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences (forthcoming)
Via HealthCanal and The Daily Stat
