Is there scientific evidence that IQ tests measure intelligence? IQ tests are quite popular, but they seem to be lacking a scientific proof confirming their accuracy of measuring ones intelligence.
No matter how hard I've searched I haven't been able to find a scientific paper proving the result, all I could find was some questionable statistical studies but I am not interested in such, I am looking for a more fundamental proof, one that shows the relation of this test with the actual biological processes in the brain.
My guess would be that the only thing IQ tests measure is how good someone is at IQ tests, since one can actually get a good score due to training.
Another thing to keep in mind is that, people working in mathematics, physics and related sciences tend to get better scores and this can be explained by the fact that this is what they do, this is their job and they have spent a large amount of time studying patterns, but this however does not mean that they are necessarily smarter that others they are just trained at this.
A mathematician for example, given a sequence 2,3,5,7,... can see that the next term is 11 since this is a familiar sequence to him, but to an artist it may not be familiar at all.
Having said that, do IQ tests actually measure human intelligence?
Is there a strict proof that confirms this?
There is no universally accepted definition of &quot;intelligence&quot;, so there is no universally accepted measure of it. An IQ test can be argued to measure specific types of intelligence like pattern recognition, but may completely ignore other types of intelligence like creativity and social intelligence. IQ has been shown to be associated with many factors like income, educational attainment, job performance and incarceration rates, so IQ tests clearly measures something meaningful and associated with many aspects of one's life, but whether you call that &quot;intelligence&quot; is open to debate. It's reasonably well accepted that an IQ test can measure specific kinds of intelligence, but there is no way to even define, much less quantify, intelligence in a general sense.