13.4: Culture and Intelligence

It is quite clear that the Western conceptions and tests of intelligence are not exportable to other cultures where creativity, character and practical intelligence might be more emphasized, or actually the only things that matter. Greenfield also suggests that whether the intelligence test that is administered is visual or verbal will also affect the outcome (and surprisingly the verbal test is more likely to be fair, because exposure to visual stimuli like matrices is very much dependent on culture). Further many researchers like Grigorenko and Serpell have studied intelligence in multiple African societies and come up with different findings.

Naglieri designed the Cognitive Assessment System (CAS) and the Kaufmans designed the Assessment Battery for Children (K-ABC). Both are based on the work of Russian neuropsychologist Luria. The CAS can be used with neurodivergent children and children from different cultural backgrounds in educational settings. These psychologists believe that intelligence testing is valid and useful in the hands of competent school psychologists who can interpret the numbers to best serve students’ needs in closing the intelligence-achievement gap and tailoring school for each child’s strengths and weaknesses. This is in contrast to obtaining an IQ score that most practitioners today would object to as being culturally unfair. Halpern says we all have different abilities and potentials that are not static but rather grow in a context that is diverse and varied.

The work of psychologists Serpell, Nisbett and Peng suggests that in many Eastern and African cultures (that are what is known as collectivistic cultures) intelligence is defined within a social context – the ability to interact with others responsibly, interact to reconcile and avoid conflict, and even to know when it is appropriate to display one’s cognitive abilities and when not to (Cole & Packer, 2019). Of course, it is important to realize that these differences are experiential, and that not all individuals of one culture are better at these things.  In Western models cognitive speed is often a component of intelligence.  On the other hand, Serpell (2011) points out for example that in cultures like rural Zambia where culture differentiates between cognitive speed and responsibility (and both are considered components of intelligence), the lines between the two are often intentionally blurred, and cleverness is seen as a combination of both.

It would appear that the verbal subtests of the commonly used intelligence tests (WISC or Stanford Binet) would be most susceptible to cultural differences and negatively affect the scores of non-native English speakers since these tests were written in English for English speaking individuals.  And clearly this makes sense, given that verbal and written aspects of culture and language can be considerably different in different cultures.  However, even the non-verbal, seemingly culture-free or culture fair aspects of these tests are heavily influenced by cultural differences (Shuttleworth-Edwards, 2016).

In tests like Raven’s matrices that are nonverbal, non-Western participants appear to consistently score lower. There are some questions about the methodological issues that account for these findings. However, on average there do appear to be differences. Generally, it is assumed that the type of processing required in these tests – visuo-spatial cognition tasks – should be fairly universal, and therefore that these tests are “culture fair.”   And then some researchers have assumed therefore that the cultural differences found in the results of testing are racial and genetic. These are precisely the type of conclusions that have been grounded in the work of historically racist practitioners in psychology like Galton and Jensen (and the type of implementation and outcomes that the APA issued an apology for in 2021).

Gonthier (2022)[1] showed that the assumption that these visuo-spatial tasks in intelligence tests are universal is a myth. Since these types of tests involve only color and shapes and very little verbal content, many researchers have suggested that these tests are not influenced by the culture of participants. In fact, the opposite is true. At least five studies with participants in Ecuador, Columbia, Uganda, the Phillippines and Indonesia found that while these individuals did comparably well on verbal tasks as Western participants, they were completely unable to perform on items such as the Wechsler Block design – they stacked blocks on top of each other, made the designs more symmetrical than the prompts, ignored color entirely and in general responded in ways that when taken out of context would suggest that their “intelligence was much lower” than their Western counterparts’. “The authors of these five studies all concluded that the inability of the subjects to perform adequately stemmed not from an innate difficulty in visuo-spatial reasoning, but from a lack of cultural expertise in perception, conceptualization or manipulation of this type of materials.” Gonthier goes on to point out specific issues that influence differences in test findings ranging from the use of and unfamiliarity with paper, that pictures represent something is not universal, not having names for shapes, positions, and colors, importance to numerosity, movement/time, symmetry, and cognitive load and processing of orientation. In some cases orientation of figures on a test are not considered important by participants who vastly outperform Western participants in cardinal orientation and directions of items that are extremely far away and of themselves even when in a windowless room. The matrix format with rows and columns (particularly going from left to right) is culture bound and most definitely affected by language orientations. Literacy and literacy in a particular language will affect outcomes on tests that are matrix based. Three dimensional representation causes even more problems. And particular colors and shapes may have different meanings in different cultures. Finally response production is affected by familiarity with the materials like blocks (and this is particularly an issue with timed tests, but also cognitive load).

So while intelligence testing has been the topic of much psychological research, it is important to carefully consider the history, motivation, and complexity of such testing. This is particularly true given the impact of the results of this research and implementation in perpetuating systemic biases.

References:

Cole, M., & Packer, M. (2019). Culture and cognition. Cross‐cultural psychology: Contemporary themes and perspectives, 243-270.

[1] Gonthier, C. Cross-cultural differences in visuo-spatial processing and the culture-fairness of visuo-spatial intelligence tests: an integrative review and a model for matrices tasks. Cogn. Research 7, 11 (2022). https://doi.org/10.1186/s41235-021-00350-w

Serpell, R. (2011). Social responsibility as a dimension of intelligence, and as an educational goal: Insights from programmatic research in an African society. Child Development Perspectives, 5(2), 126-133.

Shuttleworth-Edwards, A. B. (2016). Generally representative is representative of none: Commentary on the pitfalls of IQ test standardization in multicultural settings. The Clinical Neuropsychologist, 30(7), 975-998.

Attributions:

Original content by Bhadha (2023) licensed CC-BY 4.0