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 has come up with a test called CAS and the Kaufmans with the 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 to help 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 would object to today 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 Serpell, Nisbett and Peng suggests that in many Eastern and African cultures (basically in 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. 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. Further, Serpell 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.

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 therefore that the cultural differences are racial and genetic. Wow what a leap! Gonthier (2022)[1] showed that the assumption that these visuo-spatial tasks 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, 2022). Gonthier (2022) 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)

References:

[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

Attributions:

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