CHAPTER 8 Intelligence and the Workplace

Research on intelligence, dating back to Spearman’s 1904 article, “‘General Intelligence,’ Objectively Determined and Measured,” has been an area of keen interest to psychologists and the general public. Books such as Herrnstein and Murray’s The Bell Curve (1994) have created controversy, consternation, and commitment among different constituencies. Few areas of psychology—indeed few areas of scientific inquiry—have created such intense debate. Intelligence, also called general mental ability (GMA) and cognitive ability, is of keen interest to industrial and organizational (I-O) psychology because it is an excellent predictor of two of the most important and often-studied variables: training proficiency and job performance. Dramatic gains in performance in training and on the job can result from using preemployment selection tests to identify and hire highly intelligent job applicants. Psychologists and others who study human behavior are also interested in intelligence because it is related to many aspects of people’s lives. In addition to performance in the workplace, intelligence is related to academic performance (Kuncel, Hezlett, & Ones, 2001), occupational attainment (Jencks et al., 1979), many facets of everyday life (Gottfredson, 1997), health (Deary, Batty, & Gottfredson, 2005), and even mortality (Deary et al., 2005). Because intelligence pervades so many aspects of human lives, it has been studied extensively. This chapter begins by reviewing factor analytic studies investigating the latent structure of intelligence. This line of research dates back to Spearman and is called the psychometric approach to the study of intelligence. Some of the most eminent and controversial psychologists of the 20th century have worked in this area, including Thurstone, Burt, Guilford, Thompson, Vernon, and Cattell. In a work of remarkable scholarship, John Carroll (1993) reanalyzed 461 correlation matrices from this literature using a single methodology to provide a coherent and compelling account of the factor analytic findings. Information processing approaches to understanding intelligence constitute a second line of research summarized here. This work is characterized by carefully controlled experimental investigations of how people solve problems. In the psychometric literature, item responses are often aggregated up to subtest or total test scores prior to analysis; in contrast, information-processing research often decomposes item responding into more basic elemental components and processes to understand intelligence. Neuropsychological approaches to the study of intelligence form a third area of research summarized in this chapter. Neuropsychology attempts to link the brain and behavior and thereby provide a deeper understanding of intelligence. Until recently, many of the most important findings in this area resulted from case studies of individuals with tragic brain damage. Advances in methods for imaging brain activity, such as functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) and positron-emission tomography (PET), allow investigations of site-specific activation when individuals solve problems of a particular type. This research is exciting because it has the potential for connecting what is known about the latent structure of cognitive ability from psychometric research with the underlying hardware of the brain.