Evaluating claims — “I have a high IQ”
By: Mitch Inoz
Tags: Psychology, Bias, Trump

Photo: CNN

Recently, a long-time friend of mine mentioned to me that he has a high IQ. This reminded me of when the President mentioned his alleged high IQ-score on multiple occasions (according to CNN at least 22 times).

Neither my long-time friend nor the President provided any details about their score. They did not specify details such as the score itself, nor the name of the institution where they took the test. All we have is that their claim of a high IQ-score. If someone makes a claim but does not provide evidence nor details such as date and place, then we should take it with a grain of salt, especially when the claim is self-serving.

We can evaluate a claim to be true, plausible, uncertain, unlikely, or false depending on the amount of direct and circumstantial evidence, as well as logic.

But how do we evaluate this? How do we arrive at this qualification?

I know my friend, let’s call him Freddy, personally (obviously) and I have a good idea of how he speaks and how he thinks. I know about his studies, his academic- and professional accomplishments. I also have a good idea about his comprehension of complex issues and how he arrives at his conclusions. I don’t know the President, Trump, personally but I hear and read what he says publicly and I know of some of his successes and failures. I can be pretty sure that Freddy is honest in his discussions with me, and I can compare his reasoning with what I know about him. Taken all together I can form a consistent picture of Freddy.

With the President, we are primarily guided by his public persona. What he says away from the cameras may be different from what he says in front of them. All the same, a figure like Donald Trump has been in the public eye for almost 70 years, so that his public persona must be aligned to a high degree with his private persona to be somewhat consistent. I think that it is reasonable to assume that we can form a picture of Donald Trump based on all the publicly available information about him, even if we do not know him personally.

The difficulty with forming a judgment about someone’s claims is that if you are positively or negatively inclined towards someone, then you are biased: your mind emphasizes supporting evidence and neglects information that contradicts that inclination. Your judgment is, a priori, geared towards re-enforcing your existing view of that person. We do the same with groups of people. For example, if I believe that men aren’t good drivers (maybe because when I was little and sitting in the back of the car my mom always correcting him and pointing out other male drivers making mistakes on the road), then I am much more likely to notice a man behind the steering wheel when witnessing a driving error and I ignore the times when a woman is behind the steering wheel. This confirmation bias starts very early on because our gut reacts to first impressions. Hence we are always told about the importance of first impressions when going for a job interview or when about to meet someone for a sales-call. On top of that, we are also socially conditioned to be judgmental: “don’t be a fence-sitter!” and hence we feel that we must jump to conclusions.

My subconscious, my ‘gut’, steers my attention away from information that contradicts my preconceptions and highlights data that re-enforce my already existing beliefs.

I am unlikely to be a good judge of Freddy’s and Trump’s IQ-claims because of my preconceived likes and dislikes. My prior belief of liking my pal Freddy and disliking the President will already have selected the evidence to support my beliefs. I will readily accept that Freddy has a high IQ and dismiss Trump’s claim. I dismiss the President’s claim because I didn’t vote for him, I already had made up my mind that he is a vulgar, narcissist with limited intelligence, and, en passant, I ignore the fact that IQ-scores may not be an adequate indicator of how smart someone is.

On the other hand, I trust my mate’s IQ assertion because I like to surround myself with intelligent people, I enjoy having conversations with him and am intrigued by what I regard as his deep and witty insights. Like the majority of people I regard myself as having above-average intelligence (note the mixing-up of IQ with intelligence and a biased self-assessment) so how could Freddy no have a high IQ?

These ‘reasons’ are in fact my subconscious a priori conclusions that guide my selection and interpretation of the facts and logic that I apply to justify them. My reasons follow my gut, but I fool myself into believing that I am rational and that I have come to my conclusion through reason and reason alone.

In reality, as we have seen, I ‘cherry-pick’ the evidence to substantiate my foregone conclusions, and the higher my IQ, the better my ability to justify my conclusions with evidence and logic, thus hiding my irrationality even better.

Most of us are not trained in meta-cognition, the ability to think about our thinking, and so we are largely at the mercy of our prior beliefs and feelings which form our biases. Biases that direct our thinking to select and interpret the facts to conform to what we ‘already know’. And so we do not learn. We are stuck with our preconceptions.

Religion, our preferred football team, our national history, misogyny, and racism are great examples of frameworks that mold our thinking. We believe that our religion is the right one. Of course we do, else we wouldn’t believe it. Therefore we also believe that people who believe in other religions, or worse, people who do not have a religion at all, must be wrong.

We contest penalties against our favorite team whilst we shout for any semblance of a foul committed by the other team. The referee of a match is often seen as biased by the losing party.

We revere our national heroes and dismiss those of other nations or we might even view those as villains. The fact that our national heroes are viewed as terrorists or butchers by other nations is ridiculous and offensive in our eyes.

Misogyny and racism, the stereotyping and objectifying of people who look different from you, is a genetically reinforced framework that kept us safe when our social world consisted of just our tribe. We all have it to varying degrees, but most of us deny it consciously, but mostly subconsciously. In our interconnected world, our bias towards tribalism is only dangerous.

Considering that we are biased, what do we do with the IQ-claims of my friend and the President?

One of the things we can do is politely reply with: “I hear what you are saying”, without asking for proof. This may bring home the fact that you recognize that it is just a claim of little or no value. The little value that you might get out of someone making such an unsubstantiated claim is that you can ask yourself some questions such as:

why would anyone make a claim about having a high IQ if nobody asked for it?

is it likely for a person with a high IQ to boost about it? Is there evidence of people with a demonstrably high-IQ who claimed to have a high IQ without being asked for it and not to provide details?

Would someone with a high IQ assume that others take their claim at face value?

why would you make a claim of having a high IQ but not provide any details or evidence? Why not tell the IQ-score?

what does the person think that a high IQ-score means?

You may not want to ask the above questions directly because the claimant could become defensive. If that is of no consequence, then ask these questions, just to see how witty their response is. If the response is anything like: “Sorry losers and haters, but my I.Q. is one of the highest -and you all know it!” (Trump, 2013), then you might take that as a strong indicator. Witty? Intelligent? Nuanced? Respectful? Humble?

An approach that might be more effective is to be genuinely interested and ask: “Yes? wow! That’s great! I also did an IQ-test of the BMI-certified ‘IQ Institute’ in 2011 and achieved 132. They gave me a certificate. Where did you do your test? Maybe we can compare methods and certificates.” Or you could say: “That’s interesting. Why are you telling me this? I don’t know much about IQ, can you explain to me what it means to have a high IQ?”. If you want to be a bit contrarian you could say that according to some recent research, IQ is not a good indicator for intelligence or good decision-making and then evaluate their reaction.

Source: Amazon

A great book with great insights based on research is David Robson’s “The Intelligence Trap”, wherein Robson argues, among others, that people with a high IQ are susceptible to poor judgment (Science).

President Trump has been promoting his alleged high IQ-score without substantiation, but in one interview with Fox News he tried to exemplify his cognitive abilities by reciting a list of words from memory, live on-air. The list of words was the one that he had to remember at a test he had recently taken. The list consisted of 5 words: “Person, Woman, Man, Camera, TV”.

An embarrassing moment for America and the world: The person chosen to represent the most powerful country on earth believed that he had to demonstrate his cognitive abilities to the world and he thought that reciting 5 words from memory was a jaw-dropping manifestation of memory skills.

Most 6 year-olds can memorize and recite more than 5 words. So why perform such a childish act? Any person would understand that you’d become the object of ridicule. But what makes this example really embarrassing is that the President was primed with these 5-words that were specifically selected for him to ensure that he would be able to repeat them live on-air.

They had to find 5 words that he could recite even when his memory failed him. So they came up with ‘Person’, because POTUS would have to recite these words to a… you guessed it: ‘Person’. Now having Person, what is the next step? Well Donald, a ‘Person’ is either one of two (we must keep it binary)… a Person is either a….you know that thing that you really like, but adult…remember it’s adult, look around, ‘Woman’ YES! or…if you are unlucky it’s a …’Man’. Very good Donald you already have three from the five. That wasn’t hard was it? So you already have Person, Woman, Man. Now we do this act in front of…., just look next to the Person that is either Woman or Man that you are talking to, what is that thing you like to look into? a Camera! Well done! And the camera is so that you can be on? TV. Genius! We are set. He is prepped and ready to go to perform this act in front of the world.

They didn’t give the POTUS a list of 5 less used and more abstract words such as for example: ‘solipsism’, ‘pertinatious’, ‘gratuitious’, ‘denigrating’ and ‘fatuous’ (all words that many of us could associate directly just by looking at a picture of Trump). For the President, the words had to be simple, logically connected, and materially in front of his eyes so that he could ‘recall’ them. That the President touts his ability to recall Person-Woman-Man-Camera-TV as an example of superior cognitive skills is, besides being embarrassing, a clear example of his lack of those very memory skills he so desperately wants to demonstrate. Did he mention that his test wasn’t an IQ or intelligence test, but a test to check for signs of dementia (the Montreal Cognitive Assessment, a quick test to check for signs mental health issues)?

Examples of Montreal Cognitive Assessment Questions. Source: NBC

So what do we have here?

A President who claims to have a high IQ when no-one asked for it and fails to provide evidence. The fact that he thinks that making another claim (“everyone knows it”) is a form of evidence further indicates a lack of comprehension and/or unwillingness to provide evidence. It also could mean a disdain for his supporters because he may assume that they are so dumb that they accept anything he says as evidence (and he may be right). A President who must have a list of 5 words representing objects that are always visually right in front of him at the time that he performs his ‘memory act’. This President also has very low decision-making skills, because he cannot foreshadow that at least half the population (say, the half that has an IQ above 100), see this silly, failed circus-act for what it is and that he therefore he would only be embarrassing himself.

And what about Freddy? Freddy eventually decided to put a number on his IQ-boast: 142. I asked him if I could see the certificate. “Sure! I will look for it and show it to you”, he said. That’s as far as his boasting went. I never got to see the certificate and neither could he recall the name of the testing institute. For the sake of our friendship, I didn’t push it further. My conclusion? He has an ok IQ in my personal opinion, probably nowhere near 142, and a bigger need to boost his ego.

My reasoning about the self-serving unspecified IQ-claims of both POTUS Trump and of my friend Freddy is biased, but bias in and by itself does not invalidate an argument.

The validity of an argument depends solely on the argument itself: what are the premises? are they factual? Are all relevant facts considered and are they considered fairly (i.e. would someone who has an opposing opinion agree that all the facts are present and judged fairly?) Is the logic to arrive at the conclusions consistent and valid?

Spurious IQ-claims may not warrant a thorough analysis, but many political decisions do.

After having performed your due diligence, you can assess my arguments on the scale of true, plausible, uncertain, not-plausible, or false. In the same way you can assess someone’s claim that they have a high IQ or you can address more important questions such as whether Universal Healthcare, Housing and Education would form a stronger bedrock for a productive society.