Christopher Chabris, a psychologist at Union College, and Jonathan Wei, a researcher at the Duke University Talent Identification Program and at Case Western Reserve University, wrote an op-ed refuting a central dogma of cultural Marxism, that standardized tests have no validity (“Hire like Google? For most companies, that’s a bad idea“). What the professors write is not as surprising as where it appears. In general, while academic research continues to show the value of IQ testing, the mainstream media has been hostile to IQ testing because of the touchy subject of race differences.

Their article was a response to highly publicized comments by Laszlo Bock, the head of human resources at Google, who told the NY Times that “GPAs are worthless as a criteria for hiring, and test scores are worthless…. We found that they don’t predict anything” (much to the delight of Tom Friedman, among others). Chabris and Wei:

Decades of quantitative research in the field of personnel psychology have shown that across fields of employment, measurements of “general cognitive ability” — which is another way of referring to the old-fashioned concept of intelligence or IQ — are consistently the best tools employers have to predict which new employees will wind up with the highest performance evaluations or the best career paths. We shouldn’t rush to assume that Google, with its private data, has suddenly refuted all that work. …

Chabris and Wei attribute Google’s experience to “restriction of range”— that is, once you select from a pool of high-IQ people, other traits within that pool become important contributors to individual differences. Bock’s emphasis on other qualities, such as intellectual humility (not being obsessed with having a high IQ score) and being an emergent leader (someone who can lead when appropriate but also follow when appropriate) certainly makes sense. But among potential Google employees, these other traits occur within a pool of people already selected for high IQ — even for those employees without a college education. One need not be a college graduate to win Google’s CodeJam competition, but you can’t possibly win without a high IQ. In the words of one winner, the problems were “more like mathematical work or solving logic puzzles.”