Mankind’s IQ is 84-88. Becker May 2018 update

The London Conference on Intelligence began, as is now traditional, with an update on the project to produce a public database of the world’s IQ. It is hard to get academics to agree to anything, even when they are under bombardment, but this is one point of common purpose. Not surprisingly, there are many issues surrounding the notion of national IQs. Representativeness looms large. Well-organized countries have lots of data, less well-organized ones far less. Restricting the results to those countries which actually have data is an obvious step. For comparative purposes, one can look at the far less satisfactory approach of estimating missing country data by assuming they are like their nearest neighbours.

As befits a German, Becker has taken a systematic approach. He has now sorted the basics, such as the standard Flynn Effect correction to be applied, and now has to turn to the thorny matter of quality estimations, corrections for sample size, and the integrated representation of different measures of cognitive ability. There are also many new studies to be added. There are still many countries for which we do not have data.

When looking at his presentation slides, a few explanations are required.

DB = David Becker

L&V = Lynn and Vanhanen (authors of the original books on national IQs)

RPM = Raven’s Progressive Matrices (in various forms)

WISC = Wechsler Intelligence Scale for Children

CFT = Culture Fair Test

The last data slide Number 14 shows correlations between country IQs and a number of measures.

This slide is a useful summary of important findings so far.

Here is the link to his lecture:

https://drive.google.com/open?id=1l32bquDkqhvEkToK9Khs7X0rdD2Ydh5f

Finally, we hope that you will look at the data repository, and tell others it is available for inspection and comment.

http://viewoniq.org/