Raven's Progressive Matrices is often administered. Is that test culturally biased? Does that test measure only ability to take that test and nothing else?

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dlcarrier a day ago | parent | next [-]

Puzzle tests have their own problems. They're only effective at measuring puzzles solving abilities when they are novel, so retaking the test would lead to higher scores, and practicing even more so. They also only measure puzzle solving abilities which are necessary in some but not all applied intelligence tasks.

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tptacek a day ago | parent | prev | next [-]

A fun irony (every part of this scientific question is gnarly as fuck, which can make it interesting to follow) is that the more culturally biased an IQ test is, the more g-loaded it will turn out to be.

https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/24104504/

	▲	dlcarrier a day ago \| parent [-]
		I think humanity majorly underplays how much success is based on culture. I have a long-held theory that offices don't exist to accomplish work, but to establish social relationships, and that work itself is a secondary product of the office community. My belief was reinforced when companies switched to remote work, and management at many companies complained that it was difficult to tell who was and wasn't working, when the managers didn't get to watch the workers. Abstracting the social relationship from the results of work will make it easier to judge the work itself, but more difficult to enforce the social relationship. When the abstraction occurred, those who were basing the status of their employees on the social relationship, and not the work output, were especially disadvantaged.

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NalNezumi a day ago | parent | prev | next [-]

I can't quite find the study but there was one mentioned to me about showing the Ravens progressive matrices test to hunter / gatherer tribes, and they did horribly. But those tribes do geometric pattern recognition on the daily basis during hunting, so the tester tried to modify the base shapes to mimic more "realistic" shapes for hunter gatherers (rather than unusual shapes such as perfect triangle, circles and rectangles, hard to find in nature) and the score normalized to median.

I was told this in context of "cultural psychology" how many tests or psychological observations and metrics poorly translate over culture. (especially when you try to pin it on some success metric)

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teamonkey 2 days ago | parent | prev [-]

Yes, it’s almost certainly linked to quality of schooling and exposure to those types of problems, amongst other things, see the Flynn Effect.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flynn_effect