NURTURE
The Fallacy of (Work Hard, Get Smart?)
Intelligence
If you think that
intelligence is mostly
inherited, you are
not alone. Thanks to
a combination of the
media and truisms, many
parents believe that
their child already have a
predetermined amount of
intelligence. The truth is
more complex than that,
as Family & Life finds out.
Contrary to popular belief, your child’s intelligence, or potential intelligence,
is not actually determined by you and your spouse’s collective brain genes. In
fact, it has been discovered and accepted among the academic community that
the average IQ of the world keeps increasing year after year, and is known as
the “Flynn Effect”. According to Professor Miles Kimball from the University of
Michigan, researchers and scientists have not the faintest clue about the upper
limits of human intelligence.
How does this apply to your child and his future? Simple. Your child’s IQ, and by
extension, intelligence, is highly malleable and can increase or even decrease,
depending on the activities he or she partakes in. Professor Kimball stresses that
the misconception that “you are born with a certain amount of intelligence and
you cannot really do much to change it” is very harmful to the child, who might
grow up believing that he or she will be consigned to a certain class of society.
In a study done by the Wellcome Trust Centre for
Neuroimaging at University College London, a
group of researchers studied 33 British students,
giving them IQ tests and brain scans at the age of
12 and then again at the age of 16. Nine percent of
the students had a significant change of 15 points or more
in IQ scores. More pertinently, the scans showed that the
students’ grey matter – linked to IQ – had increased over
time.
The
misconception
that you are
born with a
certain amount
of intelligence
and you cannot
really do much
to change it is
very harmful
to the child,
who might grow
up believing that
he or she will be
consigned to a
certain class of
society.
14
Family & Life • Feb 2014
Similarly, author and social psychology professor
Richard Nisbett expounds in his book Intelligence
and How to Get It: Why Schools and Cultures
Count that intelligence is “principally
determined by societal influences”. One of
the studies he presented was when a group
of psychologists tried to convince
“a group of poor minority
students that intelligence is
highly malleable and
be developed by
hard work”. These
students, who
believed intelligence
was mostly inherited,
began working harder
and subsequently
received higher grades.
The key to increasing your child’s intelligence is to consistently engage him or her
in complex activities such as music or games of the mind such as chess. Children
who regularly went for music lessons gained slightly more than one IQ point a year.
Unfortunately, these gains eroded when the lessons were stopped for a period of
time. However, parents, you would be happy to know that in general, schooling has
been demonstrated to raise your child’s IQ by several points a year.
The Importance of
Hard Work in Math
Have you ever heard your chi