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Intelligence in Context

The florescent lights flicker, the clock ticks every second away as you sweat in the ninety-five degree heat... it's easy to think of a bad environment in which to take a test. Yet it isn't only the physical place that matters; the social context of a question also affects a student's ability to answer it correctly.

Ceci and Roazzi (1994) described the effect of a question's phrasing on Brazilian children's answers to math questions. Underprivileged children in Brazil generally do not attend school for more than five years. Instead, they work as street vendors, selling small goods to passers-by. Researchers asked Brazilians aged 9-15 years two sets of questions. One set presented problems the way a customer might ask a vendor, such as " If a large coconut costs 76 cruzeiros, and a small one costs 50, how much do the two cost together?" The second set asked questions in standard mathematical form, such as "How much is 76 + 50?" The children answered 98% of the customer-phrased questions correctly, but only got 37% of the standard math questions right. The large discrepancy in the percentages answered correctly suggests that a psychologist who did not understand these children's environment - or any child's environment- would have difficulty designing an IQ test that would accurately rate their intelligence.