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IQ: R.I.P.
a
Muriel D. Lezak
a
Oregon Health Sciences University ,
Published online: 04 Jan 2008.

To cite this article: Muriel D. Lezak (1988) IQ: R.I.P., Journal of Clinical and Experimental
Neuropsychology, 10:3, 351-361, DOI: 10.1080/01688638808400871

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 h
1988, Vol. 10, NO. 3, pp. 351-361 @ Swets & Zeitlinger

IQ: R.1.P.”
Muriel D. Lezak
Oregon Health Sciences University

ABSTRACT

In the early decades of this century, “IQ,” as score and concept, not only satisfied
psychology’s need for metrical respectability, but it caught the public’s fancy and
rapidly became a household word. Reified in many popular tests, it has withstood
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onslaughts from factor analysis, from concerned social scientists, from judicial
fiat, and from scientific knowledge about mental abilities, brain functions, and
neuropathology. In neuropsychological practice its use - and that of any scores
representing sums or averages of disparate data obtained from tests of brain
functions and mental abilities - can obscure specific facets of a subject’s
neuropsychologicai status or misrepresent it generally. This 70-year-old concept
has outlived its usefulness. Neuropsychology needs to seek more appropriate
alternatives to the IQ for describing and conceptualizing mental functioning.

I offer this speech as a funeral oration for a concept that, when young, served
psychology well by giving it a metric basis that made it less of a speculative
philosophy and more like a science. This concept - the intelligence quotient, or
IQ as most people have come to know it - also brought psychology into
common parlance and gave its practioners a rationale that seemed to be
responsive to social and human needs. Moreover, it was the camel’s nose that
got many of us into the tent of professional practice. Psychologists owe much t o
the IQ.
However, this is 1988, more than three-quarters of a century since Wilhelm
Stern fathered the IQ and a half-century after David Wechsler pushed it a little
closer to the scientific realities of the late 1930’s. The IQ - as concept and as
score - has long ceased to be a useful scientific construct for organizing and
describing our increasingly complex and sensitive behavioral observations.

* This paper is based on the author’s Presidential Address presented at the International
Neuropsychological Society’s 16th Annual Meeting on January 28,1988 in New Orleans,
LA.

Address for reprints: Muriel D. Lezak, Ph.D., Department of Neurology, L.226, Oregon
Health Sciences University, 3181 SW Sam Jackson Park Road, Portland, OR 97201,
USA.

Accepted for publication: March 7,1988

 352 MURIEL D. LEZAK

Like many persons who achieve fame and fortune very early in their careers, the
IQ became captive of its own success: It crystallized prematurely in a form that
has staunchly withstood the onslaught of scientific psychology’s enormous
advances in understanding the nature of cognition, its neuropsychological
roots, and how these might be delineated with statistical precision. Unable to
adapt to such ongoing changes, the IQ became senescent soon after its brilliant
adolescence, and should have been put to rest by now.
The central problem with the IQ concept was succinctly stated by Thurstone
in 1946 when he observed that it, “tends so to blur the description of man that
his mental assets and limitations are buried in a single index.” Nowhere does
this blurring become more apparent than in neuropsychology where most
examinations are conducted on persons whose mental functioning is only
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partially impaired: rarely does brain damage erode all mental functions equally
except in obtunded patients and those whose deterioration is so advanced that
neuropsychological documentation is hardly possible. When the many and
various neuropsychological observations elicited by so-called “intelligence”
tests are lumped and leveled into a single IQ-score -or even three scores - the
product of this unholy conversion is a number that, in referring to everything,
represents nothing. The patients, on whose behavior this score is supposedly
based, are lost to sight: neither are their residual strengths and potential
competencies apparent, nor can one divine the nature or severity of their
deficits. And with the patient goes the opportunity for furthering scientific
understanding of brain function and pathological processes, all obscured in
summed scores.
The illogic of attempting to communicate the panoply of a person’s
intellectual skills and cognitive functions in a single number derived by
summing scores on tests of many different abilities becomes evident when
considering similar practices in a medical setting. Imagine an orthopedic
surgeon, well-versed in elementary statistics, who computes a set of standard
scores for evaluating limb strength. Average strength would be represented by a
score of 100: like mental ability scores, the higher the score, the better - in this
case, the stronger - the limb. In order to compare his patients’ limb strength on
a linear scale, the good doctor devises the LSQ, or “limb strength quotient”
which combines the measures of strength for all four limbs. He is delighted with
this statistic because not only can he assign a statistically manipulable score to
each patient, but his LSQ turns out to be more reliable than individual limb
measurements. Now in hobbles Harry, a champion tennis player who badly
sprained his right ankle. Using his calibrated measures of strength, the
orthopedist determines that Harry’s right and left arms register scores of 150
and 140 respectively; and his left leg attains a score of 160,given Harry’s age and
sex. Since Harry can not support himself on his right leg nor lift a weight with an
ankle pulley, that leg’s total strength score is a mere 50. His computed LSQ,
however, is 125 - well above average. On learning this, the doc congratulates
Harry on his excellent condition and sends him home with a clean bill of
 IQ: RIP 353

orthopedic health. Of course this is a silly story. But when considered as an

analogy to psychology’s custom of lumping discrete scores together, is it really
so far-fetched?

History of the IQ
If the IQ concept is as silly as it might seem from the above analogy, how did it
become the raison dCtre for the bulk of all behavioral assessments done in the
world today? Partly the answer lies in the Zeitgeist - the spirit of the times - of
the early 20th century; partly the IQ concept’s success reflects the needs of an
increasingly complex and impersonal society to categorize people efficiently.
Not least of its attractions may be that the generally received notion of the IQ
concept is sufficiently simplistic as to be grasped with little expenditure of
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intellectual effort.
A review of the evolution of mental measurement in the first two decades of
this century may put the development of the IQ - score and concept - into
perspective. The two progenitors of modem day mental ability assessment are
the Frenchman, Alfred Binet, and the Englishman, Charles Spearman. They
each published their first studies in mental measurement within a year of one
another, Spearman in 1904 and Binet in 1905.
Spearman obtained test grades from two schools, one serving a village, the
other a preparatory school for upper class children. The students took tests on
the usual school subjects of “Classics,” French, English, and Mathematics; and
also on two special topics, Discrimination of Pitch, and Musical Talent. By
using statistical techniques to measure the relationships between the scores in
these various subjects, Spearman laid the groundwork for applying factor
analytic methods to mental measurements. He found that, by and large, those
students who did well in one area - say French - were likely to d o well in others.
Even the questionably valid scores for Musical Talent correlated positively with
all other scores, attaining the highest correlation - .63 - with Classics and,
surprisingly, the lowest - .40 - with Pitch Discrimination. His intercorrelations
also yielded a “first factor” which he interpreted as reflecting the nonindepen-
dence of the abilities measured by each test. He took this first factor to be
evidence for general intelligence as a basic underlying attribute of mental
activity, and called it g. Thus Spearman set the stage both for subsequent
factorial analyses of measurements of mental ability, and for longstanding
disputes among theoreticians concerning the factorial nature of intelligence.
Binet’s contributions were equally clever and equally fruitful. Charged by the
French Ministry of Public Education with the responsibility of identifying
which children might not benefit from public education, Binet and his associate
Th. Simon brought together a large number of little tests measuring different
aspects of mental ability on a wide range of difficulty levels. They tried to invent
or select tests that were not obviously education-dependent, making this the
first attempt to produce a culture-fair test. Binet arranged the tests in order of
difficulty, assigning each to the age level at which it was performed successfuly
 354 MURIEL D. LEZAK

by 50% or more of the children of that age. Out of this he developed a “mental
age” scale containing four or six little tests at each age level from preschool to
adult. A child’s Mental Age, or MA, was determined from the number and level
of subtests the child passed. By this means, children who were far behind their
age mates in their mental development could be quickly and objectivelyspotted.
Thus began the practice of school placement by ability testing, the use of
“omnibus” ability tests in which discrete measurements of many different
functions are combined into one grand score, and the “mental age” concept.
Binet feared reification of the mental age concept as he foresaw the pitfalls of
describing mental abilities by means of a single number which, “if accepted
arbitrarily may give place to illusions” (1911).
Shortly thereafter, Wilhelm Stem, a German, took Binet’s calculations one
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step further by dividing the subject’s chronologicalage into the mental age score
and multiplying the dividend by 100 to obtain a “mental quotient” (Boring,
1950). Lewis R. Terman renamed this score the Intelligence Quotient in 1916
when he published the first Stanford revision of Binet’s scale.
Within a decade, Binet’s fears had been realized, at least in part due to two
major historical events occurring contemporaneously with the development of
systematic intelligence testing. One was the first World War, into which
hundreds of thousands of young civilians were rapidly mustered. Only a few had
more than eight years of schooling, most came from farms or rural communi-
ties. A means was needed for finding out quickly and efftctively which recruits
could profit from training for technical or supervisory positions, which were so
dull they would endanger their comrades in a fighting unit. And that means
appeared to be at hand in the newly emerging field of mental measurements.
With the development of the US. Army’s Alpha and Beta examinations,
psychologists showed the world that mass ability testing could be an effective
technique for classifying and sorting applicants for army work placement as
well as identifying potential school problems (Yerkes, 1921). By calling these
tests “intelligence tests,” and deriving a single “IQ-scope” from performances
on seven (Beta) or eight (Alpha) different kinds of subtcsts, each having
something to do with mental activity, the psychologists involved in the
development and application of these tests brought the IQ and the uses of
mental measurement to public attention.
History influenced enthusiasm for the IQ concept in another way. The late
19th and early 20th centuries saw enormous advances in the natural sciences,
both in the sheer expansion of knowledge and in the development of rigorous,
mathematics-based scientific methodologies. For the newly emerging “soft”
science of psychology, psychometrics offered a route to the acclaim and dignity
accorded the so-called “hard” sciences of astronomy, physics, and chemistry.
Surely the IQ’s mathematical properties that made it seem more than just
another fuzzy and unverifiable hypothetical construct would be Psychology’s
passport into Sciences’ big leagues. Thus the decades of the 20’s and 30’s saw a
proliferation of mental ability tests, assessment techniques, theoretical con-
 IQ: RIP 355

structs, and statistical developments inspired by and dedicated to elaborating

the IQ.
For all practical purposes, the history of the 1Q stops with Wechsler’s 1939
innovations because that is when the concept congealed. Wechsler made several
significant innovations. By converting raw scores into standard scores for each
age grouping, he opened the way for statistically meaningful comparisons
between age groups or at different times for the same person. By creating a
battery of differentiable subtests with relatively homogeneous items of known
and graded difficulty levels, assessments could be fine-tuned and a performance
profile obtained which provides a more appropriate description of a subject’s
cognitive status than a single IQ score or even three of them. And he tackled the
illogic of ascertaining adult IQ scores on the basis of Stern’s original MA/CA
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formula by throwing this formula out altogether. Wechsler’s major accomplish-

ments reflected a truly creative genius.
Wechsler’s other major innovation - the splitting of human cognition into
two parts - so-called “verbal” and “performance” - was also a radical step.
However, in keeping with the times, he could not let a bipartite conceptualiza-
tion of intelligence stand, Rather the Verbal IQ (VIQ) and Performance IQ
(PIQ) turned out to be just two aspects of a unitary intelligence expressed in the
“Full Scale IQ” (FSIQ) which came to represent all human cognition for most
clinical psychologists, educators, psychiatrists, social workers, and a lot of
other people as well. Perhaps Wechsler’s VIQ and PIQ concepts would have had
a greater chance for independent survival if they had been not only theoretically
attractive but psychologically sound. However, hundreds of factor analytic
studies - beginning with Cohen’s work in the early ’50’s (1952) - have repeatedly
and consistently demonstrated that not all Verbal Scale subtests measure verbal
functions, that one Performance Scale subtest has a considerable Verbal
loading, and that other important aspects of cognitive behavior - particularly
attention and concentration, mental tracking, and response speed - contribute
variously to both Wechsler’s VIQ and PIQ scores without being recognized or
measured in their own right (Hill, Reddon, & Jackson, 1985; Leckliter,
Matarazzo, & Silverstein, 1986).
However, Wechsler’s tests were so easy to administer, their applications so
wide-ranging, and his constructs so easily grasped and readily integrated with
existing knowledge that they quickly became the standard for mental measure-
ment world-wide. Along with Wechsler’s tests and their statistically comprehen-
sible standard scores, their excellent age-norms, the 11 or 12 different,
interesting, and informative subtests, came the IQ construct, more attractive
than ever now that lip-service could be paid to a hypothetical dual nature that,
when all was said and done, was really unitary, expressible in the old, familiar,
single IQ score. Long before now, prominent theoreticians, for example,
Thurstone (1938) and Guilford (1956), put forth conceptual schemes and testing
programs emphasizing the multiplicity of mental processes. Some clinicians,
particularly among neuropsychologists and educational psychologists, have
 356 MURIEL D. LEZAK

already thrown out the IQ - concept and score together - conceptualizing

mental measurements in profiles of scores. Yet today, most psychologists,
psychiatrists, educators, judges, the United States Social Security Administra-
tion, among others, think, write, talk, and make decisions as if an IQ score
represented something real and essentially immutable with a locus somewhere
in the cranium.

Usefulness
The IQ owes its longevity to more than just its conceptual simplicity and elegant
psychometric properties. We must remember that Binet developed his tests in
order to have an unbiased evaluation of children’s scholasticpotential. Much of
the attractiveness of intelligence tests has been their implicit promise of
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objectivity and fairness. Intelligence test evaluations protected children from

their teachers’ subjective judgments when critical educational decisions were
made. Moreover, intelligence tests were seen as more culture-fair than
achievement tests because they used test material that seemed to be unrelated to
what was taught in school. Those who used intelligence tests the most - the
educators - had little reason to quarrel with scoring systems that uniformly
churned the many different kinds of responses to many different questions into
a single number for each child since that number was known to have predictive
value; i.e., the IQ score did predict children’s success in school.
Of course, we know now that other variables predict school success too, such
as parents’ occupation, income, and education. In general, demographic
variables are excellent predictors of the IQ score, suggesting that rather than
representing an independent predictor variable, the IQ score can also be
conceptualized as a dependent variable (e.g., Goldstein, Gary, 8z Levin, 1986;
Karzmark, Heaton, Grant, & Matthews, 1985; Loehlin, Lindzey, & Spuhler,
1975). Not surprisingly, IQ scores do not do a very good job at predicting
success in real life.

Theoretical considerations
Until now I’ve been doing what most people who talk about IQ’s do: I’ve been
using the term IQ, sometimes to refer to a test score, sometimes to refer to the
idea of an inherent quantity of mental ability that resides within each person
and can be determined by appropriate testing, and sometimes as equivalent to
one of the many concepts of intelligence. We hear people say, “On that test
John’s IQ is 86;” “Mary is clever; she must have a high IQ;” and, “IQ is
determined by both environmental and genetic factors;” without clarifying the
distinctions in concepts either in speech or in their own minds. The common
practice of applying the term “IQ” indiscriminately to these quite different
concepts has probably contributed to its murky theoretical nature. But this may
be the least of its problems as a theoretical or scientific construct.
One major problem that from its inception has dogged the IQ, whether score
or concept, is its questionable conceptual basis. IQ as test performance usually
 IQ:RIP 357
defines another concept - intelligence; except when the concept of intelligence
has been brought in to give scientific standing to IQ scores. When I first taught a
course called “Intelligence” in the early 1960’s, my predecessor kindly gave me
his notes which included a list of over 90 different definitions of intelligence that
he had found in the literature. I suspect that, if the list has not doubled in the last
quarter century, it’s at least half again as long. E.G. Boring’s almost tongue-
in-cheekdefinition,“Intelligence is what the tests of intelligence test” (1923) lays
bare the essentially circular reasoning that characterizes much of the specula-
tion about intelligence and IQ. Voss (1976) pointed out that the concept of
intelligence is a “remnant of faculty psychology,” that philosophical ancestor of
present day psychology which we like to think was long ago supplanted by hard-
headed empiricism.
Another problem with the concept of intelligence is that neuropsychological
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studies have repeatedly failed to identify neuroanatomic or neurophysiologic

correlates of IQ. Yet such correlates have been demonstrated for most discrete
mental abilities, as measured by appropriately discrete and focussed tests.
However, when we think of how an IQ score is obtained, it is not surprising
that a neuropsychological meaning for this score can not be found. Our so-
called intelligence tests typically contain a number of different kinds of
questions or tasks chosen or devised by test makers according to their notions of
what is intelligent behavior. Thus a certain proportion of each test battery may
be given over to word usage, another proportion to number concepts, and still
another to visuospatial tasks or to visually presented logic puzzles, and so on.
The choice of tasks is arbitrary: if there were a little more of task X and a little
less of task Y; or if number concepts were examined with paper and pencil rather
than orally, or vocabulary by analogies rather than straight definitions, the
scores obtained by individual subjects would differ somewhat - some a little, a
few a lot; and the rank ordering of subjects by their scores would also change.
The effects of relatively small changes in the tests has been shown by
comparisons of IQ scores obtained from the same persons on the last two forms
of Wechsler’s intelligence test battery for adults. In two studies the magnitude of
change was more than 7 IQ score points and in another it was 6 points (Lezak, in
press; Parker, 1986).In short, IQ scores and all their conceptual trappings have
been built on the unstable sands of arbitrary and shifting item selection.
However, the scientific applicability of most - perhaps all - so-called
intelligence tests to the understanding of human mentation is also limited by the
complex nature of most of their items and subtests. These conceptual
conglomerations make it difficult if not impossible to identify cognitive
functions or neurobehavioral correlates clearly, or make behavioral predictions
at the high level of refinement and exactitude scientific psychology calls for.

Practical considerations
The practical problems created by IQ scores are too numerous for all of them to
be dealt with here. The two that will be discussed have profound implications
 358 MURIEL D.LEZAK

for the practice of psychology.

The first shows us how psychometricians have dug their own grave by
misusing mental ability tests and thereby limiting children’s opportunities for
objective evaluation of their ability potential. In 1979, Judge Robert Peckham
outlawed the use of intelligence tests, i.e., tests that generated an IQ score, for
purposes of educational placement in the state of California because a
disproportionately large number of black and Hispanic children were obtaining
low IQ scores on the WISC primarily, but probably on some other tests as well;
this ruling has been upheld on appeal (Larry P., 1984). Many of the children
under consideration in this case are raised outside the mainstream of American
culture; many come from economically deprived backgrounds: for them, a
standardized testing situation can be puzzling and many of the WISC test items
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must seem like gibberish, so a poor showing on a number of the scales cannot be
surprising. Larry P., for example, when retested by a black examiner increased
his score by 38 points. By using the IQ score as the criterion for placement in
special classes, educators made their decisions on an aggregate score in which
evidence of learning potential could readily be submerged. So Judge Peckham
threw the baby out with the bath water, depriving California youngsters of the
opportunity for an objective and reasonably fair evaluation of their mental
functioning because the complex data generated by the tests had been misused.
IJse of a profile of subtest scores would lead to different decisions in at feast
some cases, and perhaps many (Engin, Leppaluoto, & Petty, 1977).
The second problem is common in current neuropsychological practice.
Patients with neuropsychological disorders are given one of Wechsler’s tests on
which their subtest performances vary widely, depending upon the nature of
their cerebral dysfunction. Thus,as we all know, persons with left hemisphere
damage tend to have relatively lowered scores on the more verbaliy demanding
subtests compared to their better scores on several of the less verbally dependent
subtests. Many persons who have sustained a mild concussion with a brief loss
of consciousness and no demonstrated focal damage tend to perform relatively
poorly on Digits Backward, Arithmetic (unless given paper and pencil to solve
the problems), and Digit Symbol. When low scores - which reflect their deficits
and thus have both diagnostic value and usefulness in counseling the patient -
are added in with the higher scores, both the patients’ strengths and their
problems are obscured (see Table 1).
Psychologists who take IQ scores at face value without taking account of the
patient’s status or subtest variations, tend to interpret an IQ score that has been
lowered by virtue of some specific neurologic deficit to be an indicator of the
patient’s overall ability level; i.e., they quite literally equate the score with
“intelligence”. Those who are aware of neuropsychological phenomena may
call attention to deficits reflected in lowered subtest scores, but still treat the
computed IQ score as representative of the patient’s “global” intelligence. They
do not seem to appreciate the illogic of this procedure nor the disservice it does
to bright patients evaluated as having just average premorbid ability, or to
 IQ: RIP 359

Table 1

Lack of Correspondence of IQ Scores with Age-Graded Subtest Scores in a Clinical

Sample

Subject 36yoM 29yoM 27yoM 33yoM 32yoM 53yoM 45yo

Diagnosis Petrol SP/HT Schiz Solvent SP/HT SP/HT SP/HT

expose expose

Wechsler Subtest

Inform 12 8 8 7 14 11 14
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DSpan 7 6 10 6 12 4 5
Vocab 12 8 9 9 12 12 12
Arith 7 5 6 5 11 7 9
Compre 11 11 8 10 11 14 15
Simil 13 9 5 8 16 6 13
PicCom 12 14 11 7 I1 10 11
PicArr 7 8 7 12 13 9 13
BlockD 12 8 12 4 12 9 9
ObjecA 12 10 12 8 14 6 8
DSymb 10 7 7 6 5 6 12
IQ Scores
VSIQ 99 86 85 86 118 96 109
PSIQ 104 95 104 88 106 99 105
FSIQ 100 88 88 86 114 97 108
Number of tests in same range as the IQ score:
VSIQ I 1 1 2 2 1 1
PSIQ 1 3 1 2 1 3 3
FSIQ 2 2 3 4 4 4 4

persons whose scores are mostly a t an average level yet are called low average by
virtue of an IQ score lowered by specific neuropsychological deficits.

An alternative to the IQ
Although the traditional scoring scheme for the Wechsler tests exemplifies the
IQ problem, these tests also show us the way out of the problem by providing a
profile of scores. Rather than equating mental abilities with intelligence and
thinking of them as aspects of a unitary phenomenon that can be summed up in
an IQ score, we need to conceptualize them in all their multivariate complexity
and report our examination findings in a profile of test scores (e.g., see
Pellegrino & Glaser, 1979). Professionals and the public alike can become
 360 MURIEL D. LEZAK

accustomed to pluralistic concepts of mental abilities. None of us have difficulty

thinking of different clothing sizes for various parts of the body; it should not be
more difficult to think and talk about human cognition in a manner more
appropriate to its multivariate nature,
Objections to replacing IQ scores with test score profiles will be raised. For
instance, there may be increased difficulty in performing some statistical
manipulations. While this is a problem, its solution should not lie in sacrificinga
closer approximation to the messy details of reality for clean theoretical
nonsense.
Another objection is that subtest scores are not as reliable as IQ scores. One
cannot disagree. It is true for all statistical measures that the more variables one
piles in, the more stable the measure. If running speed, hat size, and pulse rate
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were added to Wechsler’s 11or 12 measures to obtain an even more global score,
this would certainly raise the reliability coefficient but not do much for the
meaningfulness of the compound measure.

Looking to the future

Wechsler’s contribution of the subtest profile is an invaluable aid in conceptu-
alizing the multiplicity of mental abilities and cognitive functions as we
understand them today. Sooner or later test score profiles must supplant the IQ
score for neuropsychologists, educators, and everyone else who needs valid
descriptions of mental abilities. Sets of subtest scores are now used almost
universally for reporting results of achievement tests. Even the venerable
Memory Quotient of the Wechsler Memory Scale has given way to a profile
scoring system (Psychological Corporation, 1987). It is time that we treat the
broad range of cognitive functions as realistically.
However, Wechsler’s subtests need not be preserved or even imitated in
future test batteries: Some subtests will probably continue to be used in their
present form. Others would be discarded by any team of neuropsychologists,
cognitive psychologists, or educators attempting to develop a rational schema
for measuring mental abilities. Other tests may be introduced to provide more
refined measures of one or more of the three factors commonly determined for
the Wechsler scales. And still others may be developed to measure cognitive
components that are not included in Wechsler’s scales or anyone else’s yet. This
latter task - the development of a well-standardized, neuropsychologically
sound, and practically relevant set of mental abilities tests - lies before us as the
next major challenge for neuropsychological assessment.
 IQ: RIP 361
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