I hope that if you’re a regular on this channel, then you are more likely than average to adjust your beliefs when presented with compelling evidence that you’re wrong. But is that true? A new study suggests that we might be able to tell, based on whether or not you can solve this puzzle. Okay, that is a gross oversimplification but I’m a dork who loves these kinds of tests so I figured that would be a fun place to start. Feel free to pause on this screen to try to work it out, and at the end of this video I’ll tell you the right answer.
Okay, so that is a figure matrix, and you may have encountered similar puzzles if you’ve ever taken an IQ test. Real talk up front: I’m sure we all know by now that IQ tests in general are highly problematic, because throughout history people have used flawed and overly simplistic measures of cognitive ability as an excuse to discriminate against, punish, and even kill large groups of people who are deemed “other.”
Many of those tests are no longer used after scientists figured out they weren’t measuring cognitive ability as much as things like how wealthy your family is, what your cultural background is compared to the culture you live in, what language you speak, your access to education, whether or not you have issues like dyslexia, whether or not you’re autistic, et cetera.
In full disclosure, I hit the jackpot on all that stuff and benefited from it by being really good at taking tests, so I got to start school early, skip ahead in certain classes, and eventually test out of a full semester of college courses thus saving thousands of dollars on my student loans. On the other hand, I was left with Former Gifted Child syndrome (I’m joking but this may be a real thing?) in that I had to learn and accept that I was average and needed to actually work hard as an adult and I constantly feel that I’m not living up to my potential and now I’m on antidepressants, soooooo….a mixed bag. But overall, yes, I benefited from debunked ideas about IQ tests.
These days, researchers who study cognition have a better, more complex, more nuanced understanding of what intelligence is, how we can measure it, how it can be improved, and how it might positively or negatively impact a person’s life.
The puzzle I showed you, the figure matrix, is one way that researchers can score a person’s “fluid intelligence.” In the 1940s, psychologist Raymond Cattell developed the idea that general intelligence can be split into two categories. “Crystalized intelligence” is what IQ tests mostly focused on when I was a kid: knowledge and strategies that you accumulate over time through learning and experience. It’s heavily reliant on your language abilities.
“Fluid intelligence” refers to your ability to solve problems you’ve never encountered before, thinking that doesn’t rely as heavily on prior learning. Cattell created tests to measure this that are completely nonverbal. That makes it a much more even playing field for testing people regardless of their culture or language abilities, which is funny because that may lead you to assume Cattell was a cool guy but no, like a lot of people obsessed with intelligence in the 1930s, he was a real piece of eugenicist shit who thought that better IQ tests could help us figure out which races should be “phased out” of existence. Nonviolently of course! Like with birth control or whatever. Yikes. As with Margaret Sanger, today we can keep the good ideas and discard the eugenicist tripe in the trash can of history.
Anyway, that’s fluid intelligence: the ability to think laterally and novelly. Fluid and crystallized intelligence influence one another, and so aren’t necessarily opposite ways of thinking. A good example of the difference would be how a person might solve a puzzle, developed by Cattell’s student, John L. Horn: “There are 100 patients in a hospital. Some (an even number) are one-legged but wearing shoes. One-half of the remainder are barefooted. How many shoes are being worn?”
You can figure out the answer using crystallized intelligence if you learned algebra in school. But you can also figure it out using fluid intelligence by reasoning that “if half the two-legged people are without shoes, and all the rest (an even number) are one-legged, then the shoes must average one per person, and the answer is 100.”
All of this leads me to the actual study that was published this month in Cognitive Research: Principles and Implications: Fluid intelligence but not need for cognition is associated with attitude change in response to the correction of misinformation.
We talk a lot on this channel about how to stop misinformation from spreading, so this is right up our alley. Previous research shows that in general, it’s really difficult to get someone to change their mind when they believe misinformation. Debunking with correct data seems to work a little bit, “prebunking” by giving people correct information before they see the misinformation seems to work a little better, and sometimes using more emotional arguments seems to work on some people. But that’s part of the issue: people are all different, so maybe different kinds of audiences respond better to different kinds of arguments.
So these researchers explored the hypothesis that maybe people are more likely to change their minds and drop misinformation if they’re better at fluid intelligence. They pre-registered two studies, which is great because that means they couldn’t change anything if they didn’t get the results they wanted, and both of them were pretty much the same. They took a total of a little more than 1,000 people and split them into two groups. The control group read about a company that experimented with giving its workers flexible hours and found that it was beneficial.
The other group read about the same company’s flexible work hours, but they were told that it had negative results. They were then given a fact check that debunked the negative results and explained that the result was actually positive.
The subjects took fluid intelligence tests, and sure enough, the hypothesis was supported: people who scored higher on those tests were more likely to accept the correction.
As the study’s title suggests, they also looked at “need for cognition,” so what’s that? Some researchers suspect that it’s actually a little more complicated to test fluid intelligence, because people might not do well on them simply because they don’t feel like putting in the effort to solve the problem. It’s boring, let’s just guess and move on.
Full disclosure, that was almost me for the puzzle I started this video with! I found it on a page of several puzzles and that was the first one, and it stumped me to the point where I got annoyed and scrolled down to the next one to see if I just suck at fluid intelligence these days. When I got the second one I decided to put more effort into the first one, and I am happy to report that I got it eventually. See? Former gifted child syndrome. Putting in effort is an active and painful decision sometimes.
Anyway, that’s where “need for cognition” comes in: that’s a person’s desire to think deeply about a subject. So they tested the subjects for that, too, and found that it didn’t have any impact on the results. You can be as lazy as you want, but if you have the ability to engage in that abstract thinking about novel problems, you are more likely to change your mind when presented with evidence.
(Hey, post-production Rebecca here. I was rewatching this and I realized I didn’t fully explain the importance of the “need for cognition” finding. It doesn’t JUST control for people who didn’t feel like working hard to understand the company’s experiment. It ALSO suggests that a person might be really interested in thinking about a topic but that doesn’t mean they will necessarily accept new information about that topic. They need the flexible intelligence for that. Okay, back to the video!)
At least when it comes to, um, a company offering employees flexible work hours. The researchers controlled for how people felt about flexible work hours before they read about the company’s experiment, so this was about as nonpolitical and unemotional as a topic can get. Obviously things are going to be trickier when it comes to beliefs that are deeply held, that people think of as being central to their identity. So, good news if you’re a psychologist out there looking for a cool follow-up study: try this out with, say, correcting US Republicans about whether or not immigrants are eating cats and dogs. Could be fun.
Okay, that’s the study, so now I’m going to end by telling you the answer to the puzzle. I debated putting this after the traditional video of Indy outro but ultimately decided that he’s way too cute and distracting and you’d probably forget. Here’s the puzzle one more time. The answer is B! The secret that escaped me for far too long is that the colors are reversed between the top two images. If you switch the top right image’s colors, it becomes much more obvious that that square has rotated once clockwise. So you take the bottom left image, rotate it, reverse the colors, and you end up with B.
Don’t worry if you didn’t get it! That’s just one example, and it doesn’t actually say much, if anything, about you. You were probably just really excited to get to the Indy video, so here it is.
