Nature? Or Nurture?

So a few months ago, I asked you guys on my story whether you think that intelligence is largely shaped by nature, or largely shaped by nurture. After you guys responded, I had this post drafted in my notes but I just never got around to posting it; maybe because I knew in the back of my head that this topic deserves more nuance than I initially gave it. But now that it is exam season and a lot of us are taking loads of different tests, I thought it would be a good time to edit and post this:)

I found the idea of intelligence to be such a fascinating topic, and I feel that the more I read around it, the more I realized that I am not so certain about what intelligence even is and what intelligence is shaped by. So I was really curious to see what you guys thought.

I posted this question in the morning and as your responses started rolling in I was super entertained! I think that if I had to answer the question, I would probably have chosen the middle, leaning ever so slightly to the right (nurture). But it would have been very very close to the middle. So I was quite surprised to see how a lot of people actually swung quite far on either end of the extreme. Interestingly, the average was always hovering around the center, so for every person who strongly believed intelligence was based on nature, there was someone who strongly believed it was based on nurture.

And obviously this is a very crude survey, so I can't perform any good analytics. But what I have observed is that I don't seem to be able to generalize any patterns from your choices. Like I guess as I posed this question, I hypothesized that people from my secondary school would make similar choices, or that people from my uni would make similar choices, but no... the variations within particular demographics were quite pronounced.

But yeahhhh, I guess what I wanna do in the rest of this post is to pick apart the question that I asked and perhaps provide some insight into why the variability in the answers is so big.

1. What even is intelligence? Like what even is it? Is it a biological quality, a theoretical concept, a metaphysical property, a subjective characteristic? Is it something that is quantifiable, something that goes up and down on a spectrum? Or is it more multifaceted, where say, you could have arithmetic skills or verbal communication skills or aesthetic skills? Is it something that can vary over time?

2. Is intelligence about capacity/potential (something that may not yet have been fulfilled), or is it something that has already been developed/attained? Does it have anything to do with prior knowledge/experience?

3. What is 'nature'? Does that just mean the influences that come from your parents? Because our parents give us way more than just genes. If 'smarter parents' tend to have 'smarter children', this could be due to the fact that they are more likely to be able to provide a better learning environment.

4. Kind of following on from the last question, but how do you even separate nurture and nature?

So I guess the reason that people answered this question so differently is the fact that there are so many interpretations of this question in the first place haha.

When you answered this question, did you first try to break it down? Or did you just go with your gut feeling? I know that I went with an instinctive answer. And I think I didn’t feel the need to break down the question because subconsciously thought intelligence can be well defined. Society kind of tells us intelligence can be well-defined.

A lot of the times when we think about intelligence, we think about IQ, which is a number that compares you to other people of the same age. But these numbers are obtained based on a set of tests DESIGNED BY PEOPLE. I'm highlighting that because even though IQ presents itself as an objective number, it really isn't as simple as that. The people designing these tests inevitably shape the way that these tests work, and there are a lot of decisions involved in selecting what questions to put in these tests and how they are presented. Essentially test-takers are evaluated based on what the testers are looking for. But who is to say that the testers designed these tests well in the first place?

I don't think we will ever be able to reach a consensus on how to objectively define and measure intelligence. But you know what? I honestly think that none of this matters as much as we think. I feel like our society is SO obsessed with measuring and quantifying and labelling people, even though these things have nothing to do with our intrinsic worth. Being ‘intelligent’ can be useful in a test-taking context, but just because someone is ‘intelligent’ doesn’t make them any better than anybody else. And our worth should not be based on comparison with other people in the first place.

I'm not saying tests are inherently bad or that we should abolish all forms of examinations. Tests are almost certainly going to continue to be a part of our culture. But I guess what I wanted to do here is just to challenge our perception of aptitude tests, and what they have to say about us as people.

We need to be very careful when thinking with the framework of "intelligent" VS "unintelligent" even though this may seem like the norm in society. I don't think it's healthy for anyone to be complicit in this mentality of measurement and comparison. Reflecting on the nuances of "intelligence" and on the way that we perceive other people is very important because it affects the way that we interact and connect with them. And it also has important implications on the way that we perceive ourselves.

So as an ending remark, I just want to encourage you to have a think about what are the things that you really value? In others, and in yourself?