By Nicholas Gershwin—Since their inception, tests of intelligence have faced criticism for showing bias in favor of more affluent demographics, and in some cases, even bias against different cultures and races. Sometimes these biases are subtle and perhaps even unintended, as the tests' norms are based on majority populations. Fortunately, multiple revisions have worked to make these tests of "intelligence quotients" (I.Q.) less biased against these groups.
Unfortunately, researchers, lawmakers, and even the general public have heretofore largely ignored one group of people that remains susceptible to some built-in biases to these so-called tests of intelligence: stupid people.
This marginalized group of individuals often gets ignored in society because they so easily blend into places that are high profile, such as in politics, Hollywood, and management positions in even some of the largest corporations. Still, these positions of power do not make them any less a group prone to bias in these I.Q. tests.
For purposes of this opinion piece, "stupid" people are individuals who often have trouble completing simple tasks, solving problems, integrating information, and sometimes even remembering things. Often, they will say nonsensical things before apparently having thought about how they might sound, and sometimes they will act in ways that would strike the intelligence-privileged bourgeois and elites as infantile or short-sighted.
The fact is that stupid people score markedly lower on tests of intelligence than do people who are not stupid. For example, the average person scores near 100 on the most common test of intelligence for adults, the WAIS-V. Stupid people, on the other hand, virtually always score closer to 85 and 90.
What else could possibly account for such a discrepancy, if not blatantly biased test items and procedures? How can we, as a society, allow for such marginalization to occur every day?
I call upon lawmakers, intelligence researchers, educators, and all others to immediately work toward changing these I.Q. tests and similar ones to change their test criteria so that stupid people are no longer the lowest-scoring demographic. Surely, in 2019 we can all agree that equality is what is most important.