General mental ability and specific abilities: Their relative importance for extrinsic career success.

Abstract

Recent research on the role of general mental ability (GMA) and specific abilities in work-related outcomes has shown that the results differ depending on the theoretical and conceptual approach that researchers use. While earlier research has typically assumed that GMA causes the specific abilities and has thus used incremental validity analysis, more recent research has explored the implications of treating GMA and specific abilities as equals (differing only in breadth and not subordination) and has used relative importance analysis. In this paper, we extend this work to the prediction of extrinsic career success operationalized as pay, income, and the attainment of jobs with high prestige. Results, based on a large national sample, revealed that GMA and specific abilities measured in school were good predictors of job prestige measured after 11 years, pay measured after 11 years, and income 51 years later toward the end of the participants' work lives. With one exception, GMA was a dominant predictor in incremental validity analyses. However, in relative importance analyses, the majority of the explained variance was explained by specific abilities, and GMA was not more important than single specific abilities in relative importance analyses. Visuospatial, verbal, and mathematical abilities all had substantial variance shares and were also more important than GMA in some of the analyses. Implications for the interpretation of cognitive ability data and facilitating people's success in their careers are discussed.

The overlapping geography of cognitive ability and chronotype

“…While little research is available on this topic, in a sample of German Mensa members, we found that the later sleep time of gifted participants was only present during work days and fully accounted for by later work time (Ujma et al, 2020). The sorting of higher-ability individuals into high-prestige (Herrnstein & Murray, 2010;Strenze, 2007) or highincome (Lang & Kell, 2019) jobs occurs at a relatively late stage of the career path, resulting in a delayed appearance of the relationship between chronotype and cognitive ability. Since males are often overrepresented in high-prestige jobs, including among those with exceptional cognitive ability (Lubinski et al, 2014), these trends may be stronger among males.…”

Skeletal maturity predicts cognitive abilities in human adolescents

“…Also, virtually all such studies employ factor analytic designs that prioritize the general factor (i.e., across-domain variance on cognitive tests), while residualizing broad ability factors. Both practices are problematic if there is no substantive reason to justify them 50,51 . In fact, we have suggested that without sufficient evidence to establish that variation in a single general mental ability causes individual differences in performance in cognitive ability tests, emphasis should be put on broad specific abilities instead of global indicators of performance 52 .…”

Critical Thinking: A Model of Intelligence for Solving Real-World Problems

“…Measures of IQ correlate with many important outcomes, including academic performance ( Kretzschmar et al 2016 ), job-related skills ( Hunter and Schmidt 1996 ), reduced likelihood of criminal behavior ( Burhan et al 2014 ), and for those with exceptionally high IQs, obtaining a doctorate and publishing scholarly articles ( McCabe et al 2020 ). Gottfredson ( 1997, p. 81 ) summarized these effects when she said the “predictive validity of g is ubiquitous.” More recent research using longitudinal data, found that general mental abilities and specific abilities are good predictors of several work variables including job prestige, and income ( Lang and Kell 2020 ). Although assessments of IQ are useful in many contexts, having a high IQ does not protect against falling for common cognitive fallacies (e.g., blind spot bias, reactance, anecdotal reasoning), relying on biased and blatantly one-sided information sources, failing to consider information that does not conform to one’s preferred view of reality (confirmation bias), resisting pressure to think and act in a certain way, among others.…”