Has anyone ever given an IQ test to poor tribal folk? How smart are they really? People seem to think that they aren't very smart.
by 
Doc
ANSWERS: 3
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What people think this? I don't. I think they are every bit as smart (assuming they are healthy) as people who live in large cities, it's just that their education level is lower.
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There are different types of IQ. The standard IQ test means little to someone from a different culture....and there is Emotional IQ which measures a completely different parameter. I would think that I would appear very stupid if I were to take an IQ test based on their world and how they survive in it...but I'd do okay on a North American test. The same with them...they could ace a test in their environment but fail miserably in ours.
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One of the problems with trying to do so is that you quickly find that all IQ tests are very culturally biased. Find the next number doesn't work with people with no mathematical training. Even patterns and shapes don't work for people who have no tradition of pictorial art. IQ tests only work for people of broadly similar cultural backgrounds. They have in the passed been used as instruments of prejudice to denigrate those from very different cultures. What one can say is that when the children of those poor tribal people are given a full western-style education, they do just as well as the westerners. I recommend two books in this ares: "The Mismeasure of Man" by Stephen Jay Gould, showing hos IQ tests have been misused over the decades, and "Guns, Germs and Steel" by Jared Diamond, written to explain how it came about that one set of people (us) came to dominate the poor tribes, who in his opinion are just as intelligent.
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