Smart answers to clever questions

THERE ARE FEW SUBJECTS on which educated people are more likely to be misinformed than the science of human intelligence. Popular myths and feelgood fallacies abound. In his excellent new book, the educational psychologist Russell Warne debunks 35 of them.

Warne was motivated to write the book, he informs us, after discovering that scientific knowledge was sometimes “alarmingly” out of step with public understanding. For example, in a recent survey he carried out with a colleague, 38 per cent of teachers and 47 per cent of non-teachers agreed with the demonstrably false claim that students with higher intelligence test scores “tend to perform just as well in school as the average student”.

Such erroneous