IQ and well-being scores for the USA

Last week I wrote about Intelligence and its association with alcohol problems, which is a topic that I bet hardly any of you have ever thought about. Well, other people have thought about it, and that includes various groups within the U.S.A. I will look at one of those people here, who is interested in our well-being and health, and how it connects with our IQ.

Now, an Intelligence Quotient (IQ) is a controversial and complex measure of human intelligence. It is a total score derived from a set of standardized tests or subtests designed to objectively assess our intelligence. Explaining further (IQ and health: exploring the intricate connection between intelligence and well-being):

Intelligence Quotient, or IQ, is not just a single, static number that defines our mental capabilities. Rather, it’s a complex measure that encompasses various cognitive skills, including logical reasoning, problem-solving abilities, and spatial awareness. Think of it as a Swiss Army knife for your brain — a versatile tool with multiple functions that can be applied to various aspects of life, including our health.

The person interested in IQ and health works at: the Department of Management, at Cleveland State University. A couple of years ago (2022) he published a list called: Updated IQ and well-being scores for the 50 U.S. states. The author notes:

At the level of the 50 U.S. states, an interconnected nexus of well-being variables exists. These variables strongly correlate with estimates of state IQ in interesting ways. However, the state IQ estimates are now more than 16 years old, and the state well-being estimates are over 12 years old. Updated state IQ and well-being estimates are therefore needed.

So, some new data were obtained:

Thus, I first created new state IQ estimates by analyzing scores from both the Program for the International Assessment of Adult Competency (for adults), and the National Assessment of Educational Progress (for fourth and eighth grade children) exams. I also created new global well-being scores by analyzing state variables from the following four well-being subdomains: crime, income, health, and education.

The new data were produced at the level of the state (ie. an average score for each state), and they are shown in the first table, above. IQ is scaled so that the overall average for humans is 100. As you can see, both Ohio and Maryland are therefore “average”, and 23 states are higher and 25 are lower. You can make what you will about the scores for New Mexico, Louisiana, Mississippi, Alabama and Nevada.

Moving on, the author was interested in the relationships with health, which he studied using statistical correlations. Correlations between two given characteristics go from –1, which represents perfectly opposite patterns in those two characteristics, to +1, which represents perfectly corresponding patterns. The author notes:

When validating the nexus, several interesting correlations existed among the variables. For example, state IQ most strongly predicted FICO credit scores, alcohol consumption (directly), income inequality, and state temperature.

However, in this blog we are interested in alcohol. The correlations for alcohol are shown in the second table, below. All of the patterns in the table are “statistically significant” except Income Inequality, so that is the only one we can ignore.

Interestingly, alcohol has a positive correlation with IQ, indicating that states with a high IQ also have high alcohol consumption. Similarly, states with a high alcohol consumption also have a high Well-being. Such states also tend to have a high FICO credit score, and to be COVID vaccinated. Readers of this blog should be happy about all of these things!

On the other hand, alcohol has a negative correlation with both Conservatism and Religiosity, indicating that states with high alcohol consumption tend to be neither conservative nor religious. This is perhaps not surprising.

Obviously, not every American has done IQ tests, and could thus appear in this dataset. Indeed, some of my American correspondents claim to have never taken an IQ test, whereas others recall doing them in (for example) the fourth grade. I, myself, have not done any since I left school.

The concept of a unitary or general intelligence (ie. IQ) has been controversial since its introduction in the early 1900s. Indeed, there are a variety of individually administered IQ tests in use in the English-speaking world (see Wikipedia). You can make of them what you will, in terms of their reliability and validity.

As a final note, I can say that there is a study from 2013 (IQ and alcohol consumption: international data) that looked at IQ at the national level (ie. an average IQ for each country), and noted:

Using Lynn and Meisenberg's (2010) national IQ as a proxy for cognitive development we find that in countries with higher levels of intelligence the average individual is more likely to consume more beer and wine, even after controlling for income, health, urbanization and religious traditions.

So, the alcohol and IQ correlation exists at the national as well as the state level. I take this to mean that it is a general phenomenon among people.