| | IQ tests gauge deductive reasoning, for the most part. They measure people's facility to deduce the "one right answer" to a question having just a single answer.
But there is a lot more to intelligence that deductive reasoning. Many problems have far more than one solution.
Creativity -- which requires thinking outside the boxes that lead to "one right answer" -- can't be measured well on traditional IQ tests.
An open-ended creativity question:
How many uses can you think of for a brick?
Pause for a moment and think about it before proceeding....
Done?
Deductively oriented thinkers will think of the brick as a brick -- as a building block -- and quickly run out of things to construct with it.
However, the more inductively oriented thinkers will think of a brick "outside the box" of its traditional use as a building material. They'll instead think of a brick in terms of its attributes -- weight, size, hardness, thickness, color, opacity, composition, etc. -- and they will find countless more creative uses for a brick.
Deductive ability is not the only measure of "intelligence." IQ tests, then, can't begin to scope out the true breadth and productive potential of the human mind.
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