How is IQ measured and how high is Donald Trump's?
Trump claims to have a higher IQ than his opponents, although he has not revealed his score. We tell you how the IQ is evaluated and what we can guess about it
When the President of the United States, Donald Trump, boasted this Tuesday of having a higher IQ than that of his Secretary of State, Rex Tillerson, he was doing nothing more than repeating something he has been doing for a long time. weather.
In 2013, he tweeted that his IQ was higher than that of his predecessors Barack Obama and George Bush, and on another occasion he claimed that his was also higher than that of the American comedian Jon Stewart and that of Lord Sugar, the British star of the reality TV show "The Apprentice". ".
But is it possible to deduce it? Let's start by defining what exactly IQ is and how it is measured.
Evidence
Example of questions:
1. What is the 4-digit number in which the first is one-fifth of the last, and the second and third together equal the last digit multiplied by three?
2. What is the number that is one more than one-tenth of one-fifth of one-half of 4,000?
3. In a race, Jerry did not start first or last. Janet beat Jerry, Jerry beat Pat. Charlie was neither first nor last. Charlie beat Rachel. Pat beat Charlie. Who came out last?
The quotient or IQ is the score obtained on an intelligence test.
There is no single IQ test.
Mensa, the UK-based international association for the gifted, accepts results from more than 200 tests, including one of its own.
While some exams last an hour, others have no limit.
Frank Lawlis, a supervising psychologist for Mensa in the US, explains that the exercises typically assess a person's spatial, quantitative and verbal abilities.
The institution accepts only those whose IQ is in the top 2% of the general population. These people generally have an IQ of 130.
Low and high
But to what extent can we deduce Trump's IQ from his performance and his statements?
"If he ever publishes his IQ, I have a feeling - especially after he challenged Tillerson to reveal his - that he's higher than people realize," Barbara A. Perry told the BBC. , director of presidential studies at the University of Virginia, in the USA.
"People who don't like Trump say 'oh he's such an idiot, he's so stupid.' But I'll bet you his IQ is higher than we think," she adds.
Namely: public communication, organizational capacity, political capacity, vision, cognitive style and emotional intelligence.
"Trump scores low on emotional intelligence, cognitive style, vision, and organizational ability," says Perry.
"In what he has been magnificent, as to win the presidency, is in his political capacity and in public communication," she adds.
On the other hand, "he's obviously had a certain innate intelligence to be successful, as he was," Perry notes of his business career.
She also notes that Trump graduated from the Wharton School at the University of Pennsylvania.
Half story
But regardless of whether he's tall or not, Lawlis says that IQ doesn't tell the whole story.
"If you take someone who is considered a genius, like Einstein, he probably wouldn't do well on an IQ test, because he was thinking creatively, outside conventional boundaries."
"He could probably think of dozens of answers to each question."
In the meantime, to resolve the dilemma, Mensa has cordially offered to put both Trump and Tillerson on trial.
