Criticisms of Psychometric Approach

Critics of the psychometric approach, such as Robert Sternberg (who formulated the The Triarchic Theory of Intelligence), point out that people in the general population have a somewhat different conception of intelligence than most experts. In turn, they argue that the psychometric approach measures only a part of what is commonly understood as intelligence. Other critics, such as Sir Arthur Stanley Eddington, argue that the equipment used in an experiment often determines the results and that proving that e.g. intelligence exists does not prove that current equipment measure it correctly. Sceptics often argue that so much scientific knowledge about the brain is still to be discovered that claiming the conventional IQ test methodology to be infallible is just a small step forward from claiming that Craniometry was the infallible method for measuring intelligence (which had scientific merits based on knowledge available in the nineteenth century).