ABSTRACT
How do we assess mental power? This question has posed a major technological challenge to psychology for a century. Two themes recur in the literature. How are we to differentiate between what a person can do and what a person has learned to do? Another way to state the question is “Is performance due to an ability to figure out solutions to novel problems or due to the possession of a store of knowledge about problems analogous to those presented in the testing situation?” This question is by no means a new one. Our failure to resolve it has produced one of psychology’s greatest social controversies, the debate over use and interpretation of intelligence tests (Jensen, 1969; Scarr-Salapatek, 1971). The second theme is a more theoretical one; to what extent is there a general factor in intelligence? The two themes are related, since it is consistent to assume that a pure measure of the general factor, g, would also be a culture-fair measure. It would not be consistent to test g in a situation which required that the examinees utilize culture-specific training.
