Let’s dive in first with a brief overview of cognition—types of reckoning.
Cognition can be divided into two “camps” of intelligence: crystallized intelligence and fluid intelligence.
Crystallized intelligence refers to that which is established, often in long-term memory, and can be retrieved to supplement current information. Fluid intelligence refers to that capacity that is rather limited to circumstances at hand—it helps inform a person to his or her immediate environment or area and aids in making decisions based on contemporaneous information. It is fluid because it is responsive to things that are happening right now and can flex accordingly. Abstract reasoning falls in this domain. Crystallized intelligence, on the other hand, can be seen as data retrieval, often for contrast or comparison purposes; this is long-term storage, often acquired by rote or specialized training.
Originally, IQ (that is, intelligence quotient) was seen as a flat score that was both reductive and deterministic. If someone was tested and the test came back as saying the person had an IQ of 120, then that indicated that person’s range of comprehension. They could be described as “smarter than the average bear,” for instance, but they wouldn’t qualify as a genius. The IQ scale had these hard demarcations of capacity, and the scale was accepted on a popular level to an extent we today fully do not recognize because we are still immersed in that system of categorization. We still use the terms imbecile and idiot in common parlance. It’s in the culture.
Alfred Binet helped create the first standardized tests for the French, back in 1905. Unfortunately, one of the people who helped fashion and formalize the Americanized test, Carl Brigham, was an inveterate racist and eugenicist.
In his 1923 book, A Study of American Intelligence, psychologist and eugenicist Carl Brigham wrote that African-Americans were on the low end of the racial, ethnic, and/or cultural spectrum. Testing, he believed, showed the superiority of “the Nordic race group” and warned of the “promiscuous intermingling” of new immigrants in the American gene pool.
Another eugenicist contributor and influencer of intelligence testing, Henry Goddard, when faced with evidence that his statistical measurements were not accurate, publicized his findings all the more.
This Americanized test, once standardized, was first given to entrants of various backgrounds for the U.S. armed forces for World War I. (This test survives today in the form of the ASVAB.) These turn-of-the-century men of various backgrounds appeared to show a distribution with a racial aspect: Black men consistently had lower scores than other populations. This fed the widely current idea at the time of scientific racism. This was the turn of the 20th century—the nadir of race relations in the United States. The test told the researchers what they wanted to hear, and the creators of the test believed the data they wanted to see instead of the data in front of them that contradicted their expectations.
However, this idea seeped into various crevices in American culture, over many decades, and led to all sorts of paternalistic policies and attitudes toward Black Americans and the attendant “Negro problem.” The test data seemed to bear out the widespread belief that Blacks could not be trusted to govern themselves; this was confirmation bias gone wild.
Even as Black Americans were emerging from the shadow of slavery and attempting to get out from under the strictures of Jim Crow, they often encountered White Americans treating them as though they couldn’t cogitate at all. They were seen as perpetual children, mentally. This caused in the Black American, when confronted individually with this concept—when they were challenged socially—to experience something we now call stereotype threat.
Imagine that stereotype threat as a cousin, a faint relative, of test anxiety. As an example, think back to when you were in school. Perhaps there was a class that you had particular trouble with, either in terms of the material or perhaps with the teacher (maybe the teaching style did not mesh with your learning style). If the teacher one day announces a pop quiz, it’s entirely likely that a form of test anxiety would descend upon you. You didn’t have a chance to prepare, and the suddent onset of anxiety has already set yourself on heightened alert. You start thinking about how much you don’t want to fail.
Stereotype threat has been measured in social science—it’s a real phenomenon. When students are confronted with suggestions (not even direct statements) that their performance might degrade due to an essential attribute (race, sex, etc.), their test scores predictably drop. This is not hard and fast on the individual level, but it is a phenomenon seen on a generalized level. A proverb states that people live up to low expectations, but in this instance people perform at the level of their fear.
To be clear, stereotype threat is a social interaction. It’s a response to a perceived social threat (the loss of face, the loss of self-respect). This means it’s part of fluid intelligence. It’s taking up present cognitive computational resources in order to manage the threat. Physiologically, the sympathetic nervous system has fired up, because the amygdala has activated: the heart is pumping, perhaps there’s dry mouth and jitters, perhaps some sweat. There’s an onset of nervousness that otherwise would be absent were it not for the suggestion that brought about the sensation of threat. So the individual expends resources to counteract these physiological state changes, while simultaneously they are plunged into the situation, the social test they must pass.
It’s my deep suspicion that certain White people also experience stereotype threat, particularly in the form of the epithet white trash. This slur (an echo of the eugenicist’s classification of “subnormal”) is classist in form but operates as a form of race policing, basically. The use of the term can be seen as a method of maintaining a social boundary of acceptability in the socioeconomic race hierarchy that is reserved only for White culture. It is a practice of shaming in order to produce and reproduce a boundary of approved whiteness as opposed to “failed” whiteness. For in-group/out-group maintenance, the process of creating an Other necessarily contrasts and highlights what is seen as Self.
So if you’re out with your friends one Friday night, let’s say, and you’re an all-White group (let’s say you’re adolescents), and you pass a person who is indigent and living out-of-doors, one of your companions—or even you—might label that person “trash” or “white trash”. Just by doing so, that sets up an automatic, wordless contrast: “I’m not trash.” And then you internalize what all might be done to forestall a similar labeling upon yourself—you start thinking of strategies to keep that ever from happening.
What is that constellation of strategies? It’s the sum total of whiteness, a chamber of behaviors constituting what it is to be White in a social context. It’s a script that one inhabits. This is racial conformity. Devotion to this particular script means the expenditure of a finite amount of one’s cognitive functionality. A portion of fluid intelligence is going to be dedicated to the maintenance and enactment of this script. Part of your RAM is already sectioned off, as it were.
The dichotomous system of crystallized and fluid intelligence does not map exactly upon the old idea of IQ, but we still use IQ colloquially because it is a shorthand that is, for better or for worse, easily understandable in terms of common knowledge and common sense. I bring this up because we see that the folks who are most likely to be denigrated as being “white trash” are those who are in a lower socioeconomic income bracket, and in this sense intelligence and financial backing are seen as mirror images. You don’t have to be homeless to be seen as trash but merely perceived to be of a lower class; in fact, I would say that many people accused of being human refuse may indeed personally aspire to leap to a higher economic rung, the next rung of the social hierarchy.
So when I say that Covid can shave approximately seven points off one’s IQ, you understand what I mean. The social definition of IQ is common and widespread. We think of this reduction in cognitive capacity, when it is the form of a flat number like that, as solid, as concrete. It’s also abstracted. If someone has an IQ of around 110 and then, due to Covid complications, loses some ability and a new test shows the IQ level to be closer to 100, we as laypeople can comprehend that. That’s simple subtraction. On paper, it makes sense.
But in terms of crystallized and fluid intelligence, what does that mean? What does it mean to lose the equivalent of seven IQ points? How would that manifest?
I bring this up because it has already be shown that people who are in the QAnon movement—a concentrated subpopulation of MAGA—disproportionately are categorized as having a certain education level. As distribution goes, a small minority have four or more years of college, and a decent minority (around one-fifth) have had some college exposure; but the vast majority have a high school diploma as their highest level of academic achievement, with a great deal falling below that threshold. Consistently, this is the natural reservoir of QAnon support. This could be explained by regionality (who one’s neighbors are, general expectations of academic achievement, etc.), the socioeconomic level of one’s parents, and so on. Many factors may explain this, but the correlation is clear.
Trump supporters also have been explicitly described as relying more on fluid intelligence than crystallized intelligence.
When viewed in tandem with the above information regarding education attainment, that actually makes sense. If a person uses immediacy (information in the environment) rather than information learned by rote, then it may follow that the person places less importance on “book learning”. They may be good at performing quick mental calculations for which they then might not be able to “show their work.” Such interactions would add up and contribute to an overall attitude toward school.
I see fluid intelligence much like handedness—the more you use your dominant hand, the more automatic the use of that hand will be and the more you come to depend on it. If you prefer using fluid intelligence over or even to the near-exclusion of crystallized intelligence, you’re going to strengthen your reliance on that system of cognition.
These MAGA folks (who are already reactant!), if they lean more toward fluid intelligence and already have dedicated sectors of intelligence devoted to enacting the script of whiteness, that means that they have even less cognitive capacity to efficiently and accurately assess the information their brains are actually receiving. Their bandwidth necessarily contracts. In essence, these people will need to automate more of their cognitive processes, because their social cognition is working so hard to compensate for what Covid may have taken away.
Stereotype threat is temporary; once the social situation changes, the threat dissipates. Same for test anxiety: the test concludes, the student recovers and is able to go on with his or her day. The effects on Covid on cognition may also be temporary, but we also have Long Covid with which to contend. And many of these MAGA folks have sequestered themselves into communities that have higher concentrations of Covid circulation. They see higher rates of hospitalization and more strident opposition to Covid countermanding actions by authorities.
glucose: finite resource, finite allocation
Might this go toward explaining the rash of strange and violent behavior among some of us over the past two years? We’ve been living with the pandemic and its aftereffects, but some things (such as social behavior) we can’t test for and measure. I can’t tell you precisely why we’ve seen this uptick in violence or ideation thereof. I do see a connection between lowered cognition due to something as simple as a suggestion and an attendant physiological response. I see a parallel between stereotype threat (its sensation in the body, and its contraction of sheer computational force due to marshaling of defenses) and the reduction of bandwidth in those who may already be in a population that depends on fluid intelligence and already has part of cogitation devoted to enacting a racialized script.
The more processes are automatic in the brain, the less control one has over them. In fact, it becomes harder to arrest an automatic response, because those responses may never even reach the part of the brain, the frontal lobe, that mediates response. Without control, one lashes out. One becomes purely reactive to what the limbic system, of which the amygdala is a part, tells one to do. That is reactionary behavior; no thought required.
