Influence of sociodemographic and intelligence factors in general knowledge

Abstract

Research on crystallized intelligence is often constrained by the large number of resources that must be employed in its measuring. Only vocabulary size has received a substantial amount of attention within the scientific community, which has led to the common misconception that ¿crystallized intelligence? is synonym to ¿verbal ability?. This ignores how verbal ability tests often measure clearly fluid skills, and has sidelined other components of crystallized intelligence, such as general knowledge, as an object of study. The current dissertation aimed to address these issues by expanding on our understanding of general knowledge as a component of crystallized intelligence. To that end, we first created a new tool that allowed us to measure the general knowledge of the Spanish population. Then, we explored how general knowledge scores are influenced by sociodemographic variables, as well as by several other aspects of intelligence. Finally, we also compare how the influence that these two types of variables have on general knowledge differs from how they influence vocabulary size, thereby emphasizing how crucial it is that both aspects of intelligence are considered when studying crystallized intelligence