New Ideas on Intellectual Ability,Interests,Sex Differences,and Achievement: Three “Integrative” Commentaries on Four Target Articles

What factors—from prenatal brain development to intellectual curiosity in high school—predict our academic and occupational achievements? Why do we continue to see a persistent gap between the numbers of men and women entering STEM (science, technology, engineering and math) occupations? These questions are intimately related and, I believe, have tremendous implications for personal and societal wellbeing. As a discipline, psychological science has contributed greatly to understanding individual differences in educational and occupational success. In 2011 and 2012, Perspectives on Psychological Science published four articles, submitted independently by unrelated authors, addressing these issues.

Taken together, the four target articles covered a vast terrain. Valla and Ceci (2011) focused on early brain development and critiqued brain organization theory, which holds that brain lateralization emerging during early prenatal development leads to sex differences in areas (e.g., mathematical and spatial ability) that are related to long-term occupational choices. The authors argue that early androgen exposures can affect interests and preferences, which in turn shape educational and career trajectories. In the second target article, Schmidt (2011) began with the assumption that there is no evidence for sex differences in general mental ability (GMA) but instead argued that sex differences in technical interests derive in large part from sex differences in technical areas. Schmidt tested ideas emerging from this perspective and the results suggested, among other things, that technical aptitude tests may underpredict job performance for female applicants and employees.

In the third target article, von Stumm, Hell, and Chamorro-Premuzic (2011) addressed a much more general question: How does intellectual curiosity, the desire to engage in and solve a wide variety of complex intellectual problems, contribute to academic performance over-and-above GMA? Interestingly, these authors showed evidence that the personality traits of intellectual curiosity and effort exert an additive effect to predict academic performance as well as GMA. Our final target article returned to the question of how specific interests are correlated with academic and job performance that are most aligned with those areas (Nye, Su, Rounds, & Drasgow, 2012). Nye et al. showed that a person–environment congruence score (i.e., the degree of similarity between interests and the occupational demands) is a better predictor of work performance than interests alone. In short, finding the right work environment to express your interests is ideal.

I hope it is obvious from my brief summary that the topics covered in this set of articles is worthy of continued discussion. In this issue of Perspectives on Psychological Science, we continue the discussion and include three commentaries that critique, broaden, and deepen many of the ideas offered in the initial set of papers. We have two sets of the original authors back (Schmidt, 2014, this issue; Valla & Ceci, 2014, this issue) to extend their perspectives on the entire set of articles. In addition, Valian (2014, this issue) provides a fresh perspective on these issues with a commentary on Schmidt (2011) and Nye et al. (2012) that examines whether understanding how sex differences in interests emerge can, in fact, help redress sex disparities in specific STEM occupations.

Perhaps the most exciting part about this set of commentaries is that in considering these independently submitted articles together, they develop new questions and new directions for future research. Each of the target articles is integrative and thorough; there was nothing, however, integrative about the set of papers together—simply four reports submitted by four sets of authors. The commentaries in this issue join the papers and develop more integrative themes. With this agenda in place, psychological science remains well situated for advances in the study of intellectual ability, interests, sex differences, and academic and job performance.