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This comparative empirical study of policing in the United States and France draws on the authors' ten years of field work to contend that the police in both countries should be thought about as an amalgam of five distinct professional cultures or 'intelligence regimes'-each of which can be found in any given police department in both the United States and France. In particular, we contend that what police do as knowledge workers and how they make sense of the social problems such as collective offending by juveniles varies with the professional subcommunities or 'intelligence regimes' in which their particular knowledge work is embedded. The same problem can be looked at in fundamentally different ways even within a single police department, depending on the intelligence regime through which the problem is refracted.
The chapter introduces Churchill’s army career between 1895 and 1900, but does so from an important new perspective: using his exploits in Cuba, India, the Sudan and South Africa to explore the origins of his lifelong interest in intelligence and clandestine operations. It argues that his first foray overseas to Cuba was in the ‘well-established tradition of the British amateur spy’ but that he maintained his interest in military intelligence thereafter through the connections he made to support his writing and journalism on the Indian north-west frontier, while attached to Kitchener’s expedition in the Sudan and later as a war correspondent and then soldier in South Africa. The author looks at the intelligence lessons that Churchill learned, including the power of guerrilla insurrection, the importance of properly resourced intelligence services, the comparative roles of the civil and military intelligence arms and the need for a managed relationship with the press.
This chapter argues that Samuel Beckett’s plays function as a kind of fulcrum in a theatrical history of staging and thematising surveillance, extending from Dion Boucicault’s The Octoroon (1859) through Augusta Gregory’s Spreading the News (1904), to Enda Walsh’s Arlington (2016) and David Lloyd’s The Press (2009) and The Pact (2021). Surveillance agencies rely heavily on technology to gather information, but depend on human beings to store, order, and interpret it, and dramatic narratives exploit inconsistencies and injustices arising from slippages between data and its application. Boucicault, Gregory, Walsh, and Lloyd are counterpointed to Beckett’s Waiting for Godot, Endgame, Catastrophe, and What Where, which theatricalise the structuring influence of monitoring and scrutiny on the texture of Irish social experience, personal and public. Once classified in an archive or record, or interpreted in policy and implemented in practice, ‘intelligence’ plays out less as a function of rigorous analysis than ideological determination.
Mammals are unique among vertebrates in experiencing a need to carry out behaviours which are not necessary for their immediate survival. This poses questions as to the nature of these behavioural needs, how they evolved and their implications for the welfare of mammals in captivity. Evidence is provided to show that mammals carry out daily programmes of activity which meet four kinds of requirement, namely, for security, appropriate environmental complexity, novelty and opportunities for achievement. Within their programmes mammals perform two kinds of activity: work, which relates to day to day survival, and leisure, in the form of curiosity or play, which provides experience which may prove to be of value in the long term.
The existence of behavioural needs is consistent with our knowledge of mammalian evolution. Even the earliest known mammals, living over 120 million years ago, differed from reptiles in having brain to body size ratios four to five times greater. The increase in brain size resulted largely from the massive expansion of a region of the cerebral cortex, known as the neopallium, which acts as a co-ordinating centre for sensory data, and creates a model of the world which determines subsequent action. During the 60 million year tertiary era, relative brain size increased in most orders of eutherian mammals, so that only the more intelligent survived.
Because mammals rely for their survival on collecting and analyzing data and acting intelligently, they need facilities to search for information to establish and monitor their concept of the real world; their psychological well-being depends on an environment which offers such facilities. There are two kinds of behavioural needs; psychological needs, which appear to be unique to mammals, and ethological needs which are experienced by all vertebrates. It is concluded that environmental quality for captive mammals should not just be assessed negatively, by the absence of abnormal behaviours, but more positively by the extent to which it meets their psychological needs.
Chapter 3 offers a close look at the visual history of the war. By situating printed images in the field of political communication, it addresses a neglected but vital area of early modern Venetian politics. Rather than taking the military provenance of news pictures for granted, the chapter problematises the double transfer of intelligence from manuscript to print and from the battlefield to the marketplace. The reformatting of images born out of the documentary practices of the army and the optics of colonialism in new pictorial formats yields insight into the political economy of printmaking and the impact of the military on metropolitan visuality. The chapter shows that, more than carriers of information, prints were key components of the affective politics of wartime that infused the Venetian public sphere with imperial ideals and nurtured sentimental attachment to the state.
Individual differences in cognitive abilities and skills can predict normatively superior and logically consistent judgments and decisions. The current experiment investigates the processes that mediate individual differences in risky choices. We assessed working memory span, numeracy, and cognitive impulsivity and conducted a protocol analysis to trace variations in conscious deliberative processes. People higher in cognitive abilities made more choices consistent with expected values; however, expected-value choices rarely resulted from expected-value calculations. Instead, the cognitive ability and choice relationship was mediated by the number of simple considerations made during decision making — e.g., transforming probabilities and considering the relative size of gains. Results imply that, even in simple lotteries, superior risky decisions associated with cognitive abilities and controlled cognition can reflect metacognitive dynamics and elaborative heuristic search processes, rather than normative calculations. Modes of cognitive control (e.g., dual process dynamics) and implications for process models of risky decision-making (e.g., priority heuristic) are discussed.
Are highly intelligent people less risk averse? Over the last two decades scholars have argued the existence of a negative relationship between cognitive ability and risk aversion. Although numerous studies support this, the link between cognitive ability and risk aversion has not been found consistently. To shed new light on this topic, a systematic review and meta-analysis was conducted. A total of 97 studies were identified and included for meta-analysis in the domain of gains (N=90, 723), 41 in the mixed domain (N=50, 936), and 12 in the domain of losses (N=4, 544). Results indicate that there exists a weak, but significant negative relationship between cognitive ability and risk aversion in the domain of gains. However, no relationship was observed in the mixed domain or in the domain of losses. Several meta-regressions were performed to investigate the influence of moderator variables. None of the moderator variables were found to consistently influence the relationship between cognitive ability and risk aversion across the domain of gains, mixed and losses. Moreover, no significant difference was observed between males and females across all three domains. In conclusion, this systematic review and meta-analysis provides new evidence that the relationship between cognitive ability and risk aversion is domain specific and not as strong as suggested by some previous studies.
This paper summarizes an empirical comparison of the accuracy of forecasts included in analysis reports developed by professional intelligence analysts to comparable forecasts in a prediction market that has broad participation from across an intelligence community. To compare forecast accuracy, 99 event forecasts were extracted from qualitative descriptions found in 41 analysis reports and posted on the prediction market. Quantitative probabilities were imputed from the qualitative forecasts by asking seasoned professional analysts, who did not participate in the prediction market, to read the reports and to infer a quantitative probability based on what was written. These readers were also asked to provide their personal probabilities before and after reading the reports. There were two statistically significant results of particular interest. First, the primary result is that the prediction market forecasts were more accurate than the analysis reports. On average prediction market probabilities were 0.114 closer to ground truth than the analysis report probabilities. Second, in cases where analysts (readers) updated their personal probabilities in a direction opposite to what the reports implied, analysts tended to update their probabilities in the correct direction. This occurred even though, on average, reading the reports did not make readers more accurate.
Chamberlain and Churchill’s characters and attitudes to war are compared as a partial explanation of their different reactions to events in the 1930s. The two men are placed in the context of how foreign and defence policy was formed, and the principal people with whom they interacted in Whitehall are introduced. Particular attention is paid to the limitations of the intelligence services and to Churchill’s contacts and sources of information, including membership of an official committee on air defence.
This chapter discusses the ways in which natural selection has acted on the animal and primate brain, demonstrating that the human brain is better at some tasks, whereas other animals are better at certain others (e.g. special memory and chimpanzees). Human brains are the results of selection for very specific tasks, largely relating to social information. It also discusses the role of metabolism in brain evolution, reviewing the ‘expensive tissue hypothesis’. It summarizes brain anatomy, and shows that, anatomically, the human brain is essentially a scaled-up primate brain. Finally, it discusses the idea of consciousness, the ways we evaluate it in other animals, and how it may have arisen.
Studies reporting that highly intelligent individuals have more mental health disorders often have sampling bias, no or inadequate control groups, or insufficient sample size. We addressed these caveats by examining the difference in the prevalence of mental health disorders between individuals with high and average general intelligence (g-factor) in the UK Biobank.
Methods
Participants with g-factor scores standardized relative to the same-age UK population, were divided into two groups: a high g-factor group (g-factor 2 SD above the UK mean; N = 16,137) and an average g-factor group (g-factor within 2 SD of the UK mean; N = 236,273). Using self-report questionnaires and medical diagnoses, we examined group differences in the prevalence of 32 phenotypes, including mental health disorders, trauma, allergies, and other traits.
Results
High and average g-factor groups differed across 15/32 phenotypes and did not depend on sex and/or age. Individuals with high g-factors had less general anxiety (odds ratio [OR] = 0.69, 95% CI [0.64;0.74]) and post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD; OR = 0.67, 95 %CI [0.61;0.74]), were less neurotic (β = −0.12, 95% CI [−0.15;−0.10]), less socially isolated (OR = 0.85, 95% CI [0.80;0.90]), and were less likely to have experienced childhood stressors and abuse, adulthood stressors, or catastrophic trauma (OR = 0.69–0.90). However, they generally had more allergies (e.g., eczema; OR = 1.13–1.33).
Conclusions
The present study provides robust evidence that highly intelligent individuals do not have more mental health disorders than the average population. High intelligence even appears as a protective factor for general anxiety and PTSD.
Myside bias occurs when people evaluate evidence, generate evidence, and test hypotheses in a manner biased toward their own prior opinions and attitudes. Myside bias is displayed by people in all demographic groups, and it is exhibited even by expert reasoners, the highly educated, and the highly intelligent. Surprisingly, however, the degree of myside bias shown is not predictable from individual difference variables that we would expect to be associated with it. For example, it is not attenuated by cognitive sophistication, as measured by cognitive ability or thinking dispositions. Another way in which myside bias is an outlier bias is that, in most circumstances, it shows very little domain generality and appears to be very content dependent. Individuals who display high myside bias on one issue do not necessarily show high myside bias on another, unrelated issue. Because of these unusual characteristics, myside bias needs a different type of model – a content-based model, such as those deriving from memetic theory.
In this chapter, the philosopher Christoph Durt elaborates a novel view on AI and its relation to humans. He contends that AI is neither merely a tool, nor an artificial subject, nor necessarily a simulation of human intelligence. These misconceptions of AI have led to grave misunderstandings of the opportunities and dangers of AI. A more comprehensive concept of AI is needed to better understand the possibilities of responsible AI. The chapter shows the roots of the misconceptions in the Turing Test. The author argues that the simplicity of the setup of the Turing Test is deceptive, and that Turing was aware that the text exchanges can develop in much more intricate ways than usually thought. The Turing Test only seemingly avoids difficult philosophical questions by passing on the burden to an evaluator, who is part of the setup, and hides in plain sight his or her decisive contribution. Durt shows that, different from all previous technology, AI processes meaningful aspects of the world as experienced and understood by humans. He delineates a more comprehensive picture according to which AI integrates into the human lifeworld through its interrelations with humans and data.
Belief in biological races remains prevalent in the early 21st century despite opposing logical arguments and an abundance of converging evidence from multiple scientific disciplines. Structural and interpersonal racism, among the most salient issues today, are empowered and perpetuated by false claims and misconceptions about human origins, kinships, and differences. The best current science and historical knowledge make clear that races are cultural inventions that are not aligned with biological realities. Acknowledging the errors and falsehoods that provide the framework for biological race belief is not an attempt to deny real genetic variation or the importance of cultural races. This chapter reviews critical challenges to biological race belief and presents examinations of three of the most contentious and confounding race topics: IQ tests and intelligence, health and healthcare disparities, and sports as a popular source of misinterpretation and confusion. An evidence-based perception of humankind offers both laypersons and scientists a more productive position from which to understand our diversity and alleviate racism.
In this study, we have compared 229 Wechsler Adults Intelligence Scale – Fourth Edition (WAIS-IV) cognitive profiles of different severity adults with autism spectrum disorder to verify the impact of several variables including sex, age, level of education and autism severity level in an Italian sample. Moreover, we wanted to find out the optimal cut points for the major intelligence quotients in order to discriminate autism severity levels.
Methods
Participants were recruited from two National Health System Center in two different Italian regions and were assessed with gold-standard instruments as a part of their clinical evaluation. According to DSM-5, cognitive domains were also measured with multi-componential tests. We used the Italian adaptation of WAIS-IV. We checked our hypotheses using linear regression models and receiver operating characteristics (ROC) curves.
Results
Our results showed that age and level of education have a strong impact on Verbal Comprehension (VCI) and Working Memory Indexes (WMI). Gender differences are relevant when considering the VCI and Processing Speed index (PSI) in which women obtained the best performance. These differences are still relevant when considering cut points of ROC because 69 resulted to be the optimal cut point for women, 65 for men.
Conclusions
Few conclusions can be assumed only examining Full Scale Intelligence Quotient (FSIQ) scores as it includes many different information about broader cognitive abilities. Looking deeper at main indexes and their subtests findings are consistent with previous research on the disorder (moderate correlations of FSIQ, Perceptual Reasoning index, WMI and PSI with the participants’ age), while other results are unforeseen (no effect of sex found on FSIQ score) or novel (significant effect of education on VCI and WMI). Using an algorithm predicting optimal cut point for discriminating through autism severity levels can help clinicians to better label and quantify the required help a person may need, a test cannot replace diagnostic and clinical evaluation by experienced clinicians.
Recent studies mostly focus on the links between measures of alpha-band EEG networks and intelligence. However, associations between wide frequency range EEG networks and general intelligence level remain underresearched.
Objectives
In this study in a student sample we aimed to correlate the intelligence level and graph metrics of the sensors/sources-level networks constructed in different frequency EEG bands.
Methods
We recorded eyes-closed resting-state EEG in 28 healthy participants (21.4±2.1 y.o., 18 females, 1 left-handed). The Raven’s Standard Progressive Matrices Plus (‘SPM Plus’, 60 figures) was used as an intelligence measure. We constructed networks for all possible combinations of sensors/sources-level and 4-8, 8-13, 13-30, or 4-30 Hz frequency bands using Weighted Phase-Lag Index (wPLI), and calculated four graph metrics (Characteristic Path Length, Clustering Coefficient, Modularity, and Small World Index) for each network. Spearman correlation (with Holm-Sidak correction) was applied to characterize the relations between the SPM Plus scores and all the network metrics.
Results
SPM Plus scores varied from 35 to 57 (mean 45.3±4.2), and the intelligence level negatively correlated with Modularity in beta-band (r = -0.63, pcorr = 0.0253).
Conclusions
High modularity may reflect relatively high segregation, but not integration, of networks (Girn, Mills, Christoff, 2019). Accordingly, our findings may shed light on the neural mechanisms of the general inefficiency of global cognitive processing in the case of intellectual decline related to different mental disorders. Funding: This research has been supported by the Interdisciplinary Scientific and Educational School of Lomonosov Moscow State University ‘Brain, Cognitive Systems, Artificial Intelligence’.
This chapter highlights the close interconnection between cosmology and human nature in the Timaeus. According to Timaeus, human beings are not merely part of the cosmos; they play a crucial role in explaining how the cosmos came to be. The cosmos must contain three kinds of mortal beings in order to be complete, and all three derive from human beings, as a result of varying degrees of moral and cognitive failure. Recognizing the distinctive role human beings play in completing the cosmos complicates the standard picture of Timaeus’ cosmology, as well as his account of human nature. While in large part the cosmos is a product of divine craft, in some part it is the product of the inevitable disturbance of immortal souls due to mortal embodiment. Human beings have a special status as the first generation of mortal beings, as well as the only ones produced solely by divine craft. However, this distinction does not extend beyond the first generation, nor does it include any women. Ultimately, Timaeus’ account of human nature blurs the lines between humans and gods, as well as between humans and non-human animals.
This chapter discusses the practice of measurement in psychological research. Here, where we cast doubt on the basic assumptions and endeavours underlying the act of measuring in mainstream psychology. Next, we introduce the processual alternative, which stresses the study of activity as situated and coupled with an environment. This chapter explains how a process approach to ‘measurement’ is thus fundamentally different from the standard one, and can remedy existing issues related to non-ergodicity and the ecological fallacy. These ideas are illustrated by means of the concept of intelligence, which is undoubtedly one of psychology’s show-pieces of measurement.