Nevertheless, evaluating a person’s IQ is one way to establish clues to character and purpose. If one accepts the statistics in the revolutionary book, The Bell Curve, it is apparent that people vary widely in intelligence with the USA national average IQ being heavily skewed by a number of factors. But why does anyone need to assess intelligence on the web?
The answer is that users have very few clues about the person behind the keyboard and must rely on whatever clues are readily available. These techniques are especially useful for identifying “posers” who pretend to be more intellectual than they are in actuality.
The greatest skew in intelligence is found in an evaluation of IQ averages by level of formal education level:
- Basic illiteracy - 85
- High School Graduate – 105
- College Student – 120
- Graduate Student – 128
- Medical Doctor – 135
Assessing IQ on the Web
Assessing IQ comes in handy in many instances. One such instance would be if one were approached by a con artist posing as a “professional.” Many of these posers will deliberately introduce big words or famous quotes into a conversation in an effort to impress others with their high-level of knowledge. They can be very adept at using Google to find synonymous words, but terrible at fashioning a coherent sentence. This type of criminal should immediately be considered dangerous because they are deliberately attempting to mislead.
Willful deception is always a major red flag, and users should always be very wary of anyone who is posing as someone or something that they are not.
Many people enjoy the creative use of the English language, and subtleties can reveal volumes about the education and intelligence of a person on the web. Here are some examples based on Internet message boards and forums.
From someone posing as a medical doctor:
I am uphawled at the way your doctor treated you.
If you were really starel then the Clomiphene treatment would make you ferdal.
From someone posing as a college professor:
I don’t no if this makes a difference, but it’s soley my opinion.
Here’s one from an alleged Electrical Engineer:
I think that my clame stand for itself and I never said I was a no it all.
Legitimate misspellings can be forgiven; however, fundamental errors in word usage, sentence structure and grammar are always dead giveaways. For more information, see the great book “Web Stalkers: Protect yourself from Internet Psychopaths”:
