did more reading on "culture-fair IQ tests" and the one I could find actual examples from was mostly this kind of shape-rotating type stuff. which, like, I guess it's a step up from asking "what's the first day of the week?" on an IQ test. but it still feels like a very "Moses is the Jewish version of Jesus" understanding of culture.
for starters, if you read right to left, you're going to have a weird time with this question
I think they're going for C as the unintuitive answer because the shape steps down with each row but it's reached the bottom so the lower end of it should wrap around to the top. But you could easily say "no, the bottom of the box is a solid floor, E would follow" and that seems like a fair disagreement.
Really, the nature of "which one is next" questions is that there is no objectively right answer. "It would be most artistically pleasing if the shape gave the audience a little surprise by tipping up at the end, so A is correct" isn't wrong the way that 1+1=3 is wrong.
Which means this test is judging you on whether you think the same way as the test designer, more than a simple arithmetic test would.
Which led me to look up the test designer (Raymond Cattell) and discover that he was a white supremacist. Not just in, like, the "well, he was a white academic psychologist in the 1920s" way. Like the "eugenicist who thanked Neo-Nazis in the preface to his book" way. Which led me to realize that the motivation for designing a "culture-fair" test was as a tool for race science. It's not for testing individual aptitude while removing the factor of culture. It's for testing cultures against each other.
Holy shit, man. I started this post assuming incompetence but we gotta ascribe this to malice.
(The reason this shouldn't have been a surprise is probably also the reason this test is still in use: people who are actually interested in cultural fairness are not going to want a better IQ test, they're going to want to get rid of the entire superstition that intelligence can be expressed as a number.)
Anyway, "culture-fair" IQ testing! As I suspected: not really all that fair! As I should have suspected: created by an actual eugenicist, for eugenics reasons!
