After three days on the Eurozone, the Deep End turns to the happier subject of confectionery. According to a fascinating piece for Slate by Paul Tough (author of How Children Succeed: Grit, Curiosity, and the Hidden Power of Character) eating sweets really can make you more intelligent. Or, at least, they can if you happen to be a child sitting an IQ test.
Mr Tough describes how American researchers discovered that children measured as being of lower-than-average intelligence could raise their scores right up to average if bribed with M&Ms – something which came as bit of a surprise:
Some people dismiss the importance of IQ, but it does make a difference. IQ is related to academic performance which, in turn, predicts how likely a student is to get a good job – “at which point he can buy as many bags of M&M’s as he wants.”
However, IQ isn’t the only test that’s a good predictor of future success. There’s another measure called the “coding-speed test”, which scores accuracy in a series of extremely mundane data entry tasks.
Why should this be?
In fact, it’s not even the case that “students who did better on the coding test had better coding skills than the other students”:
In other words, this is all about character – in particular, the virtues of being bothered to do something well for its own sake. Paul Tough argues that such traits help explain why bribing children with sweets raises their IQ scores:
The irony, though, is that for these children, the first and lower IQ score is the relevant one – because it’s a measure of such things as motivation, determination, diligence and conscientiousness.
Further confirmation, therefore, that character counts – but, then, anyone who didn’t believe that already really must be thick.