15 Celebrities With Surprisingly High IQs

15 Celebrities With Surprisingly High IQs

Kinda meaningless. In order to understand IQ scores, it is critical to know which tests are being used as the basis of the scores. In other words, 132 does not equal 132.

Wechsler, Stanford-Binet and Cattell are all normed at 100, but have different standard deviations: 15, 16 and 24 respectively. 189, the highest score cited in this article, if based on the Cattell tests, is equivalent to "only" about 156 on the Wechsler scale. It is highly unlikely that Masi Oka scored 189 on the Wechsler scale. That would place him in the 99.9999998th percentile - a score achieved by only about two people out of every billion. That could make him the smartest person in our hemisphere, and would probably be one of the 15 highest IQs in the world, putting almost all Nobel winners to shame. On the other hand, a 189 on the Cattell scale would place him just a hair below the 99.99th percentile - one in ten thousand, which is probably where he actually belongs (although I'm only guessing).

James Woods's reported pre-1974 SAT score of 1580 does correspond reasonably well to his reported 180 IQ if one uses the Cattell IQ scale, but would be represented by a much more modest IQ, somewhere around 150, on Wechsler or S-B. (Or others. The Otis and CMM scales are equivalent to Stanford-Binet).

Notice on this list of MENSA admission requirements, that a score of 145 on Stanford-Binet, Wechsler, CMM or Otis is more than high enough to enter the society, but a Cattell 145 will not make the society's cutoff, which is the 98th percentile. That Cattell score is in the 96.96 percentile. The same score on Wechsler would be in the 99.93 percentile.

Long story short: if you want to crow about your genius, tell everyone your IQ on the Cattell scale!

One more point I should make. The IQ tests used for mass administration generally do not have any accurate upper-level discrimination. They simply can't identify super-high IQs accurately or at all. If you take one of the Stanford-Binet tests at age 20 and get every question right, you're going to score something like 148 (Sorry, I don't remember the exact number, but that's in the ballpark). So your IQ might actually be 148 in that case, or it might be 210. I'm not sure whether any IQ test could provide Masi Oka with an accurate non-Cattell IQ score of 189. When you get to that level, who the hell can you compare the testee to for accurate norming? You gonna bring DaVinci and Mozart back to life? Oh, I'm exaggerating. There are some specialized tests which have been designed for upper-level IQ discrimination by researchers like Ron Hoeflin and Kevin Langdon, but I don't think any such tests have ever been recognized as accurate, valid and reliable by any society of scientific professionals. When non-psychologists start writing about IQ's above 150, you should probably take their words with a grain of salt, if not an entire statue of Lot's wife.