Everyday Life as an Intelligence Test

>We all make mistakes in life, and Alexander Pope’s “To err is human” is a familiar refrain. There is good reason, however, for supposing that the probabilities of making a mistake in any given situation, independent of experience, vary from individual to individual according to IQ or score on any good test of g, the general intelligence factor. This would help explain why “some people make more errors than other people” ... . Full recognition of this probability differential is blunted by the fact that, although life in some ways resembles a test of general intelligence, life departs in many ways from the formal requirements of a well-designed psychometric instrument. Combined with age differences in experience (which can easily be mistaken for differences in intelligence) and with age differences in cumulative lifetime risk (which can let the histories of younger and hence less exposed persons seem more error free than those of older, more exposed ones of equal intelligence), such departures from psychometric rigor obscure the role of g but do not negate it. ...<

Source:
Everyday Life as an Intelligence Test: Effects of Intelligence and Intelligence Context
Robert A. Gordon (1997)