“30 Years of Research on General and Specific Abilities: Still Not Much More Than g”, 2022-03-01 ():
This paper presents a review of the current state of research on general cognitive and specific cognitive abilities.
It presents the results of a 30-year research program based on studying the predictive efficiency of these 2 types of cognitive abilities in training and job performance for a wide array of jobs.
Results consistently showed that general cognitive ability is more predictive than specific abilities.
Results of a 30-year research program indicate that specific cognitive abilities (s) provide little or no incremental validity beyond general cognitive ability (g).
Definitions of g and s are provided and examples from training and job performance are presented. All samples are large adding to confidence in the results.
On average, the increased validity for multiple regressions between using g versus g plus s was 0.02.
The weight of the evidence suggests that the increment of 0.02 is an artifact of measurement-error. An alternative ability model that fails to separate g and s is presented.
[Keywords: general cognitive ability, specific cognitive abilities, construct validity, incremental validity]