Frequently, there is debate about whether Western conceptualizations of intelligence apply to other cultures. Some theorists contest that traditional Western understandings of intelligence ignore concepts that other cultures include in their definitions of “intelligent behavior.” For example, traditional Chinese and Zimbabwean views of intelligence include a social component and the importance of wisdom (e.g., Mpofu, 2004; Yang & Sternberg, 1997). Thus, some cross-cultural psychologists believe that applying Western theories of intelligence to these groups is deficient because Western psychologists overlook behaviors that could be very intelligent in non-Western peoples' cultural and environmental context.
To test the applicability of Western views, we investigated whether Spearman’s g was present in non-Western countries (defined as a population < 50% European/White) that were unindustrialized (defined as “least developed countries” or “low middle income nations” by the United Nations) in a pre-registered study. In an exhaustive search of the literature, we found 96 unique datasets from 31 countries, totaling 50,288 individuals. We subjected each of these datasets to a principal axis exploratory factor analysis with promax rotation. Two methods (a modification of the Guttman rule and the minimum average parcel—or MAP—procedure) were used to determine the number of factors in the data. Datasets that produced more than one factor were subjected to a second-order factor analysis that would use a Schmid-Leiman solution to determine the relative contribution of higher- and lower-order factors to the explained variance in the observed variables.
Results showed that the first factor of found in these analyses explained an average of 45.8% of observed variable variance. This indicated that cognitive data taken from non-Western samples produces a first factor that explains approximately the same amount of variance as found in Western samples. The vast majority of samples (73.7%) produced only one factor in the data, regardless of the method used to select the number of factors. Of the datasets that produced more than one factor, 96.0% (24 of 25) produced a single higher-order factor when subjected to a second-level factor analysis. Only one dataset produced two higher-level factors, and even then only under a specific set of analysis decisions.
We believe that these results indicate that g is present in every non-Western culture we examined. This study is strong evidence that g is a universal characteristic of human psychology. The fact that some cultures do not recognize g or consider “intelligence” to expand beyond the cognitive realm is probably irrelevant to the study of g. We consider these findings in an evolutionary context, where g has been identified in several mammal species, including non-human primates, dogs, cats, horses, and rats. The most parsimonious explanation is that g evolved in early mammals and that later species—and later groups of humans—already had g as part of their psychology when they split off from related organisms. Therefore, we do not find it surprising that non-Western humans would exhibit g.
