Does childhood poverty or low socioeconomic status in childhood predict lower IQ in adulthood?
- Nikola Erceg, Spencer Greenberg, and Beleń Cobeta
- Sep 21, 2024
- 2 min read
Updated: 7 days ago
Note: This is a section of a longer article. To go to the start, click here.
Not in our sample. We asked our participants two questions related to their childhood socioeconomic status: a) How wealthy or poor would they say they were growing up (on a scale from 0 = poor to 4 = wealthy), and b) Where would they put themselves on a scale from 0 = lower class to 4 = upper class while they were growing up. Correlations between IQ and both measures were very weak, basically negligible (r = 0.06 for a wealth question and r = 0.03 for the social class question; n = 3688). Here are the two scatterplots showing these correlations:
One explanation for the lack of correlation between IQ and childhood socioeconomic status could be that we did not capture the full range of childhood socioeconomic status, e.g., that we had only people with higher socioeconomic status in our sample which would decrease the correlation due to range restriction. However, this is not true as people of both higher and lower socioeconomic status were represented in our sample. Here are two plots that show the distribution of our childhood wealth and childhood class in society.
What do the other studies say?
Our results somewhat contradict previous reports about the negative relationship between childhood poverty and later cognitive functioning. For example, Najman et al. (2009) found that poverty experienced at any stage of the child's development is associated with reduced cognitive outcomes at the age of 14. Skoblow et al. (2023) provided meta-analytical estimates of the relationship between childhood socio-economic position and later-life cognitive functioning showing that the mean correlation between the two was r = 0.18.
Takeaways
In our study childhood poverty and low childhood socioeconomic status was not related to IQ, although this contradicts findings from other studies that find a modest negative correlation between these factors and IQ.
If you'd like to read the full report, of which this is a section, as one long PDF, you can download it here.
And if you'd like to understand where your intellectual strengths and weaknesses lie, try the cognitive assessment tool that we developed out of this research:
