How does scientists find out IQ of a person that never took any IQ test? For example Albert Einstein, he never took IQ test because at his time there wasn’t any, yet his IQ is approximated 160. Why not 130 or 190? Ans what about fictional characters, like Sherlock Holmes with IQ around 190. It’s not about achievements because it doesn’t make sense, maybe because of their conclusions?
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well, fictional characters are just that…. fictional. so Holmes IQ is fictional.
for Einstein, that IQ is estimated. there is no accurate IQ score for him, since he never took the test.
>“People who obtain PhDs in areas such as physics tend to have extremely high IQs…a combination of mathematical, verbal and spatial reasoning ability,”
[here’s a good read about his estimated IQ](https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.biography.com/.amp/news/albert-einstein-iq)
Let us start with the fictional characters, because those are easy.
The authors make them up. A character can seem so much smarter than the author or the reader because the author knows everything in his world. So the character can be seen as implausibly intelligent and intuitive.
As for nonfictional personages, like Einstein, they look at things like educational milestones and achievements to determine an IQ estimate based on what IQ means.
A person’s IQ is simply their intellectual age divided by their physical age. So if you have high school knowledge (age 16-18) at age 8 or 9, then you have an approximate IQ of 200, because you are 200% the normal value.
If you were normal, then your IQ is 100.
The current versions of the test grade on a bell curve with hard limits, so having IQs in the 200s or higher is not usually seen anymore.
Under the original intelligence quotient, Doogie Howser, MD, would have scored around 300, having graduated high school at age 6.
Keep in mind one of the current conceptualizations of intelligence is performance-based. It compares your individual performance within a cognitive domain to a normed population. Assume the physicists in your example all took an appropriately normed IQ test. Since they work in similar fields we would expect a similar range of IQ scores. Considering the cognitive demands required to work in the field, it is loosely assumed that they would outperform other people on IQ measures. Thus we can try to infer IQ scores of people from the past by finding a similar population – in this case physicists – and apply their expected IQ scores to Einstein.
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