By Christopher Cudworth

Anyone who has ever taken the Wonderlic test knows that it is a supposed measure of your general cognitive ability. And having taken it myself, and wondered quietly to myself why I still don’t “get” math under any circumstance, I am a believer of sorts not only in the Wonderlic, but a few other tests taken over the years. It’s been astounding to see how well some of these things work in assessing who you are, and what you do, and what you can or can’t do well. Yet still I wonder about the wonders of the Wonderlic. Perhaps it’s the journalist in me, but I see flaws in relying on tests to judge the human character. The real answers are ultimately found in others ways.

Checking in and checking out

The Wonderlic test is quite popular as a qualifying tool for new employees, team building and sundry other purposes concocted by human resource departments who don’t have time to actually talk to people. Too many people looking for work.

Which is why is interesting to note that the Wonderlic test is popular among NFL teams, and was first used by none other than Tom Landry, that tight-lipped, hat-wearing dude who coached the Dallas Cowboys. Of course the Cowboys were accused of playing like a silver and blue machine, which is either a credit to the Cowboys organization or an accusation of corporate soullessness in sports. But that depends on if you bet on football or not, or have a fantasy football roster. In either of those scenarios, all you want to do is win. And that begs all kinds of questions about pro sports in general, which in the end are all about artifice, and how to support the kind that attracts enough attention for people to shove buckets of money your way.

Even Cowgirls get the blues

Take that, Wonderlic.

One must wonder if the Wonderlic test is administered to the Dallas Cowboy Cheerleaders, who (rather ironically) are quite famous for their ability to reduce cognitive abilities in many men. That gives a whole new meaning to the term Wonderlic.

Brain squish

Perhaps the Dallas Cowboys Cheerleaders are an attempt to direct attention away from the league’s rather prodigious ability to grind so many great athletes into dust by the time they retire. No matter how smart a player might be (Wonderlic or not…) when they’re starting out, it has been proven that playing NFL football can squish your brain through repeated concussions that ruin your ability to think at all.

There has even been talk that the NFL, even football as a sport at all levels may not survive the wave of litigations now surfacing. The evidence shows that the sport and its helmets flatly fail to protect its participants. You’d have to be pretty dumb to deny what’s come to light, but the NFL must certainly be doing its best to avoid the courtroom over such matters. Granted, not every player who emerges from an NFL career has a squishy brain, but there’s a whole line of guys ready to file lawsuits against the league because they can no longer remember how to tie their shoes.

Football great Dave Duerson even took his own life with a shotgun blast. But he did not shoot himself in the head.  He was smarter than that. A head shot would have destroyed evidence that his brain was traumatized by his football career. Instead he aimed at his chest so that his brain could be preserved for research and prove that something was going wrong up there that he could not control. Face facts: pro football was to blame, and no amount of cognitive testing could have prevented such a scenario. Junior Seau took his own life as well, and his family is suing the NFL as a result. There’s a pattern going on here, and it’s not one measured by the Wonderlic test.

True assessment

It seems like there should be a Wonderlic test or some other cognitive test administered to players at the start of their career and one given after they’ve finished. Let’s keep track of how many IQ points they’ve lost or what level of cognitive ability they’ve sacrificed. And it should be ongoing. Sometimes the damage shows up years later.

But that would be a just approach, and the NFL is all about entertainment, not justice. So don’t hold your breath on that one.

It all begs the question why employers like the NFL administer a test like the Wonderlic at all? Are people really intelligence commodities? Is the Wonderlic test the Great Predictor it purports to be?

 Human nature

Apparently plenty of employers still think so. Never mind that people are adaptive creatures who employ all kinds of creative workarounds to problem solve. Or that nature imbued the human species with the ability to compensate in many ways in order to survive. Our intelligence is a pliable resource that we now know relies upon multiple types of intelligences and sensory channels that enable us to take in and process  information.

The massive test that brought all that to being is called evolution, and it’s a helpful result whether you’re skinny hominoid standing semi-helpless on an open savanna or a wide receiver executing a 10-yard pass completion on the sidelines to run out time.

The only test that matters in evolution is not how others can test your abilities, but whether you succeed or not. Take that, Wonderlic. Evolution kicks your ass.

Testing, testing

People with dyslexia often learn to read and comprehend quite well. But if you start out using dyslexia as a disqualifying trait for success in academics or employment because the candidate failed a Wonderlic test, you’d lose all that potential.

People deserve better that that.

Just kidding,

Of course we must reckon as well with a curious side of human nature that avoids all sorts of tests, or questions their merit at some level. For example, what would happen if we applied the Wonderlic test people before they entered the world of world of running and riding? We might find some rather curious results.

Qualifying traits

A typical question on the Wonderlic test works like this:

When a rope is selling 20 cents per 2 feet, how many feet can you buy for 30 dollars?

Now, we all know that the way the human brain works while you’re out running is rather complex, and sometimes silly. That’s because your brain is trying to trick your body into running or riding as fast as you can. Sometimes that’s all the room you’ve got in your brain, so logic gets confused.

In facing the Wonderlic question posed above, a runner’s response to the question might go something like this,

“Let’s see: What kind of feet are we talking about? Because my feet are not exactly 12 inches. I’m a size 11, sometimes 11.5 depending on what brand of shoes I’m buying. And also the time of day can affect my feet size too. So in this case it’s really not fair to compare actual rope to actual feet, because it all depends on what brand of shoe you buy. I’m a size 11 Nike and a size 11.5 Brooks, and while both are good companies, the Nikes always look smaller even if they aren’t really smaller, and I don’t like looking down and thinking I have big feet, because it makes me feel slow. Now, what was the question again?”

And that’s how it works. When you’re out running thoughts seem to come at you like seagulls in Alfred Hitchcock’s movie The Birds. And who’s to say the runner’s answer isn’t just as legitimate as the Wonderlic version, which is based on boring things like basic facts.

And who wants to stop there? This example just proves that the Wonderlic test totally sucks because it doesn’t take all the possible variables into account when you’re talking about feet and rope and someone’s 20 cents. That’s how the mind works in the real world.

Confusing numbers

The same this goes for thinking while out riding. When cyclists encounter a typical question on the Wonderlic test, their minds might begin to assess a lot of factors. For example, here’s another Wonderlic wonder:

Which of the numbers in this group represents the smallest amount? A) 0.3 B) 0.08 C) 0.08 D) 0.33.

Now don’t tell me you have the answer already. Not if you’re a true cyclist.

Because we all know that you pretty much lose your ability to figure numbers out while you’re riding, which is the whole reason why the Strava app was invented. It does your numbers thinking for you.

Otherwise the cyclist’s brain works in weird ways when facing all those letters and numbers in the Wonderlic question. You’d first have to ask yourself, “Do these numbers pertain to my cadence, current mph or average speed?” Right away, your mind spins off into a thousand calculations, all designed to distract your brain from the pain your legs are feeling on the 9% grade you just entered.

But you keep on trying to think about cadence, mph, average speed. And think again, but it escapes you because the pain is so, so intense after 400 meters of climbing that 9% grade you’ve stumbled upon that all concepts of time and space and average speed blow up like the human body in outer space. Poof! Nothing’s left of your prior thoughts but a red mist and some new floaters in your eyes.

Real problem solving

And that’s why runners and cyclists tend to do so poorly on the Wonderlic test. Most of us have minds that operate like the hyper Genie Robin Williams character in the Disney movie Aladdin. We can’t sit still to take no stinking test, and if we do, a thousand million answers come to mind. Which explains why so many runners seem to be babbling when you hear them pass by.

Or, our mental faculties are absorbed by other important issues, like why your boobs seem to bounce more on a Tuesday in June, or whether today is a right or left day for that unit in your shorts, and how many days it is until Saturday when you can actually get out and do real distance training for once.

We runners and riders really do concentrate on all the important stuff, you see.

But if you skip the Wonderlic test and hire us anyway, we work tirelessly to find creative ways to team build, such as cutting the donuts in thirds so no one gets too fat. Now that’s a valuable career skill.

Waiting for the call

As for me, I still wonder about how I’ve actually done on the Wonderlic test at times. But they never tell you. You spend 12 minutes of your precious life scrambling to answer as many inane questions as you can and then never find out the results? Where’ the fun in that.

Too bad. Someone else owns this information about your brain. The CIA maybe, or the NSA. It’s a spooky notion these days. There’s no such thing as private information any more. In fact, I’m tracking your eyes as you read these words, and it appears you are reading them backward. So straighten up!

I admit no one has ever called me back after the Wonderlic test and said, “You’re a genius! Off the charts! Mr. E. F. Wonderlic (if he’s still alive) himself wants to talk to you about your answers. You got them all wrong, and it takes a near genius to do that.”

So I’m still waiting for that call. In the meantime, you know where to reach me and others like me. We’re out solving problems on the road. Like how to change a flat in a rainstorm, and looking for places to pee when you have a shy bladder. This is the important stuff. We all know that.