Browsing by Author "Suonpää, Maarit"

The main goal of this study was to investigate what kinds of beliefs higly intelligence persons have about intelligence itself; do they consider intelligence as a fixed trait that people are born with or something in what they can affect themselves. In the light of the previous studies, I argue that people with higher intelligence would consider intelligence as something they can self make a difference in. Secondly I’m investigating how these beliefs correlate with beliefs about other aspects of intelligence. Finaly I’m investigating does person’s sex or educational backround affect their beliefs about intelligence. This study’s target group, the higly intelligence persons, were all official members of Finland’s Mensa. The data for this study was collected by electrical questionnare, on Finland’s Mensa’s official Facebook-page and on their own web site. In february 2016 alltogether 148 people answered to this questionnare, 88 of them were males, 58 of them were females. The results of this study indicate, that my targer group’s epistemological beliefs are very heterogeneous. One’s high intelligence quotient doesn’t necessarely correlate with person’s higher level thinking. The beliefs of the nature of intelligence correlated most with beliefs of musicality. Person’s sex or educational backround showed no statistical significance to their epistemological beliefs.