HAT SIZE AND INTELLIGENCE - Essay Example

While Gardner has already proven that man have different capacities for processing information, schools today continue to focus on language and locigal-mathematics as a measure of a child’s scholastic success. However, for the purpose of clarity, these capabilities which can be measured through mental test questions are now referred to as psychometric intelligences. Other intelligences mentioned by Gardner include capacities in music, visual-spatial conceptualization, bodily-kinesthetic skills, knowledge of other persons, knowledge of ourselves (Gardner, 1983: 48).

Hat Sizes, Brain Sizes and Intelligence Over the years, new studies attempting to discover the origin of intelligences of have been launched, but despite these researches, our knowledge of the topic is still incomplete. From the beginning, however, intelligence has been related with the brain. In the 1500s, Greek and Roman philosophers thought that the more efficient brain had “the right amount of the four humours, blood, phlegm, and black and yellow bile” (Deary, 2001: Chapter 3). In the 19th century as technology started developing, scientists have focused on one factor to determine a person’s intelligence: the size of the brain. . The idea of using hat sizes to measure brain size (hence, a person’s intelligence) came from Paul Broca who said, “the brain is larger in mature adults than in the elderly, in men than that in women, in eminent men than in men of mediocre talent… Other things equal, there is a remarkable relationship between the development of intelligence and the volume of brain” (as quoted in Gould, 1996: 33).

While there have been researches that corroborated Broca’s claim, several studies have tried to disprove the connection between hat size and intelligence. In 1925, Popular Science published the article Why You May Wear a Small Hat and Still Have a Big Mind (Grahame) which attempted to compare hat sizes of famous men like President James A. Garfield, Theodore Roosevelt, etc. to those of the common American. Through the simple comparison, the article concluded that there is no connection between the hat size (hence, the size of the brain) and intelligence.

To quote, “There seems to be a closer connection between the size of a man’s body and the size of his brain than there is between the size of his brain and the power of his mind” (Grahame, 1925: 16). While Arthur Grahame’s article has shown early on that a person’s hat size cannot be used to measure his intellect, his claims were not readily accepted because he did not use statistical analysis to prove his point. H.T. Epstein utilized data on the head circumferences of white Bostonians and their vocational status to show that there is no correlation between these two variables.

Research Goal, Problem Statement and Hypothesis The main research question for this paper is: Does a person’s head circumference determines his