Cattell Culture Fair Intelligence Test: Cross-culturally fair IQ test

About the Cattell Culture Fair Intelligence Test

Raymond B. Cattell (a UK-trained psychologist who emigrated to the US and spent most of his career at the University of Illinois) was an opinionated theorist of intelligence. He believed that most IQ tests of the 1930s and 1940s were unfair to subjects from cultural or linguistic backgrounds different from the test developers. He set out in the late 1940s to build a maximally culture-fair test.

Cattell's approach used four item types: series completion (continuing a visual pattern), classification (picking the figure that does not belong), matrices (3x3 grid completion, similar to Raven), and conditions (more complex multi-rule items). All items used abstract geometric figures rather than recognizable objects or words. The test had three difficulty levels (Scale 1 for ages 4-8, Scale 2 for ages 8-13 and average adults, Scale 3 for high-ability adolescents and adults).

The CFIT became widely used in cross-cultural research from the 1950s onward and remains in commercial use today through IPAT (which Cattell founded). It is not perfectly culture-fair (no test is), but it minimizes cultural loading better than verbal tests like the Stanford-Binet or WAIS Verbal. Modern cross-cultural intelligence research typically uses Raven's Matrices and the CFIT as the standard non-verbal instruments.

The 4 subtests

Source

All test materials and historical content on this page are transcribed from:

The Cattell Culture Fair Intelligence Test (CFIT) remains under active copyright (IPAT, Institute for Personality and Ability Testing). We document its history and significance; the actual items are not in the public domain.