A sweeping new synthesis of workplace data suggests that general mental ability tests are weaker predictors of job performance than long believed. Researchers pooled information from more than 109,000 workers across more than 200 contemporary samples, finding the predictive power of cognitive ability tests is less than half of the historical benchmark widely cited in textbooks. The work, published in the Journal of Business and Psychology, argues that employers should rely on a broader mix of hiring assessments rather than treating intelligence tests as a standalone gauge of future success.
General mental ability, or GMA, is described as a person’s broad capacity to learn, reason, process information and solve unfamiliar problems. In practice, standardised tests aimed at measuring this general capability are used during recruitment to estimate how well an applicant will learn job duties and perform once hired.
The traditional view in workplace psychology held that GMA was the single best predictor of job performance across occupations. This view was reinforced by a 1998 review that synthesised decades of hiring data and estimated the correlation between mental ability and performance at just over 0.50, a figure regarded as a strong link in behavioural science.
In recent years, that benchmark has been questioned because of how range restriction is treated in analyses. When firms hire mainly top-scoring candidates, the pool of employees has a narrower spread of scores than the broader applicant pool. Correcting for this, researchers estimated the true link between test scores and performance, a step that can shift apparent correlations.
A 2022 meta-analysis led by Paul Sackett argued that earlier studies applied overly aggressive range-restriction corrections, inflating the value of cognitive tests. When those datasets were recalculated with more conservative adjustments, the estimated correlation fell from about 0.51 to 0.31, though some researchers have disputed that revision. Much of the foundational work drew on studies conducted before the mid‑1980s, many involving manufacturing roles.
Three contemporary meta-analyses covering studies from 1990 to 2022, including a 2024 longitudinal analysis, reported lower correlations between cognitive ability and job performance, ranging from around 0.16 to 0.23. The new study, led by Saron Demeke of the University of Minnesota – Twin Cities, sought to merge these datasets, remove duplicates and establish a modern estimate for how well GMA predicts performance in today’s workplaces.
“For decades, general mental ability (GMA), or cognitive ability, was described as the single best predictor of job performance, but that conclusion rested largely on studies conducted before 1980, and the nature of work has changed substantially since then,” Demeke told PsyPost. “Three recent meta-analyses, or comprehensive reviews of existing studies, reported much lower estimates. These papers, including work by members of our team, drew on partially overlapping sets of studies, so their results could not simply be averaged.”
The team filtered the full datasets from the three recent meta-analyses to ensure comparability. They dropped studies using grade point averages in place of a test, relying on self-, peer- or subordinate ratings, measuring performance during training, or data collected before 1990. The process yielded 212 independent samples spanning 109,396 workers. Job performance was largely measured through supervisory ratings, with some objective measures included.
Before applying adjustments for range restriction or measurement error, the average observed correlation across the 212 modern samples was 0.14, versus 0.24 in older databases. After correcting for these factors, the contemporary correlation fell to between 0.18 and 0.22, depending on the method used. The authors propose 0.20 as the best single summary estimate for modern workplaces, a figure notably lower than the historical 0.50 benchmark and below the 0.31 estimate for older data.
The researchers preferred the equally weighted figure of 0.20 partly because the largest of the three datasets—the one comprising about 65,000 workers—came from studies of a single test, the Wonderlic, and they did not want that test to dominate the estimate. They described the choice as a judgment call.
“As an illustration, if cognitive ability scores were used to make hiring decisions, someone scoring in the top 20% on a cognitive ability test would be roughly 1.6 times as likely to be rated as an above-average performer as someone scoring in the bottom 20%,” Demeke explained.
The team highlighted two notable findings. First, the estimates remained virtually unchanged (between 0.18 and 0.22) after removing overlapping studies and applying different adjustments for bias and measurement error. Second, they tested a subset of 137 single-occupation samples matched to the Occupational Information Network, assessing three dimensions of job complexity: data (cognitive demands), people (interpersonal demands) and things (manual or technical demands).
When looking at these three dimensions, cognitive complexity alone showed virtually no relationship with how well GMA predicted performance (correlation of −0.04), and interpersonal complexity also showed no meaningful link. In contrast, manual and equipment-related demands showed a positive relationship (0.29).
Crucially, the researchers found that cognitive tests tended to be most predictive in roles that combined high cognitive demands with hands-on work. The findings suggest GMA remains particularly relevant in dynamic environments where workers must process complex information to solve technical problems.
However, the study’s authors note that this pattern diverges from a 2024 longitudinal meta-analysis that linked hands-on demands to weaker predictive power. They propose that the effect of hands-on demands may depend on whether the job also requires heavy information processing.
“Second, we expected the link to be strongest in the most mentally demanding jobs, but what we found was more nuanced,” Demeke added. “The relationship tended to be strongest in jobs that pair thinking with hands-on work, like troubleshooting, inspecting, and operating equipment. One possible explanation is that ‘hands-on’ work in many jobs today involves more than just routine physical tasks and often requires substantial information processing and problem solving.”
Emily A. Willoughby, a research assistant professor at Minnesota and a board member of the International Society for Intelligence Research, described the paper as consolidating and confirming earlier findings rather than overturning them. She cautioned against reading the numbers as proof that intelligence is irrelevant to work.
“The fact that intelligence test scores can predict job performance is very well-established, but the oft-repeated correlation of about .50 (which is pretty high, as psychological correlations go) is based almost entirely on studies done before 1980,” Willoughby told PsyPost. “There is reason to suspect that those old correlations were too generous, and Demeke et al. wanted to look only at newer data. The workforce today is clearly different than it was prior to 1980, and it’s reasonable to assume that older data doesn’t capture the modern association between cognitive ability and job performance. And when looking only at studies conducted after 1990 (and count each study once), the authors find the relationship to be closer to about .20, an estimate that seems to be remarkably resistant to correction method, weighting, and so on.”
Two explanations are offered for the smaller modern link. First, work has shifted away from individual manufacturing roles toward service and knowledge-driven tasks emphasising teamwork, communication and adaptability, which may cause supervisors to weight social and emotional skills more heavily in overall ratings. Second, the applicant pool for any given role appears more cognitively uniform than in the past; the 2024 analysis found that the spread of test scores within job-specific applicant pools narrowed by about 22% between data collected before 1973 and after 2004. This convergence reduces a test’s ability to distinguish top performers from average ones.
“The most important takeaway is that general mental ability may not relate as strongly to job performance as the field has long assumed to be true,” said Erik Gonzalez-Mulé, a professor of organisational behaviour at Indiana University who was not involved in the study. “The authors attribute that to a) the changing nature of work since the foundational studies on the validity of GMA were conducted, and b) overly generous range restriction corrections.”
Gonzalez-Mulé and others see the findings as a challenge to long-standing teaching and practice in selection. He suggested further work explore whether GMA has stronger validity in autonomous roles and whether alternatives such as interviews and personality tests exhibit similar declines over decades, noting that many predictors were based on older data and may be moving with the changing world of work.
As with all research, there are caveats. The primary outcome in the analysis is supervisor ratings, which can be noisy and less reliable than objective measures. The authors acknowledge that, in some places, the percentage declines may reflect how performance is defined and not necessarily a universal shift in the importance of cognitive ability. They also point to the concentration of data on office, administrative and sales occupations, with fewer samples from industrial production and repair roles. More research is needed across a broader range of hands-on jobs.
Despite the caveats, the study argues that cognitive ability tests still offer useful information for employers, particularly when used alongside other tools such as structured interviews and work samples, to capture both technical problem-solving and interpersonal skills while reducing adverse impact.
“Our findings do not suggest that GMA is unrelated to job performance, or that being able to learn quickly and solve problems isn’t useful at work,” Demeke concluded. “For context, it is still a better predictor of job performance than the typical informal job interview.”
“Job performance is a product of many things, including the knowledge and skills someone built up, their personality and work habits, and how well they work with others,” he added. “Cognitive ability tells us something about how someone is likely to perform, but it also leaves much of what drives performance unexplained. GMA could be best used as one part of a broader selection system alongside things like formal or structured interviews and work samples.”
The study, Is general mental ability still the best predictor of job performance? Integrating contemporary meta-analytic evidence, was authored by Saron Demeke, Paul R. Sackett, Christopher D. Nye, Yujia Li and Nathan R. Kuncel.
