What Solving Puzzles Reveals, and What They Don’t

If your puzzle scores surprised you - whether they felt like a win, a worry, or something in between - you’re not alone. These kinds of tasks can stir up a lot. They ask us to solve problems under pressure, and for many of us, they echo the feeling of a test, even if we’re told it’s "just an activity."

But the goal here isn’t to judge anyone. It’s to invite curiosity. To open a window into how psychology studies thinking - and how our minds, identities, and emotions all come together in moments asking us to perform and succeed. Our scores are just a piece of a much larger puzzle. Let’s turn over the pieces and see how they might fit - not just into a score, but into a bigger story.

In this activity, we worked through three different kinds of puzzles:

• Math problems, where we followed logic and patterns in numbers
• Analogies, where we stretched language and relational reasoning
• Matrices, like visual logic puzzles that asked us to see patterns in space

You have a number correct for each task, 0 to 8. Each task taps into different abilities - and yet, our performance across them likely wasn’t random. For most people, the scores move together. Students who do well in math also tend to do well with visual patterns and analogies. Even though these are different skills, they’re connected by something shared.

This is one of psychology’s most consistent findings: across many types of thinking tasks, scores tend to be positively correlated. Among those completing this activity, we find exactly the correlations we expect:

• Math and matrices: r = .45
• Math and analogies: r = .50
• Matrices and analogies: r = .52

These correlations illustrate how beneath the surface differences of each task, there’s a kind of common thread - a general thinking strength that supports all of them.

Psychology calls that shared thread g, for general intelligence. Charles Spearman (1904) introduced the term after he noticed that people’s performance on different mental tasks tended to rise and fall together. When researchers run statistical analyses called factor analysis, they’re looking for patterns across many variables. It’s a way of seeing which things tend to move together - like tracing a shared fabric through different pieces of a quilt. That’s how they consistently find evidence for this underlying factor (Carroll, 1993).

So intelligence, in this context, isn’t a single skill. It’s more like a pattern - a way of describing how strengths in one kind of problem-solving often go hand-in-hand with strengths in another.

That pattern turns out to be useful. IQ scores, which are built to reflect g, do well predicting certain life outcomes: school achievement, job performance, and even health and longevity (e.g., Deary et al., 2000).

But the usefulness of IQ doesn’t make it everything. Intelligence tests leave out entire realms of human brilliance - creativity, emotional insight, cultural fluency, and more. Standardized tests can’t measure the way someone lights up a room, survives injustice, or makes others feel seen.

And there’s a deeper challenge, too: how we use IQ. While intelligence scores are predictive, they’re also powerful gatekeepers. They influence who gets into gifted programs, honors classes, and selective universities. And that means IQ can become not just a measure of opportunity, but a mechanism for distributing it - intensifying existing inequalities (Nisbett et al., 2012). In that sense, IQ isn’t only a predictor of success. It can help cause success, by opening doors for some and quietly closing them for others.

So while g helps us make sense of how the pieces fit, it doesn’t tell us everything about the picture - or how the puzzle was framed to begin with.

There’s another layer to all this - one that has nothing to do with our raw ability and everything to do with how we feel while trying to show it.

As we worked through these puzzles, we also tracked how we felt on a scale from 1 (excited, curious) to 10 (dread). That wasn’t just a throwaway question. It was a window into how emotions like anxiety shape our performance.

And the results speak volumes (figure 1).

• White and Asian men generally reported nominally positive feelings (1–2), except for math (3) which was more neutral than anxious.
• Women and people from groups negatively stereotyped in academic settings, like Latino, Black, and Indigenous students -reported a little anxiety throughout (3–4), and even more on math (5 – a little on edge).

This pattern matches what psychology calls stereotype threat - a phenomenon where awareness of negative stereotypes creates extra pressure. When people worry they might confirm a stereotype, especially around intelligence, anxiety can actually undermine performance - even when they’re fully capable (Steele & Aronson, 1995).

It’s not just in someone’s head. It’s in the air.

And that’s not a personal failing - it’s a pattern shaped by social context. When stereotypes whisper "you don’t belong here," it preoccupies part of our brain just so we can keep functioning. That kind of mental load pulls focus, drains memory, and leaves less brainpower for the task itself (Schmader & Johns, 2003). It’s like trying to sprint while carrying a heavy backpack.

So if our scores felt lower than expected, especially in math, and we noticed that anxious flutter in our chest? That’s not a sign we weren’t capable. It’s a sign of how deeply performance is shaped by the space we’re in.

These puzzle scores reflect a mix of things: our current cognitive strengths, the kinds of problems we’re more comfortable with, and the emotional weight we were carrying while solving them.

They definitely don’t capture the full range of what our minds can do.

But they can tell us something.

If our scores across the three tasks were similar, we may be seeing a glimpse of g at work. If our scores varied, we might be noticing areas where we shine, or where anxiety, familiarity, or doubt might have gotten in the way. Either way, this isn’t a verdict. It’s a starting point for our reflection about how we perform.

We’re allowed to grow. We’re allowed to be more than our score.

If we felt anxious while puzzling through this activity, that doesn’t mean we’re stuck. There are ways to work with test anxiety: practicing self-talk, slowing our breathing, reframing tasks as challenges instead of threats. These strategies don’t make anxiety disappear, but they can loosen its grip, one test, or puzzle, at a time.

This activity isn’t really about numbers. It’s about noticing—how our minds work, how our feelings show up, and how the world around us shapes both.

Understanding intelligence as a construct helps us hold it gently. It's useful. Just not the be all end all. And understanding stereotype threat helps us create more compassionate spaces for everyone’s mind to thrive.

💭 If you’re curious to keep reflecting, here are a few questions to take with you:

• What moments during the puzzles felt energizing? What felt heavy or frustrating?
• Did you notice your thoughts or emotions shifting based on the type of task?
• What messages - explicit or subtle - have you heard about intelligence and who is “supposed” to have it? Have you internalized them?

Keep asking questions. Keep learning. And keep knowing we are all more than any score can capture..

Uneasy Feelings about Your Results?
Please remember your results with any activity are not who you are. Your results are a 'snapshot' of a moment when you did an activity. It's just one measure, a single thread, of the many strands of who you are. Any result is a guess with statistical error. And it's possible the measure is flawed in a way so it doesn't work for you. Please do not think of your results as definitive dogma. Instead they're a starting point for our self reflection. Please keep in mind too, self-reflection can feel uncomfortable. "Bad" feelings are not actually bad. They're information. So, even if your activity result is inaccurate and flawed, you might ask yourself what your feeling is trying to tell you? Trusted teachers, friends, and therapists can be helpful. I wrote an essay elaborating with concrete examples how we can appreciate uneasy feelings about our activity results.

Scholarly Information?
You're welcome to use Copernican Revolution activities and essays for your thesis and studies. Having information about scholarly aspects like psychometric data, activity design details, and norm calculations may help. The primary focus of my essays is connecting educated laypersons with psychology. To help people like you, with advanced academic interests, I add an appendix with each activity.

Carroll, J. B. (1993). Human cognitive abilities: A survey of factor-analytic studies. Cambridge University Press.

Deary, I. J., Whalley, L. J., Lemmon, H., Crawford, J. R., & Starr, J. M. (2000). The stability of individual differences in mental ability from childhood to old age. Intelligence, 28(1), 49–55.

Nisbett, R. E., Aronson, J., Blair, C., Dickens, W., Flynn, J., Halpern, D. F., & Turkheimer, E. (2012). Intelligence: New findings and theoretical developments. American Psychologist, 67(2), 130–159.

Schmader, T., & Johns, M. (2003). Converging evidence that stereotype threat reduces working memory capacity. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 85(3), 440–452.

Spearman, C. (1904). "General intelligence," objectively determined and measured. The American Journal of Psychology, 15(2), 201–292.

Steele, C. M., & Aronson, J. (1995). Stereotype threat and the intellectual test performance of African Americans. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 69(5), 797–811.