The Lesson of Prada

I finally got around to watching The Devil Wears Prada last night. While I found it very entertaining, I was struck by the important social commentary buried in the story. No, not the crap about finding yourself or being true to yourself or whatever nonsense it was ostensibly spouting. What it really is is a lesson about the overarching importance of intelligence in job success. As I'm sure you all know, the film is about a young midwestern Northwestern graduate (Andie Sachs), looking to break into journalism in the Big Apple, who applies for a highly coveted job as an assistant to Miranda Priestly, the frightening editor of Runway magazine (see Steve Sailer's excellent review). Before hiring her, Miranda spells out how ill-fitted the girl is for the job (other than her being, at a size 6, a bit over-sized in this milieu):

Miranda: So you don't read Runway
Andie: No...
Miranda: And before today you had never heard of me...
Andie: No...
Miranda: And you have no style or sense of fashion...
Andie: Well, um, I think that depends on what's your...
Miranda: No, no, that wasn't a question.

But Miranda takes a chance on her because of her apparent intelligence. As she explains later, thinking she might have made a mistake (because Andie was unable to find her a flight out of a hurricane-ravaged Miami):

I usually hire the same girl - stylish, slender, worships the magazine, but so often they turn out to be disappointing and - stupid. But you, with that impressive resume and the big speech about your supposed work ethic, I thought you'd be different. I said to myself, 'go on, take a chance, hire the smart, fat girl'.

But Andie succeeds spectacularly (except of course that at the end she must walk-away from this high-powered world so that she can be herself).

This theme - that the interest you have in a job is nowhere near as important as the brains you bring to it - was discussed recently in a gnxp thread commenting on Charles Murray's recent series on education. Commenter ANM points to this study, a meta-analysis of "85 years of research in personnel selection." The study found that

in the pantheon of 19 personnel measures [studied], GMA (also called general cognitive ability and general intelligence) occupies a special place, for several reasons. First, of all procedures that can be used for all jobs, whether entry level or advanced, it has the highest validity and lowest application cost.

In other words, intelligence testing is the most effective and cheapest way to predict job performance. This is true for the most analytical jobs to those jobs requiring almost no skills. But what about following your passions - isn't that an important predictor of success?

Many believe that interests are an important determinant of one's level of job performance. People whose interests match the content of their jobs (e.g., people with mechanical interests who have mechanical jobs) are believed to have higher job performance than with nonmatching interests. The validity of .10 for interests shows that this is true only to a very limited extent. To many people, this seems counterintuitive. Why do interests predict job performance so poorly? Research indicates that interests do substantially influence which jobs people prefer and which jobs they attempt to enter. However, once individuals are in a job, the quality and level of their job performance is determined mostly by their mental ability and by certain personality traits such as conscientiousness, not by their interests. So despite popular belief, measurement of work interests is not a good means of predicting who will show the best future job performance.

So there you have it - The Devil Wears Prada, Hollywood's stealth endorsement of The Bell Curve.