How IQ tests became identity, praise for intelligence trained fear of error, the gifted child became a digital trophy — and what The Society of Tantrums sets against that: mental endurance, not the number.
Isabel de Fátima Alvim Braga
Original: https://revistapahnorama.com.br/2026/09/11/superdotacao-e-altas-habilidades-o-numero-o-treino-e-o-destino/
The thesis
The book The Society of Tantrums starts from a claim the IQ market does not like to hear: past a certain point, the number stops predicting what the family expects it to predict. Above IQ 120, chances of personal and professional success converge — and grit, mental endurance, is what separates those who persist from those who collect certificates. The 1990s marshmallow measured waiting, not vocabulary. The child at 125 who cannot wait is not a misunderstood genius: it is a child without training in friction.
This does not cancel the factor
General intelligence exists as a statistical construct: different batteries correlate and predict school performance moderately. Denying g is as ideological as turning it into a horoscope. The contemporary problem is another: the test left its original use — finding who needed help at school — and became identity, product, acceleration cut, piece of litigation and Reels content. The 130 on the report does the same social work as ASD on the neighbouring report: it organises benefit, school, parental narrative and feed.
An IQ does not become fate just because the scale was re-edited. Praise of “you are a genius” does not become self-esteem. A like does not become attachment. A company number does not become expertise.
From Binet to the market
In 1905 Alfred Binet and Théodore Simon did not want to rank France. They wanted a cut to find children the Third Republic school was losing. William Stern, in 1912, froze the metaphor: IQ = (mental age / chronological age) × 100. The book asks the obvious the manual does not ask: does it make sense to use 1912 arithmetic as if it described the 2025 brain?
David Wechsler, in 1939, dropped the age ratio and created the deviation around 100 (SD 15). Hence WISC-III (1991), WISC-IV (2003) and WISC-V (2014). Each re-edition is sold as an improvement. Few studies, the book notes, validate those versions in the population that exists now: child with unrestricted screens, short sleep, little free play and parents who already know the test format.
Gold standard of itself
Validity is an instrument’s capacity to measure what it claims to measure in the population in which it will be used. In IQ the circle is almost perfect. The WISC is validated against the WAIS, Raven against WISC, Woodcock-Johnson against both. High correlation is presented as proof that all measure intelligence. They measure, in large part, the same kind of performance on a standardised task. That is factor g — and it is also a test recognising its sibling.
Internal validity breaks when the environment changes, the examiner hints, the child trained the format, sleep was poor. External validity breaks when the norm is another country, another decade, another class. The book is explicit: IQ tests in general were not validated for heavy screen users or for several neurodivergent profiles — and still decide high ability or intellectual disability.
The psychologist does not “use a test”: they buy the right to administer it. Kits are restricted to those with a licence — Pearson, Hogrefe, Vetor, Casa do Psicólogo — and the entry price already selects who enters the report market. In 2025–2026 the WISC-IV kit runs about R$3,900–R$4,200 at retail; WAIS-III R$2,750–R$3,500; WASI R$1,730–R$2,000; Raven’s Coloured Matrices R$450–R$670. That is only the case. Each administration burns official protocol. Vineland and support scales add more. Who sets up a high-ability or IQ practice spends R$8,000–R$15,000 for the minimum shelf Satepsi recognises — then rebought paper without end. The assessment that the kit authorises leaves the family at R$1,500–R$4,000. The number 130 that becomes identity on the internet begins, before that, as an invoice item.
What psychometrics actually supports: full-scale WISC-V reliability is high (about 0.95 in manuals). Isolated indices are less stable. IQ predicts school moderately — better than chance, worse than fate. When there is a large discrepancy among indices, DSM itself warns that the single number may be uninterpretable.
Dweck: praising intelligence worsens the result
In 1998 Claudia Mueller and Carol Dweck published in JPSP six experiments with 412 fifth-graders. After a set of items (derived from a nonverbal IQ test) on which most did well, one third heard: “You must be smart at this.” Another third heard: “You must have worked hard.” A third group only learned they had done well.
What followed is the opposite of what the giftedness market sells. Children praised for intelligence began to prefer easy tasks — to keep looking smart. After a hard set (induced failure), they attributed the error to lack of ability, lost persistence and pleasure, and, on return to items equivalent to the first, they got worse. Those praised for effort wanted the challenge, attributed error to strategy and improved on the return.
Dweck’s summary: praising intelligence, far from inflating self-esteem, teaches the child to fear failure and avoid risk. Praising process teaches that intelligence is worked. “You are gifted,” written on the report, repeated in the family group and posted on Instagram, is the industrial version of the experimental condition that worsened performance.
Fixed mindset: intelligence is gold one has or does not have. The goal becomes looking smart. Error is a verdict. Growth mindset: skill develops with deliberate practice. Error is information. The theory was over-popularised and sometimes becomes a school poster. That does not erase the 1998 finding. The high-ability label, when it becomes public identity, is a fixed-mindset apparatus: the child learns that her value is the number. Protecting the number becomes more urgent than learning.
Gladwell: after 120, other things move to the front
In Outliers (2008) Malcolm Gladwell popularised two theses that speak directly to Braga’s chapter. The first is the threshold. IQ predicts up to a point; from about 120, extra points stop translating into measurable advantage in the real world. The analogy is height in basketball: one must be tall enough; after that come speed, reading of the game, nerve. An IQ of 125 is not, for that reason, “less Nobel” than an IQ of 170. Terman, in the twentieth century, chased child geniuses and watched adult life scatter — including outside the pantheon.
The second thesis is the 10,000-hour rule, a journalistic reading of K. Anders Ericsson on deliberate practice. Practice is not what one does after becoming good; it is what makes one good. Talent without a chance to train does not become expertise. The rule was contested and qualified — later meta-analyses show practice explains part, not nearly everything, and that at the elite the hour gap shrinks. The core that matters here survives the correction: above the threshold, the differential ceases to be the test point and becomes persistence, opportunity, environment and the so-called “other skills” — social, emotional, practical.
Braga and Gladwell meet without citing each other. The book speaks of mental endurance; Outliers of preparation. Both refuse the cult of the isolated number. The Brazilian high-ability market does the opposite: it sells the point above 130 as if it were already the career. What Gladwell does not authorise: saying IQ is irrelevant. What he authorises: saying that, past the threshold, the rest of life — character, training, luck, mental health — weighs more than the next standard deviation. Whoever locks the child onto “130” is optimising the variable that is already saturated.
High IQ in childhood is also a risk
Giftedness exists. Not in the absurd proportion Instagram shows. The child’s IQ does not change because her Instagram asserts a number.
Isolation among peers, vocabulary ahead of age, school boredom and emotional intensity are not an Instagram invention. The literature, however, does not authorise the romantic myth of the suffering genius nor the symmetric myth of the immune genius.
Asynchronous development — cognition ahead of emotional regulation — is frequently described. Perfectionism, performance anxiety, difficulty finding cognitive peers and, in some studies, more internalising symptoms appear in slices of the identified population. A systematic review (Child Psychiatry & Human Development, 2022) found mixed results.
The most inconvenient datum for the report market came from a large community sample (Weyns et al.): adolescents with IQ ≥ 120, without a formal label, were not worse — and sometimes were better — than those of average ability. Those officially identified as gifted reported worse adjustment on several outcomes. The label, not only the IQ, weighs. That fits Dweck. Identifying can open school. Identifying and celebrating the trait as essence can close the child on herself. High ability without endurance is an inflated curriculum and a raw nerve.
The child as trophy
There is an affective economy of childhood IQ that the test does not measure. The number becomes the parents’ medal. The child is presented as evidence of family genetics, of “conscious parenting,” of moral superiority dressed as neuroscience. In meetings, the school group, the profile, the child ceases to be a subject and becomes a shop window. A trophy has an owner. A trophy cannot rust in public. Hence the training for retesting, the refusal of the hard item (“I don’t want to look stupid”), the crisis when the school grade does not match the report, the comparison with the cousin at 118. Childhood becomes a permanent campaign to maintain the brand. No one asks whether the child sleeps, has a friend, tolerates boredom, laughs without an audience.
Exposing a “gifted” minor online — and Brazil’s Digital ECA
Profiles of “high-ability mothers,” WISC stories, thumbnails with “IQ 145 at age 7,” enrichment-routine lives: the child is the product. The audience is an algorithm. Consent is a fiction when the adult who decides profits in reach, mentorship sales or validation.
Law 15.211 of 17 September 2025 — Digital Statute of the Child and Adolescent, the Digital ECA — has been in force since 17 March 2026. It obliges technology providers to prevent exposure and recommendation of content that adultifies, exploits or puts a minor at risk; accounts up to 16 linked to a guardian; age verification; duty to remove and notify in serious cases. It was not written only for pornography and gambling. It was also written for the use of a minor’s image and life as content. Publishing the report, the number and the child’s face on an open platform punctures the spirit of the law even when no one “monetises” explicitly.
Law 15.436/2026 and the register the market will feed
In June 2026 Brazil gained the National Policy for Students with High Abilities or Giftedness (Law 15.436): national register at the Education Ministry, specialised support, acceleration, recognition of twice-exceptionality (AH/SD with ASD, ADHD, dyslexia). The 2025 School Census recorded about 56,000 identified students — and a void in thousands of municipalities. Public under-notification and private over-notification coexist. The government vetoed mandatory mass screening. The gatekeeper became, in large measure, the private report. Without a transparent public criterion, the 130 that was bought and the 130 that was found mix in the same register.
Clinics, companies and those who issue their own proof
The pattern is that of the ASD essay. The clinic assesses, sells the enrichment package, reassesses, issues a report for the school and, if needed, for the judge. Whoever profits from continuity of the label rarely has an incentive to say “it was training, it was not g.” There are identification courses, online Raven kits, WISC preparation. Whoever administers the test should not sell the programme the report itself indicates.
If no one asks whether the child is happy, what is the test for?
This is the question the instrument does not contain. The WISC has vocabulary, blocks, digits, matrices. It has no item for sleep, for a friend, for a family lunch without a screen, for the capacity to lose a game and stay at the table. The high-ability report describes a percentile. It does not describe whether the child can stand boredom, fears erring in public, has already been introduced three times this week as “the genius of the house.”
A test serves when the question is operational: does this child need acceleration in this subject? Is intellectual disability to be investigated? Does a discrepant profile suggest a learning disorder, not a “gift”? Outside that, the number becomes cheap metaphysics. If the battery rises and the child shrinks; if the percentile impresses and recess is a desert; if the feed grows and sleep vanishes — the test answered the wrong question.
The Society of Tantrums names it: virtue signalling. Power without control, said the Pirelli epigraph in Braga’s chapter, is nothing. IQ without endurance, without peers, without privacy and without a question about happiness is the same engine without a brake. Measure, when it is the case. Forget the number enough for the work — and childhood — to begin. The rest is Wechsler on Instagram.
What the book sets against this
The book does not ask for the end of tests. It asks for the end of the oracle. Teach waiting without a screen. Let the sum be wrong and be redone. Do not buy the 130 on Saturday to present it on Monday. Do not film the result. Do not turn a child into evidence. Praise specific effort (“you stayed with that item”), not essence (“you are gifted”). Above 120, train what Gladwell calls the rest and the book calls endurance: persistence, friction, the real world.
And the society of tantrums, when it wins a high-ability report, acceleration without effort and a thousand likes on the IQ story, does not cease to be what it was: an elegant way of not doing the hard thing.
Notes and sources
Synthesis from A Sociedade da Birra (Isabel Braga, 2025) and open literature consulted in 2026. Does not replace individual assessment.
Braga, I. A sociedade da birra. 1st ed. Rio de Janeiro, 2025. ISBN 978-65-01-03962-6. Amazon: https://www.amazon.com.br/dp/6501039622 — Kindle: https://www.amazon.com.br/dp/B0F3PHMYYT
Mueller C.M., Dweck C.S. JPSP, 75(1), 33–52, 1998. Six studies, 412 fifth-graders.
Dweck C.S. Mindset. Later popular articles.
Gladwell M. Outliers, 2008. IQ threshold ~120; 10,000-hour rule (reading of Ericsson). Later qualifications: Macnamara et al.
Ericsson K.A., Krampe R.T., Tesch-Römer C. Psychol Rev, 1993.
Weyns T. et al. High cognitive ability and mental health: community sample of adolescents. Formal gifted label associated with worse adjustment; high IQ without label, not.
Systematic review, giftedness and socioemotional problems: Child Psychiatry & Human Development, 2022. Mixed results.
Law 15.211 of 17 September 2025 (Digital ECA). In force 17/03/2026.
Law 15.436/2026. National Policy for Students with High Abilities or Giftedness. 2025 School Census: about 56,000 identified students.
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