A recent study found that more than one-third of recently published articles produced by University of Massachusetts scientists had one or more authors who stood to make money from the results they were reporting. That is, they were patent holders, or had some relationship, for example, as board members, to a company that would exploit the results. The financial interests of these authors were not mentioned ‘in the publications. If patents are needed to protect public knowledge from private claims, then simply have the publicly funded patent holders put their patents in the public domain or charge no fee for use.

In another case, financial institutions donated a very large sum to a Canadian university economics department to study "the effects of high taxation on productivity." The results may influence government policy. In such cases, the public and its political decision-makers get information only of a certain kind, because there is no private, well-funded foundation called The retarded, a term with inescapably pejorative connotations.

Second, giftedness is generally recognized as more than just a degree of intelligence, even broadly defined. Most psychologists who have studied gifted persons agree that a variety of aspects make up giftedness. Howard E.Gruber, the Swiss psychologist, believes that giftedness unfolds over the course of a lifetime and involves achievement at least as much as intelligence. Gifted people, he contends, have life plans that they seek to realize, and these plans develop over the course of many years. To measure giftedness merely in terms of a single test score would be, for Gruber, a trivialization of the concept.

Third, a given test score can mean different things to different people. An IQ score for a person who has grown up in a ghetto home and gone to an inadequate school does not have the same meaning as the same IQ score for someone who has grown up in an upper-middle-class suburban environment and gone to a well-endowed school. An IQ score also does not mean the same thing for a person whose first language is not English but who takes a test in English, as it does for a native English-speaker. Another factor is that some people are "test-anxious" and may do poorly on almost any standardized test. Based on these and similar drawbacks, it has come to be believed generally that scores have to be interpreted carefully on an individual basis.

Psychologists now believe that IQ represents only a part of intelligence, and intelligence is only one factor in both retardation and giftedness. Earlier rigid concepts in the field of intelligence measurement, which led to labeling, have had undesirable effects. The growth of a more recent concept, the malleability of intelligence, has also served to discredit labeling.