That 'Internet Explorer Users Have Low IQs' Study Was a Hoax

What did the "study" claim?

In late July 2011, a press release from a company calling itself AptiQuant Psychometric Consulting made the rounds: online IQ tests given to more than 100,000 people supposedly showed a "substantial relationship" between cognitive ability and browser choice. Internet Explorer users fared worst, with IE6 at the bottom; Opera users scored highest. The release declared that "individuals on the lower side of the IQ scale tend to resist a change/upgrade of their browsers."

It was irresistible. Within days, the story had been picked up by NBC, Mashable, Business Insider, CNET, the BBC, the Daily Mail, PC World, and AFP. Tech people everywhere gleefully forwarded it. The conclusion was repeated so often that, as Wired's Tim Carmody later observed, the original release became irrelevant — outlets were quoting other outlets.

How was the hoax exposed?

Within days, the whole thing fell apart. The "company" AptiQuant was fake: its website was a WordPress install with content copied wholesale from a legitimate psychometric firm, Central Test, with staff names changed but headshots intact. The domain had been registered only on July 14. And on August 3, the man behind it identified himself: Tarandeep Gill, a web developer from Vancouver (he'd graduated from Georgia Tech and quit his job to work on a comparison-shopping startup).

Gill's motive was frustration. "IE6 compatibility was being a pain in the ass" while building his site, he told ReadWriteWeb. The hoax, he said, was "an honest effort to create awareness about the incompatibilities of IE versions 6.0 to 8.0" — and a demonstration of memetics, his favorite theory: strong ideas spread because people want to hear them. He apologized to Central Test for copying their material and to the IE users he had insulted.

Why does this hoax still matter?

The episode became a textbook case in media criticism: the story spread because it told a large audience exactly what it wanted to hear. Tech journalists shared an anti-IE prejudice, so nobody checked. As Scientific American's writer confessed at the time: "No matter how fact-oriented we think we are, we only really question reports that challenge our preconceived notions."

We are republishing this corrected version of our original 2011 post precisely because the original version got fooled too — it presented the "study" credulously, before the hoax was exposed. The honest record matters more than the joke. And the joke, to be fair, was pretty good: a frustrated developer created a fake psychometric company, faked a PDF, and watched the world's media do his marketing for him. The real IQ test was the one the press failed.