The Spanish General Knowledge Norms

The thousand-question Spanish general knowledge database

“…The present Data Report introduces a new database of general knowledge questions akin to that of Nelson and Narens (1980) and its updates and adaptations by Tauber et al (2013) or Duñabeitia et al (2016). In a similar fashion to its predecessors, the items included in this database span a wide variety of topics, ensuring that no advantage is conferred to people who are well-versed in a specific field of knowledge.…”

“…Yet, in spite of all this, general knowledge is still highly valued by individuals, and is usually regarded as one of the hallmarks of what we consider to be a "cultured person". Thus, it comes as no surprise that psychologists have remained interested in the acquisition and retainment of this type of data over the years (e.g., Bäckman and Lipinska, 1993;Murayama and Kuhbandner, 2011;Coane and Umanath, 2019) and that much effort has been invested into creating and updating scales as a means to measure a person's general knowledge (Duñabeitia et al, 2016;Nelson and Narens, 1980;Jalbert, Newman and Schwarz, 2019;Tauber, Dunlosky, Rawson, Rhodes and Sitzman, 2013;Martín-Luengo, Zinchenko, Alekseeva and Shtyrov, 2020).…”

“…Thus, a simple translation of the questions is not enough to apply them to a foreign population, and a new norming process is required. In this line, Duñabeitia et al (2016) created a Spanish adaptation of the Tauber et al (2013) set by eliminating all questions that were not considered to have cross-cultural applicability, and they collected norms with a Spanish sample. However, while this made the database applicable to a Spanish population, it also meant the set was reduced from 300 questions to only 132.…”

Russian Norms for 500 General-Knowledge Questions

“…This somewhat complicated cross-cultural comparison of our results with other samples obtained in other languages and cultures. A follow-up step of this research line could be to improve this database incorporating questions used in other studies (e.g., Tauber et al, 2013 ; Duñabeitia et al, 2016 ).…”

“…Recently, Tauber et al ( 2013 ) conducted a study to update the results of Nelson and Narens in which possible differences among US states were also considered and controlled in terms of accuracy and other measures. Along the same lines, Duñabeitia et al ( 2016 ) ran a normative study of GKQs in Spain to provide a cross-cultural validation of Tauber's data with a Spanish population. This research illustrates the need for similar normative studies in each country and languages, which should be culturally and linguistically specific.…”