Intelligence

Harcourt Brace College Publishers

Chapter One

INTELLIGENCE
AND INDIVIDUALITY

Every society features its ideal human being. The ancient Greeksvalued the person who displayed physical agility, rational judgment,and virtuous behavior. The Romans highlighted manly courage, andfollowers of Islam prized the holy soldier. Under the influence of Confucius,Chinese populations traditionally valued the person who wasskilled in poetry, music, calligraphy, archery, and drawing. Among theKeres tribe of the Pueblo Indians today, the person who cares forothers is held in high regard.

    Over the past few centuries, particularly in Western societies, a certainideal has become pervasive: that of the intelligent person. Theexact dimensions of that ideal evolve over time and setting. In traditionalschools, the intelligent person could master classical languagesand mathematics, particularly geometry. In a business setting, the intelligentperson could anticipate commercial opportunities, take measuredrisks, build up an organization, and keep the books balancedand the stockholders satisfied. At the beginning of the twentieth century,the intelligent person was one who could be dispatched to the farcorners of an empire and who could then execute orders competently.Such notions remain important to many people.

    As the turn of this millennium approaches, however, a premium hasbeen placed on two new intellectual virtuosos: the "symbol analyst"and the "master of change." A symbol analyst can sit for hours infront of a string of numbers and words, usually displayed on a computerscreen, and readily discern meaning in this thicket of symbols.This person can then make reliable, useful projections. A master ofchange readily acquires new information, solves problems, forms"weak ties" with mobile and highly dispersed people, and adjusts easilyto changing circumstances.

    Those charged with guiding a society have always been on the outlookfor intelligent young people. Two thousand years ago, Chineseimperial officials administered challenging examinations to identifythose who could join and direct the bureaucracy. In the Middle Ages,church leaders searched for students who displayed a combination ofstudiousness, shrewdness, and devotion. In the late nineteenth century,Francis Galton, one of the founders of modern psychological measurement,thought that intelligence ran in families, and so he looked forintelligence in the offspring of those who occupied leading positions inBritish society.

    Galton did not stop with hereditary lineages, however. He alsobelieved that intelligence could be measured more directly. Beginningaround 1870, he began to devise more formal tests of intelligence, onesconsistent with the emerging view of the human mind as subject tomeasurement and experimentation. Galton thought that more intelligentpersons would exhibit greater sensory acuity, and so the first formalmeasures of intelligence probed the ways in which individualsdistinguished among sounds of different loudness, lights of differentbrightness, and objects of different weight. As it turned out, Galton(who thought himself very intelligent) bet on indices of intelligencethat proved unrevealing for his purposes. But in his wager on thepossibility of measuring intelligence, he was proved correct.

    Since Galton's time, countless people have avidly pursued the bestways of defining, measuring, and nurturing intelligence. Intelligencetests represent but the tip of the cognitive iceberg. In the United States,tests such as the Scholastic Assessment Test, the Miller Analogies Test,and the various primary, secondary, graduate, and professional examinationsare all based on technology originally developed to test intelligence.Even assessments that are deliberately focused on measuringachievement (as opposed to "aptitude" or "potential for achievement")often strongly resemble traditional tests of intelligence. Similartesting trends have occurred in many other nations as well. It is likelythat efforts to measure intelligence will continue and, indeed, becomemore widespread in the future. Certainly, the prospect of devisingrobust measures of a highly valued human trait is attractive, for example,for those faced with decisions about educational placement oremployment. And the press to determine who is intelligent and to doso at the earliest possible age is hardly going to disappear.

    Despite the strong possibility that intelligence testing will remainwith us indefinitely, this book is based on a different premise, namely,that intelligence is too important to be left to the intelligence testers.Just in the past half century, our understanding of the human mindand the human brain has been fundamentally altered. For example, wenow understand that the human mind, reflecting the structure of thebrain, is composed of many separate modules or faculties. At the sametime, in the light of scientific and technological changes, the needs anddesires of cultures all over the world have undergone equally dramaticshifts. We are faced with a stark choice: either to continue with thetraditional views of intelligence and how it should be measured or tocome up with a different, and better, way of conceptualizing thehuman intellect. In this book, I adopt the latter tack. I present evidencethat human beings possess a range of capacities and potentials—multipleintelligences—that, both individually and in consort, can be put tomany productive uses. Individuals can not only come to understandtheir multiple intelligences but also deploy them in maximally flexibleand productive ways within the human roles that various societieshave created. Multiple intelligences can be mobilized at school, athome, at work, or on the street—that is, throughout the various institutionsof a society.

    But the task for the new millennium is not merely to hone our variousintelligences and use them properly. We must figure out how intelligenceand morality can work together to create a world in which agreat variety of people will want to live. After all, a society led by"smart" people still might blow up itself or the rest of the world.Intelligence is valuable but, as Ralph Waldo Emerson famously remarked,"Character is more important than intellect." That insight applies atboth the individual and the societal levels.

ORGANIZATION OF THE BOOK

    In Chapter 2, I describe the traditional scientific view of intelligence.I introduce my own view—the theory of multiple intelligences—inChapter 3. While this theory was developed nearly two decades ago, ithas not remained static. Thus, in Chapters 4 and 5, I consider severalnew candidate intelligences, including naturalist, spiritual, existential,and moral ones. In Chapter 6, I address some of the questions and criticismsthat have arisen about the theory and I dispel some of the moreprominent myths. I treat other controversial issues in Chapter 7. And Iexplore in Chapter 8 the relationships among intelligence, creativity,and leadership.

    The next three chapters focus on ways in which the theory ofmultiple intelligences can be applied. Chapters 9 and 10 are devoted to adiscussion of the theory in scholastic settings, and in chapter 11 I discussits applications in the wider world. Finally, returning to the issuesraised in Chapter 1, in Chapter 12 I explore my answer to theprovocative question "Who owns intelligence?"

    Since my presentation of the theory almost twenty years ago, anenormous secondary literature has developed around it. And manyindividuals have propagated the theory in various ways. In the appendices,I present an up-to-date listing of my own writings on the theory,writings by other scholars who have devoted books or major articlesto the theory, selected miscellaneous materials, and key individuals inthe United States and abroad who have contributed to the developmentof the theory or related practices. I provided a similar, but muchsmaller, listing of resources in Multiple Intelligences: The Theory inPractice, completed in 1992. I am humbled by the continued andgrowing interest in the theory, and proud that it has touched so manypeople all over the world.

Chapter Two

BEFORE
MULTIPLE INTELLIGENCES

A TALE OF TWO BOOKS

    In the fall of 1994, an unusual event occurred in the book-publishingindustry. An eight-hundred-page book, written by two scholarsand including two hundred pages of statistical appendices, was issuedby a general trade publisher. The manuscript had been kept underembargo and therefore had not been seen by potential reviewers.Despite (or perhaps because of) this secrecy, The Bell Curve, byRichard J. Herrnstein and Charles Murray, received front-page coveragein the weekly news magazines and became a major topic of discussionin the media and around dinner tables. Indeed, one would havehad to go back half a century to a landmark treatise on black-whiterelations, Gunnar Myrdal's An American Dilemma, to find a social sciencebook that engendered a comparable buzz.

    Even in retrospect, it is difficult to know fully what contributed tothe notoriety surrounding The Bell Curve. None of the book's majorarguments were new to the educated public. Herrnstein, a Harvardpsychology professor, and Murray, an American Enterprise Institutepolitical scientist, argued that intelligence is best thought of as a singleproperty distributed within the general population along a bell-shapedcurve. That is, comparatively few people have very high intelligence(say, IQ over 130), comparatively few have very low intelligence (IQunder 70), and most people are clumped together somewhere inbetween (IQ from 85 to 115). Moreover, the authors adduced evidencethat intelligence is to a significant extent inherited—that is, within adefined population, the variation in measured intelligence is due primarilyto the genetic contributions of one's biological parents.

    These claims were fairly well known and hardly startling. But Herrnsteinand Murray went further. They moved well beyond a discussionof measuring intelligence to claim that many of our current socialills are due to the behaviors and capacities of people with relativelylow intelligence. The authors made considerable use of the NationalLongitudinal Survey of Youth, a rich data set of over 12,000 youthswho have been followed since 1979. The population was selected insuch a way as to include adequate representation from various social,ethnic, and racial groups; members of the group took a set of cognitiveand aptitude measures under well controlled conditions. On the basisof these data, the authors presented evidence that those with low intelligenceare more likely to be on welfare, to be involved in crime, tocome from broken homes, to drop out of school, and to exhibit otherforms of social pathology. And while they did not take an explicitstand on the well-known data showing higher IQs among whites thanamong blacks, they left the clear impression that these differences weredifficult to change and, therefore, probably were a product of geneticfactors.

    I have labeled the form of argument in The Bell Curve "rhetoricalbrinkmanship." Instead of stating the unpalatable, the authors leadreaders to a point where they are likely to draw a certain conclusion ontheir own. And so, while Herrnstein and Murray claimed to remain"resolutely neutral" on the sources of black-white differences in intelligence,the evidence they presented strongly suggests a genetic basis forthe disparity. Similarly, while they did not recommend eugenic practices,they repeatedly used the following form of reasoning: Socialpathology is due to low intelligence, and intelligence cannot be significantlychanged through societal interventions. The reader is drawn,almost ineluctably, to conclude that "we" (the intelligent reader, ofcourse) must find a way to reduce the number of "unintelligent"people.

    The reviews of The Bell Curve were primarily negative, with themajor exception of those in politically conservative publications.Scholars were extremely critical, particularly in regard to the allegedlinks between low intelligence and social pathology. Not surprisingly,the authors' conclusions about intelligence have been endorsed bymany psychologists who specialize in measurement and on whosework much of the book was built.

    Why the fuss over a book that offered few new ideas and dubiousscholarship? I would not minimize the skill of the publisher, who keptthe book under wraps from scholars while making sure that it got intothe hands of people who would promote it or write at length about it.The application of seemingly scientific objectivity to racial issues onwhich many people hold private views may also have contributed tothe book's success. But my own, admittedly more cynical, view is thata demand arises every twenty-five years or so for a restatement of the"nature," or hereditary explanation, of intelligence. Supporting thisview is the fact that the Harvard Educational Review in 1969 publisheda controversial article titled "How much can we boost scholasticachievement?" The author, the psychologist Arthur Jensen, harshlycriticized the effectiveness of early childhood intervention programslike Head Start. He said that such programs did not genuinely aid disadvantagedchildren and suggested that perhaps black children neededto be taught in a different way.

    Just one year after the appearance of The Bell Curve, another bookwas published to even greater acclaim. In most respects, EmotionalIntelligence, by the New York Times reporter and psychologist DanielGoleman, could not have been more different from The Bell Curve.Issued by a mass-market trade publisher, Goleman's short book wasfilled with anecdotes and presented only a few scattered statistics.Moreover, in sharp contrast to The Bell Curve, Emotional Intelligencecontained a dim view of the entire psychometric tradition, as indicatedby its subtitle: Why it can matter more than IQ.

    In Emotional Intelligence, Goleman argued that our world haslargely ignored a tremendously significant set of skills and abilities—thosedealing with people and emotions. In particular, Goleman wroteabout the importance of recognizing one's own emotional life, regulatingone's own feelings, understanding others' emotions, being able towork with others, and having empathy for others. He described waysof enhancing these capacities, particularly among children. More generally,he argued that the world could be more hospitable if we cultivatedemotional intelligence as diligently as we now promote cognitiveintelligence. Emotional Intelligence may well be the best-selling socialscience book ever published. By 1998, it had sold over 3 million copiesworldwide, and in countries as diverse as Brazil and Taiwan it hasremained on the best-seller list for unprecedented lengths of time. Onthe surface, it is easy to see why Emotional Intelligence is soappealing to readers. Its message is hopeful, and the author tells readers howto enhance their own emotional intelligence and that of others close tothem. And—this is meant without disrespect—the message of the bookis contained in its title and its subtitle.

    I often wonder whether the readers of The Bell Curve have also readEmotional Intelligence. Can one be a fan of both books? There areprobably gender and disciplinary differences in the audiences: To put itsharply, if not stereotypically, business people and tough-minded socialscientists are probably more likely to gravitate toward The Bell Curve,while teachers, social workers, and parents are probably more likely toembrace Emotional Intelligence. (However, a successor volume, Goleman'sWorking with Emotional Intelligence, sought to attract the formeraudiences, too.) But I suspect that there is also some overlap.Clearly, educators, business people, parents, and many others realizethat the concept of intelligence is important and that conceptualizationsof it are changing more rapidly than ever before.

A BRIEF HISTORY OF PSYCHOMETRICS

    By 1860 Charles Darwin had established the scientific case for theorigin and evolution of all species. Darwin had also become curiousabout the origin and development of psychological traits, includingintellectual and emotional ones. It did not take long before a widerange of scholars began to ponder the intellectual differences acrossthe species, as well as within specific groups, such as infants, children,adults, or the "feeble-minded" and "eminent geniuses." Much of thispondering occurred in the armchair; it was far easier to speculateabout differences in intellectual power among dogs, chimpanzees, andpeople of different cultures than to gather comparative data relevant tothese putative differences. It is perhaps not a coincidence that Darwin'scousin, the polymath Francis Galton, was the first to establish ananthropometric laboratory for the purpose of assembling empiricalevidence of people's intellectual differences.

    Still, the honor of having fashioned the first intelligence test is usuallyawarded to Alfred Binet, a French psychologist particularly interestedin children and education. In the early 1900s, families wereflocking into Paris from the provinces and from far-flung French territories.Some of the children from these families were having great difficultywith schoolwork. In the early 1900s, Binet and his colleagueThéodore Simon were approached by the French Ministry of Educationto help predict which children were at risk for school failure. Proceedingin a completely empirical fashion, Binet administered hundreds oftest questions to these children. He wanted to identify a set of questionsthat were discriminating, that is, when passed, such items predictedsuccess in school and when failed, the same items predicted difficulty inschool.

    Like Galton, Binet began with largely sensory-based items but soondiscovered the superior predictive power of other, more "scholastic"questions. From Binet's time on, intelligence tests have been heavilyweighted toward measuring verbal memory, verbal reasoning, numericalreasoning, appreciation of logical sequences, and ability to statehow one would solve problems of daily living. Without fully realizingit, Binet had invented the first tests of intelligence.

    A few years later, in 1912, the German psychologist Wilhelm Sterncame up with the name and measure of the "intelligence quotient," orthe ratio of one's mental age to one's chronological age, with the ratioto be multipled by 100 (which is why it is better to have an IQ of 130than one of 70).

    Like many Parisian fashions of the day, the IQ test made its wayacross the Atlantic—with a vengeance—and became Americanizedduring the 1920s and 1930s. Whereas Binet's test had been administeredone on one, American psychometricians—led by Stanford Universitypsychologist Lewis Terman and the Harvard professor andarmy major Robert Yerkes—prepared paper-and-pencil (and, later,machine-scorable) versions that could be administered easily to manyindividuals. Since specific instructions were written out and normswere created, test takers could be examined under uniform conditionsand their scores could be compared. Certain populations elicited specialinterest; much was written about the IQs of mentally deficientpeople, of putative young geniuses, U.S. Army recruits, members ofdifferent racial and ethnic groups, and immigrants from northern, central,and southern Europe, and by the mid-1920s, the intelligence testhad become a fixture in educational practice in the United States andthroughout much of western Europe.

    Early intelligence tests were not without their critics. Many enduringconcerns were first raised by the influential American journalist WalterLippmann. In a series of debates with Lewis Terman, published in theNew Republic, Lippmann criticized the test items' superficiality andpossible cultural biases, and he noted the risks associated with assessingan individual's intellectual potential via a single, brief oral orpaper-and-pencil method. IQ tests were also the subject of countlessjokes and cartoons. Still, by sticking to their tests and their tables ofnorms, the psychometricians were able to defend their instruments,even as they made their way back and forth among the halls of academe;their testing cubicles in schools, hospitals, and employment agencies;and the vaults in their banks.

    Surprisingly, the conceptualization of intelligence did not advancemuch in the decades following the pioneering contributions of Binet,Terman, Yerkes, and their American and western European colleagues.Intelligence testing came to be seen, rightly or wrongly, as a technologyuseful primarily in selecting people to fill academic or vocationalniches. In one of the most famous—and also most cloying—quipsabout intelligence testing, the influential Harvard psychologist E. G.Boring declared, "Intelligence is what the tests test." So long as thesetests continued to do what they were supposed to do—that is, yieldreasonable predictions about people's success in school—it did notseem necessary or prudent to probe too deeply into their meanings orto explore alternative views of what intelligence is or how it might beassessed.

THREE KEY QUESTIONS ABOUT INTELLIGENCE

    Over the decades, scholars and students of intelligence have continuedto argue about three questions. The first: Is intelligence singular, or arethere various, relatively independent intellectual faculties? Purists—fromCharles Spearman, an English psychologist who conducted research inthe early 1900s, to his latter-day disciples Herrnstein and Murray—havedefended the notion of a single, supervening "general intelligence."Pluralists—from the University of Chicago's L. L. Thurstone, who in the1930s posited seven "vectors of the mind," to the University of SouthernCalifornia's J. P. Guilford, who discerned up to one hundred and fifty"factors of the intellect"—have construed intelligence to be composed ofmany dissociable components. In his much cited The Mismeasure ofMan, the paleontologist Stephen Jay Gould argued that the conflictingconclusions reached on this issue simply reflect alternative assumptionsabout a particular statistical procedure ("factor analysis") rather thanabout "the way the mind really is." More specifically, depending uponthe assumptions made, the procedure called "factor analysis" can yielddifferent conclusions about the extent to which different test items do(or do not) correlate with one another. In the ongoing debate amongpsychologists about this issue, the psychometric majority favors a generalintelligence perspective.

    The general public, however, generally focus on a second, even morecontentious question: Is intelligence (or are intelligences) predominantlyinherited? Actually, this is by and large a Eurocentric question.In the Confucius-influenced societies of East Asia, it is widely assumedthat individual differences in intellectual endowment are modest andthat personal effort largely accounts for achievement level. Interestingly,Darwin was sympathetic to this viewpoint. He wrote to hiscousin Galton, "I have always maintained that, excepting for fools,men did not differ much in intelligence, only in zeal and hard work."In the West, however, there is more support for the view—firstdefended vocally by Galton and Terman, and echoed recently by Hernsteinand Murray—that intelligence is inborn and that a person can dolittle to alter his or her quantitative intellectual birthright.

    Studies of identical twins reared apart provide surprisingly strongsupport for the "heritability" of psychometric intelligence (the intelligencetapped in standard measures like an IQ test). That is, if onewants to predict someone's score on an intelligence test, it is on theaverage more relevant to know the identity of the biological parents(even if the individual has had no contact with them) than the identityof the adoptive parents. By the same token, the IQs of identical twinsare more similar than the IQs of fraternal twins. And contrary to bothcommon sense and political correctness, IQs of biologically relatedindividuals actually grow more similar, rather than more different,after adolescence. (This trend could be a by-product of general healthiness,which aids performance on any mental or physical measure,rather than a direct result of native intellect reasserting itself.)

    While the statistics point to significant heritability of IQs, manyscholars still object to the suggestion that biological lineage largelydetermines intelligence. They argue, among other things:

• The science of behavioral genetics was developed to work with animals other than humans. In any event, it is a new science that is changing rapidly.

• Since researchers cannot conduct genuine experiments with human beings (such as randomly assigning identical and fraternal twins to different homes), behavioral genetic conclusions involve unwarranted extrapolations from necessarily messy data.

• Only people from certain environments—chiefly middle-class Americans—have been studied, so we cannot know about the "elasticity" of human potential across more diverse environments.

• Because they look alike, identical twins are more likely to elicit similar responses from others in their environment.

• Generally, identical twins reared apart were placed in backgrounds similar to those of their biological parents, in terms of race, ethnicity, social class, and so forth.

• Identical twins reared apart did share one environment from conception to birth.

    Even without such findings for support, many of the general publicas well as scholars simply feel uncomfortable with the view that cultureand child rearing are impotent when stacked against the powersof the gene. They point to the enormous differences between individualsraised in different cultural settings (or even different cultures withinone country), and they cite the often impressive results of their ownand others' efforts to rear children who exhibit certain traits and values.Of course, the resulting differences among children are not necessarilyan argument against genetic factors. After all, different racialand ethnic groups may differ in respect to their genetic makeup, onintellectual as well as physical dimensions. And children with differentgenetic makeups may elicit different responses from their parents.

    Most scholars agree that even if psychometric intelligence is largelyinherited, it is not possible to pinpoint the reasons for differences inaverage IQ between groups. For instance, the fifteen-point differencetypically observed in the United States between African-American andwhite populations cannot be readily explained, because it is not possiblein our society to equate the contemporary (let alone the historical)experiences of these two groups. The conundrum: One could only ferretout genetic differences in intellect (if any) between black and whitepopulations in a society that was literally color-blind.

    A third question has intrigued observers: Are intelligence testsbiased? In early intelligence tests, the cultural assumptions built intocertain items are glaring. After all, who except the wealthy could drawon personal experiences to answer questions about polo or fine wines?And if a test question asks respondents whether they would turn overmoney found in the street to the police, might responses not differ formiddle-class respondents and destitute ones? Would the responses notbe shaped by the knowledge that the police force is known to be hostileto members of one's own ethnic or racial group? However, testscorers cannot consider such issues or nuances, and therefore scoreonly orthodox responses as correct. Since these issues resurfaced in the1960s, psychometricians have striven to remove the obviously biaseditems from intelligence measures.

    It is far more difficult, though, to deal with biases built into the testsituation. For example, personal background certainly figures intosomeone's reactions to being placed in an unfamiliar surrounding,instructed by an interrogator who is dressed in a certain way andspeaks with a certain accent, and given a printed test booklet to fill outor a computer-based test to click. And as the Stanford psychologistClaude Steele has shown, the biases prove even more acute in caseswhen the test takers belong to a racial or ethnic group widely consideredto be less smart than the dominant group (who are more likely tobe the creators, administrators, and scorers of the test), and whenthese test takers know their intellect is being measured.

    Talk of bias touches on the frequently held assumption that tests ingeneral, and intelligence tests in particular, are inherently conservativeinstruments—tools of the establishment. Interestingly, some test pioneersthought of themselves as social progressives who were devisinginstruments that could reveal people of talent, even if they came from"remote and apparently inferior institutions" (to quote wording usedin a catalogue for admission to Harvard College in the early 1960s).And occasionally, the tests did reveal intellectual diamonds in therough. More often, however, the tests indicated the promise of peoplefrom privileged backgrounds (as evidenced, for instance, in the correlationbetween wealthy areas' ZIP codes and high IQ scores). Despitethe claims of Herrnstein and Murray, the nature of the causal relationbetween IQ and social privilege has not been settled; indeed, it continuesto stimulate many dissertations in the social sciences.

    Paradoxically, the extensive use of IQ scores has led to the tests notbeing widely administered anymore. There has been much legal wranglingabout the propriety of making consequential decisions about education(or, indeed, life chances) on the basis of IQ scores; as a result, manypublic school officials have become test shy. (Independent schools arenot under the same constraints and have remained friendly to IQ-stylemeasurements—the larger the applicant pool, the friendlier the admissionsoffice!) By and large, IQ testing in the schools is now restricted to casesin which there is a recognized problem (such as a suspected learningdisability) or a selection procedure (such as determining eligibility foran enrichment program that serves gifted children). Nevertheless, intelligencetesting—and, perhaps more importantly, the line of thinkingthat gives rise to it—have actually won the war. Many widely usedscholastic measures are thinly disguised intelligence tests—almostclones thereof—that correlate highly with scores on standard psychometricinstruments. Virtually no one raised in the developed worldtoday has gone untouched by Binet's deceptively simple invention of a centuryago.

ATTACKS ON THE INTELLIGENCE ESTABLISHMENT

    Although securely ensconced in many corners of society, the conceptof intelligence has in recent years undergone its most robust challengessince the days of Walter Lippmann and the New Republic crowd.People informed by psychology but not bound by psychometricians'assumptions have invaded this formerly sacrosanct territory. Theyhave put forth their own conceptions about what intelligence is, how(and even whether) it should be measured, and which values should beinvoked in shaping the human intellect. For the first time in manyyears, the intelligence establishment is clearly on the defensive, and itseems likely that the twenty-first century will usher in fresh ways ofthinking about intelligence.

    The history of science is a tricky business, and particularly so whenone sits in the midst of it. The rethinking of intelligence has beenaffected especially by the perspectives of scholars who are not psychologists.For instance, anthropologists, who spend their lives immersedin cultures different from their own, have called attention to theparochialism of the Western view of intelligence. Some cultures do noteven have a concept called intelligence, and others define intelligencein terms of traits that Westerners might consider odd—obedience orgood listening skills or moral fiber, for example. These scholars alsohave pointed out the strong and typically unexamined assumptionbuilt into testing instruments: that performance on a set of unrelateditems, mostly drawn from the world of schooling, can somehow besummed up to yield a single measure of intellect. From their perspective,it makes far more sense to look at a culture's popular theory ofintellect and to devise measures or observations that catch such formsof thinking on the fly. As the cross-cultural investigator Patricia Greenfieldhas remarked, with respect to the typical Western testing instrument,"You can't take it with you."

    Neuroscientists are equally suspicious of the psychologists' assumptionsabout intellect. Half a century ago, there were still neuroscientistswho believed that the brain was an all-purpose machine and thatany portion of the brain could subserve any human cognitive orperceptual function. However, this "equipotential" position (as it wascalled) is no longer tenable. All evidence now points to the brain asbeing a highly differentiated organ: Specific capacities, ranging fromthe perception of the angle of a line to the production of a particularlinguistic sound, are linked to specific neural networks. From this perspective,it makes much more sense to think of the brain as harboringan indefinite number of intellectual capacities, whose relationship toone another needs to be clarified.

    It is possible to acknowledge the brain's highly differentiated natureand still adhere to a more general view of intelligence. Some investigatorsbelieve that nervous systems differ from one another in the speedand efficiency of neural signaling, and that this characteristic mayunderlie differences in individuals' measured intelligence. Some empiricalsupport exists for this position, though no one yet knows whethersuch differences in signaling efficiency are inborn or can be developed.Those partial to the general view of intelligence also point to theincreasingly well-documented flexibility (or plasticity) of the humanbrain during the early years of life. This plasticity suggests that differentparts of the brain can take over a given function, particularly whenpathology arises. Still, noting that some flexibility exists in the organizationof human capacities during early life is hardly tantamount toconcluding that intelligence is a single property of a whole brain. Andthe early flexibility evidence runs counter to the frequently voicedargument of "generalists" that intelligence is fixed and unchangeable.

    Finally, the trends in computer science and artificial intelligence alsomilitate against the entrenched view of a single, general-purpose intellect.When artificial intelligence was first developed in the 1950s and1960s, programmers generally viewed problem solving as a genericcapacity and contended that a useful problem-solving program shouldbe applicable to a variety of problems (for example, one should be ableto use a single program to play chess, understand language, and recognizefaces). The history of computer science has witnessed a steadyaccumulation of evidence against this "general problem-solver" tradition.Rather than setting up programs that embrace general heuristicstrategies, scientists have found it far more productive to build specifickinds of knowledge into each program. So-called expert systems"know" a great deal about a certain domain (such as chemical spectrography,voice recognition, or chess moves) and essentially nothingabout the other domains of experience. Development of a machinethat is generally smart seems elusive—and is perhaps a fundamentallywrong-headed conceit.

    Like neuroscientists, some computer scientists have retained ageneric view of intelligence. They point to new parallel-distributed systems(PDPs) whose workings are more akin to the human brain'sprocesses than the step-by-step procedures of earlier computationalsystems. Such PDPs do not need to have knowledge built into them;like most animals, they learn from accumulated experience, even experienceunmediated by explicit symbols and rules. Still, such systemshave not yet exhibited forms of thinking that cut across different contentareas (as a general intelligence is supposed to do); if anything,their realms of expertise have thus far proved even more specific thanthose displayed by expert systems based on earlier computer models.

    The insularity of most psychological discussions came home to merecently when I appeared on a panel devoted to the topic of intelligence.For a change, I was the only psychologist. An experimentalphysicist summarized what is known about the intelligence of differentanimals. A mathematical physicist discussed the nature of matter, as itallows for conscious and intelligent behavior. A computer scientistdescribed the kinds of complex systems that can be built out of simple,nervelike units and sought to identify the point at which these systemsbegin to exhibit intelligent, and perhaps even creative, behavior. As Ilistened intently to these thoughtful scholars, I clearly realized thatpsychologists no longer own the term intelligence—if we ever did.What it means to be intelligent is a profound philosophical question,one that requires grounding in biological, physical, and mathematicalknowledge. Correlations (or noncorrelations) among test scores meanlittle once one ventures beyond the campus of the Educational TestingService.

THE RESTLESSNESS AMONG PSYCHOLOGISTS

    Even some psychologists have been getting restless, and none moreso than the Yale psychologist Robert Sternberg. Born in 1949, Sternberghas written dozens of books and several hundred articles, mostfocusing on intelligence in one way or another. Influenced by the newview of the mind as an "information-processing device," Sternbergbegan with the strategic goal of understanding the actual mentalprocesses—the discrete mental steps—someone would employ whenresponding to standardized test items. He asked what happens—on amillisecond-by-millisecond basis—when one must solve analogies orindicate an understanding of vocabulary words. What does the minddo, step by step, as it completes the analogy "Lincoln: president ::Margaret Thatcher :?" According to Sternberg, it is not sufficient toknow whether someone could arrive at the correct answer. Rather, oneshould look at the test taker's actual mental steps in solving a problem,identify the difficulties encountered, and, to the extent possible, figureout how to help this person and others solve items of this sort.

    Sternberg soon went beyond identifying the components of standardintelligence testing. First, he asked about the ways in which peopleactually order the components of reasoning: For example, how do theydecide how much time to allot to a problem, and how do they knowwhether they've made a right choice? As a cognitive scientist might putit, he probed the microstructure of problem solving. Second, Sternbergbegan to examine two previously neglected forms of intelligence. Heinvestigated the capacity of individuals to automatize familiar informationor problems, so that they can be free to direct their attention tonew and unfamiliar information. And he looked at how people dealpractically with different kinds of contexts—how they know and usewhat is needed to behave intelligently at school, at work, on thestreets, and even when one is in love. Sternberg noted that these latterforms of "practical intelligence" are extremely important for success inour society and yet are rarely, if ever, taught explicitly or testedsystematically.

    More so than many other critics of standard intelligence testing,Sternberg has sought to measure these newly recognized forms of intelligencethrough the kinds of pencil-and-paper laboratory methodsfavored by the profession. And he has found that people's ability todeal effectively with novel information or to adapt to diverse contextscan be differentiated from their success with standard IQ-test-styleproblems. (These findings should come as no surprise to those whohave seen high-IQ people flounder outside of a school setting or thosewho, at a high school or college reunion, have found their academicallyaverage or below-average peers to be the richest or most powerfulalumni at the event.) But Sternberg's efforts to create a new intelligencetest have not been crowned with easy victory. Most psychometriciansare conservative: They cling to their tried-and-true tests and believeany new tests to be marketed must correlate highly with existinginstruments, such as the familiar Stanford-Binet or Wechsler tests.

    Other psychologists have also called attention to neglected aspectsof the terrain of intelligence. For example, David Olson of the Universityof Toronto has emphasized the importance of mastering differentmedia (like computers) or symbol systems (like written or graphicmaterials) and has redefined intelligence as "skill in the use of amedium." The psychologists Gavriel Salomon and Roy Pea, bothexperts on technology and education, have noted the extent to whichintelligence inheres in the resources to which a person has access, rangingfrom pencils to Rolodexes(tm) to libraries or computer networks. Intheir view, intelligence is better thought of as "distributed" in theworld rather than concentrated "in the head." Similarly, the psychologistJames Greeno and anthropologist Jean Lave have described intelligenceas being "situated": By observing others, one learns to behaveappropriately in situations and thereby appears intelligent. Accordingto a strict situationalist perspective, it does not make sense to think ofa separate capacity called intelligence that moves with a person fromone place to another. And my colleague at Harvard, David Perkins, hasstressed the extent to which intelligence is learnable: One can mastervarious strategies, acquire different kinds of expertise, and learn tonegotiate in varied settings.

    Nearly every year ushers in a new set of books and a new ensembleof ideas about intelligence. On the heels of The Bell Curve andEmotional Intelligence came David Perkins's Outsmarting IQ,Stephen Ceci's On Intelligence: More or Less, Robert Sternberg'sSuccessful Intelligence, and Robert Coles's Moral Intelligence ofChildren. Some of the authors sought to differentiate among different formsof intelligence, such as those dealing with novel, as opposed to "crystallized,"information. Some sought to broaden the expanse of intelligence toinclude emotions, morality, creativity, or leadership. And others soughtto bring intelligence wholly or partially outside the head, situating it inthe group, the organization, the community, the media, or the symbolsystems of a culture.

    The different textures of these books are of interest chiefly to thosewithin the trade of social scientists. Outsiders are well advised not totry to follow every new warp and woof, since many will soon unravel.However, the general message is clear: Intelligence, as a construct to bedefined and a capacity to be measured, is no longer the property of aspecific group of scholars who view it from a narrowly psychometricperspective. In the future, many disciplines will help define intelligence,and many more interest groups will participate in the measurementand uses of it.

    Now I want to focus on the view of intelligence that, in my view, hasthe strongest scientific support and the greatest utility for the nextmillennium: the theory of multiple intelligences.

Continues...

Excerpted from Intelligenceby Howard Gardener Copyright © 1997 by Howard Gardener. Excerpted by permission.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.