Defining Intelligence

Frames of Mind: The Theory of Multiple Intelligences

A young girl spends an hour with an examiner. She is asked a number of questions that probe her store of information (Who discovered America? What does the stomach do?), her vocabulary (What does nonsense mean? What does belfry mean?), her arithmetic skills (At eight cents each, how much will three candy bars cost?), her ability to remember a series of numbers (5, 1, 7, 4, 2, 3, 8), her capacity to grasp the similarity between two elements (elbow and knee, mountain and lake). She may also be asked to carry out certain other tasks – for example, solving a maze or arranging a group of pictures in such a way that they relate a complete story. Some time afterward, the examiner scores the responses and comes up with a single number – the girls’ intelligence quotient, or IQ. This number (which the little girl may actually be told) is likely to exert appreciable effect upon her future, influencing the way in which her teachers think of her and determining her eligibility for certain privileges. The importance attached to the number is not entirely inappropriate: After all, the score on an intelligence test does predict one’s ability to handle school subjects, though it foretells little of success in later life.

The preceding scenario is repeated thousands of times every day, all over the world; and, typically, a good deal of significance is attached to the single score. Of course, different versions of the test are used for various ages and in diverse cultural settings. At times, the test is administered with paper and pencil rather than as an interchange with an examiner. But the broad outlines – an hour’s worth of questions yielding one round number – are pretty much the way of intelligence testing the world around.

Many observers are not happy with this state of affairs. There must be more to intelligence than short answers to short questions – answers that predict academic success; and yet, in the absence of a better way of thinking about intelligence, and of better ways to assess an individual’s capabilities, this scenario is destined to be repeated universally for the foreseeable future.

But what if one were to let one’s imagination wander freely, to consider the wider range of performances that are in fact valued throughout the world? Consider, for example, the twelve-year-old male Puluwat in the Caroline Islands, who has been selected by his elders to learn how to become a master sailor. Under the tutelage of master navigators, he will learn to combine knowledge of sailing, stars, and geography so as to find his way around hundreds of islands. Consider the fifteen-year-old Iranian youth who has committed to heart the entire Koran and mastered the Arabic language. Now he is being sent to a holy city, to work closely for the next several years with an ayatollah, who will prepare him to be a teacher and religious leader. Or, consider the fourteen-year-old adolescent in Paris, who has learned how to programme a computer and is beginning to compose works of music with the aid of a synthesizer.

A moment’s reflection reveals that each of these individuals is attaining a high level of competence in a challenging field and should, by any reasonable definition of the term be viewed as exhibiting intelligent behaviour. Yet it should be equally clear that current methods of assessing the intellect are not sufficiently well honed to allow assessment of an individual’s potentials or achievements in navigating by the stars, mastering a foreign tongue, or composing with a computer. The problem lies less in the technology of testing than in the ways in which we customarily think about the intellect and in our ingrained views of intelligence. Only if we expand and reformulate our view of what counts as human intellect will we be able to devise more appropriate ways of assessing it and more effective ways of educating it. By Howard Gardner (Rose and Kiniry 10)

When Smart is Dumb

Exactly why David Pologruto, a high-school physics teacher, was stabbed with a kitchen knife by one of his star students is still debatable. But the facts as widely reported are these:

Jason H., a sophomore and straight-A student at a Coral Springs, Florida, high school, was fixated on getting into medical school. Not just any medical school – he dreamt of Harvard. But Pologruto, his physics teacher, had given Jason an 80 on a quiz. Believing the grade – a mere B – put his dream in jeopardy, Jason took a butcher knife to school and, in a confrontation with Pologruto in the physics lab, stabbed his teacher in the collarbone before being subdued in a struggle.

A judge found Jason innocent, temporarily insane during the incident – a panel of four psychologists and psychiatrists swore he was psychotic during the fight. Jason claimed he had been planning to commit suicide because of the test score, and had gone to Pologruto to tell him he was killing himself because of the bad grade. Pologruto told a different story: “I think he tried to completely do me in with the knife” because he was infuriated over the bad grade.

After transferring to a private school, Jason graduated two years later at the top of his class. A perfect grade in regular classes would have given him a straight-A, 4.0 average, but Jason had taken enough advanced courses to raise his grade-point average to 4.614 – way beyond A+. Even as Jason graduated with highest honors, his old physics teacher, David Pologruto, complained that Jason had never apologized or even taken responsibility for the attack.

The question is, how could someone of such obvious intelligence do something so irrational – so downright dumb? The answer: Academic intelligence has little to do with emotional life. The brightest among us can founder on the shoals of unbridled passions and unruly impulses; people with high IQs can be stunningly poor pilots of their private lives.

One of psychology’s open secrets is the relative inability of grades, IQ, or SAT scores, despite their popular mystique, to predict unerringly who will succeed in life. To be sure, there is a relationship between IQs and life circumstances for large groups as a whole: Many people with very low IQs end up in menial jobs, and those with high IQs tend to become well-paid – but by no means always.

There are widespread exceptions to the rule that IQ predicts success – many (or more) exceptions than cases that fit the rule. At best, IQ contributes about 20 percent to the factors that determine life success, which leaves 80 percent to other factors. As one observer notes, “the vast majority of one’s ultimate niche in society is determined by non-IQ factors, ranging from social class to luck.”

Even Richard Herrnstein and Charles Murray, whose book The Bell Curve imputes a primary importance to IQ, acknowledge this; as they point out, “Perhaps a freshman with an SAT math score of 500 had better not have his heart set on being a mathematician, but if instead he wants to run his own business, become a U.S. Senator, or make a million dollars, he should not put aside his dreams.…the link between test scores and those achievements is dwarfed by the totality of other characteristics that he brings to life.”

My concern is with a key set of these “other characteristics,” emotional intelligence: abilities such as being able to motivate oneself and persist in the face of frustrations; to control impulse and delay gratification; to regulate one’s moods and keep distress from swamping the ability to think; to empathize and to hope. Unlike IQ, with its nearly one-hundred-year history of research with hundreds of thousands of people, emotional intelligence is a new concept. No one can yet say exactly how much of the variability from person to person in life’s course it accounts for. But what data exist suggest it can be as powerful, and at times more powerful, than IQ. Daniel Goleman, from Emotional Intelligence (Rose and Kiniry 20-21)

From Children of the Dispossed

All cultures have words that denote “intelligent.” It is a matter of common observation that in any community there are individuals who stand out in wisdom, accuracy of prediction, ability to solve problems, craftiness, or in their accumulation of traditional knowledge and technical skills. Most people are not outstanding in competence. A few are so markedly backwoard that they may be called “dull.” “Intellegent” connotes goodness, power, acitivity. In Western societies “dullness” connotes badness, impotence, passivity. Take these synonyms from Roget’s Thesaurus (1965):

Adj. intelligent, quick of apprehension, keen, acute, alive, brainy, awake, bright, quick, sharp; quick-, keen-,clear-, sharp-, -eyed, -sighted, -witted; wide awake, canny, shrewd, astute; clear-headed; far-sighted; discerning, perspicacious, penetrating, piercing, nimble-witted; sharp as a needle; alive to; clever; arch.

Wise, sage, sapient, sagacious, reasonable, rational…

Adj. un-intelligent, -intellectual, -reasoning,; brainless; having no-head; not-bright; inapprehensible.

Addle-, blunder-,muddle-, pig-headed.Weak-, feeble-minded; shallow-, rattle-, lack-brained; half-, nit-, short-, dull-, blunt-witted;

shallow-, addle-pated; dim-, short-sighted; thick-skulled; weak in the upper story.Shallow, weak, wanting, soft; dull; stupid…

And so on.Despite the ubiquity of the concept “intelligent,” the particular astute behaviours that are most valued vary from culture to culture…In Rhodesian Shona society an individual’s esteem rests upon the degree of cohesion his actions foster in his kin group. Intelligent behaviour tends to incorporate a keen awareness of interpersonal relations. Force and life are imputed to words and natural objects, and the ancestral spirits of kinfolk are regarded as involved in personal transactions. The Shona equivalent for “act intelligently” is ngware, a word that connotes caution, prudence, and diplomacy. This is markedly different from – if not antithetical to – the Western ideal of independent, individual, competitive achievement. One culture values the judicious choice and application of traditional forms; the other, the creation of new forms of problem-solving. One stresses the group and its continuity with ancestral spirits and the world of nature; the other promotes the individual who masters nature and stands out from others.) by Barry Nurcombe (Rose & Kiniry, 38)

Austrian Barry Nurcombe (b.1933) is professor of psychiatry and director of child and adolescent psychiatry at the University of Queensland in Australia. The passage here is from his work Children of the Dispossessed(1976). Hi other works include An Outline of Child Psychiatry (1972; 2nd edition 1975) and Child Mental Health and the Law (1994), co-authoried with David Partlett.

Cultural Differences in the Meaning and Concept of Intelligence

Many languages have no word that corresponds to our idea of intelligence. Definitions of intelligence often reflect cultural values. The closest Mandarin equivalent, for instance, is a Chinese character that means good brain and talented. Chinese people often associate this with traits such as imitation, effort, and social responsibility. Such traits do not constitute important elements of intelligence for most mainstream Americans.

The Baganda of East Africa use the word obugezi to refer to a combination of mental and social skills that make a person steady, cautious, and friendly. The Djerma-Sonhai in West Africa use a term that has an even broader meaning, lakkal, which is a combination of intelligence, know-how, and social skills. Still another society, the Baoule, uses the term n’glouele, which describes children who are not only mentally alert but also willing to volunteer their services without being asked.

Because of such enormous differences in the ways in which cultures define intelligence, it is difficult to make valid comparisons of this notion of intelligence from one society to another. People in different cultures not only disagree about the very nature of what intelligence is, but they also have very different attitudes about the proper way to demonstrate one’s abilities. In some cultures such as the mainstream U.S. society, individuals are typically rewarded for displaying knowledge and skills. This same behaviour may be considered improper, arrogant, or rude in societies that stress personal relationships, cooperation, and modesty.

These points are important to cross-cultural studies of intelligence because successful performance on a task of intelligence may require behavoiur that is considered immodest and arrogant in culture A ( and therefore only reluctantly displayed by members of culture A) but desirable in culture B ( and therefore readily displayed by members of culture B). Clearly, such different attitudes toward the same behaviour can result in inaccurate conclusions about differences in intelligence between culture A and culture B.

It is also difficult to compare intelligence cross-culturally for another reason. Namely, because tests of intelligence often rely on knowledge that is particular to a culture, investigators who are based in another culture may not know what to test for. A test designed for one culture is often not suitable for another, even when the test is carefully translated into a second language. For example, one US intelligence test includes the following question: “How does a violin resemble a piano?” Clearly, this question assumes prior knowledge about violins and pianos, which is a reasonable expectation of middle-class America, but not of cultures that use other musical instruments. By David Matsumoto (Rose and Kiniry 39)

David Matsumoto (b. 1959) is professor and director of the Intercultural and Emotional Research Laboratory at San Francisco State University. He is the author of more than ninety works on culture and emotion, including Culture and Modern Life (1997) and People: Psychology from a Cultural Perspective (1994), excerpted here.

Rose, Mike, and Malcolm Kiniry. Critical Strategies for Academic Thinking and Writing.

3rd Ed. Boston: Bedford’s/St. Martins, 1998