by David Robson
In a later study, Sternberg recruited 110 schools (with more than 7,700 students in total) to apply the same principles to the teaching of mathematics, science and English language. Again, the results were unequivocal – the children taught to develop their practical and creative intelligence showed greater gains overall, and even performed better on analytical, memory-based questions – suggesting that the more rounded approach had generally helped them to absorb and engage with the material.
Perhaps most convincingly, Sternberg’s Rainbow Project collaborated with the admissions departments of various universities – including Yale, Brigham Young and the University of California Irvine – to build an alternative entrance exam that combines traditional SAT scores with measures of practical and creative intelligence. He found that the new test was roughly twice as accurate at predicting the students’ GPA (grade point average) scores in their first year at university, compared to their SAT scores alone, which suggests that it does indeed capture different ways of thinking and reasoning that are valuable for success in advanced education.54
Away from academia, Sternberg has also developed tests of practical intelligence for business, and trialled them in executives and salespeople across industries, from local estate agents to Fortune 500 companies. One question asked the participants to rank potential approaches to different situations, such as how to deal with a perfectionist colleague whose slow progress may prevent your group from meeting its target, using various nudge techniques. Another scenario got them to explain how they would change their sales strategy when stocks are running low.
In each case, the questions test people’s ability to prioritise tasks and weigh up the value of different options, to recognise the consequences of their actions and pre-empt potential challenges, and to persuade colleagues of pragmatic compromises that are necessary to keep a project moving without a stalemate. Crucially, Sternberg has found that these tests predicted measures of success such as yearly profits, the chances of winning a professional award, and overall job satisfaction.
In the military, meanwhile, Sternberg examined various measures of leadership performance among platoon commanders, company commanders and battalion commanders. They were asked how to deal with soldier insubordination, for instance – or the best way to communicate the goals of a mission. Again, practical intelligence – and tacit knowledge, in particular – predicted their leadership ability better than traditional measures of general intelligence.55
Sternberg’s measures may lack the elegance of a one-size-fits-all IQ score, but they are a step closer to measuring the kind of thinking that allowed Jess Oppenheimer and Shelley Smith Mydans to succeed where other Termites failed.56 ‘Sternberg’s on the right track,’ Flynn told me. ‘He was excellent in terms of showing that it was possible to measure more than analytic skills.’
Disappointingly, acceptance has been slow. Although his measures have been adopted at Tufts University and Oklahoma State University, they are still not widespread. ‘People may say things will change, but then things go back to the way they were before,’ Sternberg said. Just like when he was a boy, teachers are still too quick to judge a child’s potential based on narrow, abstract tests – a fact he has witnessed in the education of his own children, one of whom is now a successful Silicon Valley entrepreneur. ‘I have five kids and all of them at one time or another have been diagnosed as potential losers,’ he said, ‘and they’ve done fine.’
While Sternberg’s research may not have revolutionised education in the way he had hoped, it has inspired other researchers to build on his concept of tacit knowledge – including some intriguing new research on the concept of ‘cultural intelligence’.
Soon Ang, a professor of management at the Nanyang Technological University in Singapore, has pioneered much of this work. In the late 1990s, she was acting as a consultant to several multinational companies who asked her to pull together team of programmers, from many different countries, to help them cope with the ‘Y2K bug’.
The programmers were undeniably intelligent and experienced, but Ang observed that they were disappointingly ineffective at working together: she found that Indian and Filipino programmers would appear to agree on a solution to a problem, for instance, only for the members to then implement it in different and incompatible ways. Although the team members were all speaking the same language, Ang realised that they were struggling to bridge the cultural divide and comprehend the different ways of working.
Inspired, in part, by Robert Sternberg’s work, she developed a measure of ‘cultural intelligence’ (CQ) that examines your general sensitivity to different cultural norms. As one simple example: a Brit or American may be surprised to present an idea to Japanese colleagues, only to be met with silence. Someone with low cultural intelligence may interpret the reaction as a sign of disinterest; someone with high cultural intelligence would realise that, in Japan, you may need to explicitly ask for feedback before getting a response – even if the reaction is positive. Or consider the role of small talk in building a relationship. In some European countries, it’s much better to move directly to the matter at hand, but in India it is important to take the time to build relationships – and someone with high cultural intelligence would recognise that fact.
Ang found that some people are consistently better at interpreting those signs than others. Importantly, the measures of cultural intelligence test not only your knowledge of a specific culture, but also your general sensitivity to the potential areas of misunderstanding in unfamiliar countries, and how well you would adapt to them. And like Sternberg’s measures of practical intelligence, these tacit skills don’t correlate very strongly with IQ or other tests of academic potential – reaffirming the idea that they are measuring different things. As Ang’s programmers had shown, you could have high general intelligence but low cultural intelligence.
‘CQ’ has now been linked to many measures of success. It can predict how quickly expats will adapt to their new life, the performance of international salespeople, and participants’ abilities to negotiate.57 Beyond business, cultural intelligence may also determine the experiences of students studying abroad, charity workers in disaster zones, and teachers at international schools – or even your simple enjoyment of a holiday abroad.
My conversations with Flynn and Sternberg were humbling. Despite having performed well academically, I have to admit that I lack many of the other skills that Sternberg’s tests have been measuring, including many forms of tacit knowledge that may be obvious to some people.
Imagine, for instance, that your boss is a micromanager and wants to have the last say on every project – a problem many of us will have encountered. Having spoken to Sternberg, I realised that someone with practical intelligence might skilfully massage the micromanager’s sense of self-importance by suggesting two solutions to a problem: the preferred answer, and a decoy they could reject while feeling they have still left their mark on the project. It’s a strategy that had never once occurred to me.
Or consider you are a teacher, and you find a group of children squabbling in the playground. Do you scold them, or do you come up with a simple distraction that will cause them to forget their quarrel? To my friend Emma, who teaches in a primary school in Oxford, the latter is second nature; her mind is full of games and subtle hints to nudge their behaviour. But when I tried to help her out in the classroom one day, I was clueless, and the children were soon running rings around me.
I’m not unusual in this. In Sternberg’s tests of practical intelligence, a surprising number of people lacked this pragmatic judgement, even if, like me, they score higher than average on other measures of intelligence, and even if they had years of experience in the job at hand. The studies do not agree on the exact relation, though. At best, the measures of tacit knowledge are very modestly linked to IQ scores; at worst, they are negatively correlated. Some people just seem to find it easier to implicitly learn the rules of pragmatic problem solving – and that abil
ity is not very closely related to general intelligence.
For our purposes, it’s also worth paying special attention to counter-factual thinking – an element of creative intelligence that allows us to think of the alternative outcomes of an event or to momentarily imagine ourselves in a different situation. It’s the capacity to ask ‘what if . . .?’ and without it, you may find yourself helpless when faced with an unexpected challenge. Without being able to reappraise your past, you’ll also struggle to learn from your mistakes to find better solutions in the future. Again, that’s neglected on most academic tests.
In this way, Sternberg’s theories help us to understand the frustrations of intelligent people who somehow struggle with some of the basic tasks of working life – such as planning projects, imagining the consequences of their actions and pre-empting problems before they emerge. Failed entrepreneurs may be one example: around nine out of ten new business ventures fail, often because the innovator has found a good idea but lacks the capacity to deal with the challenges of implementing it.
If we consider that SATs or IQ tests reflect a unitary, underlying mental energy – a ‘raw brainpower’ – that governs all kinds of problem solving, this behaviour doesn’t make much sense; people of high general intelligence should have picked up those skills. Sternberg’s theory allows us to disentangle those other components and then define and measure them with scientific rigour, showing that they are largely independent abilities.
These are important first steps in helping us to understand why apparently clever people may lack the good judgement that we might have expected given their academic credentials. This is just the start, however. In the next chapters we will discover many other essential thinking styles and cognitive skills that had been neglected by psychologists – and the reasons that greater intelligence, rather than protecting us from error, can sometimes drive us to make even bigger mistakes. Sternberg’s theories only begin to scratch the surface.
In hindsight, Lewis Terman’s own life exemplifies many of these findings. From early childhood he had always excelled academically, rising from his humble background to become president of the American Psychological Association. Nor should we forget the fact that he masterminded one of the first and most ambitious cohort studies ever conducted, collecting reams of data that scientists continued to study four decades after his death. He was clearly a highly innovative man.
And yet it is now so easy to find glaring flaws in his thinking. A good scientist should leave no stone uncovered before reaching a conclusion – but Terman turned a blind eye to data that might have contradicted his own preconceptions. He was so sure of the genetic nature of intelligence that he neglected to hunt for talented children in poorer neighbourhoods. And he must have known that meddling in his subjects’ lives would skew the results, but he often offered financial support and professional recommendations to his Termites, boosting their chances of success. He was neglecting the most basic (tacit) knowledge of the scientific method, which even the most inexperienced undergraduate should take for granted.
This is not to mention his troubling political leanings. Terman’s interest in social engineering led him to join the Human Betterment Foundation – a group that called for the compulsory sterilisation of those showing undesirable qualities.58 Moreover, when reading Terman’s early papers, it is shocking how easily he dismissed the intellectual potential of African Americans and Hispanics, based on a mere handful of case-studies. Describing the poor scores of just two Portuguese boys, he wrote: ‘Their dullness seems to be racial, or at least inherent in the family stocks from which they came.’59 Further research, he was sure, would reveal ‘enormously significant racial differences in general intelligence’.
Perhaps it is unfair to judge the man by today’s standards; certainly, some psychologists believe that we should be kind to Terman’s faults, product as he was of a different time. Except that we know Terman had been exposed to other points of view; he must have read Binet’s concerns about the misuse of his intelligence test.
A wiser man might have explored these criticisms, but when Terman was challenged on these points, he responded with knee-jerk vitriol rather than reasoned argument. In 1922, the journalist and political commentator Walter Lippmann wrote an article in the New Republic, questioning the IQ test’s reliability. ‘It is not possible’, Lippmann wrote, ‘to imagine a more contemptible proceeding than to confront a child with a set of puzzles, and after an hour’s monkeying with them, proclaim to the child, or to his parents, that here is a C-individual.’60
Lippmann’s scepticism was entirely understandable, yet Terman’s response was an ad hominem attack: ‘Now it is evident that Mr Lippmann has been seeing red; also, that seeing red is not very conducive to seeing clearly’, he wrote in response. ‘Clearly, something has hit the bulls-eye of one of Mr Lippmann’s emotional complexes.’61
Even the Termites had started to question the values of their test results by the ends of their lives. Sara Ann – the charming little girl with an IQ of 192, who had ‘bribed’ her experimenters with a gumdrop – certainly resented the fact that she had not cultivated other cognitive skills that had not been measured in her test. ‘My great regret is that my left-brain parents, spurred on by my Terman group experience, pretty completely bypassed any encouragement of whatever creative talent I may have had’, she wrote. ‘I now see the latter area as of greater significance, and intelligence as its hand-maiden. [I’m] sorry I didn’t become aware of this fifty years ago.’62
Terman’s views softened slightly over the years, and he would later admit that ‘intellect and achievement are far from perfectly correlated’, yet his test scores continued to dominate his opinions of the people around him; they even cast a shadow over his relationships with his family. According to Terman’s biographer, Henry Minton, each of his children and grandchildren had taken the IQ test, and his love for them appeared to vary according to the results. His letters were full of pride for his son, Fred, a talented engineer and an early pioneer in Silicon Valley; his daughter, Helen, barely merited a mention.
Perhaps most telling are his granddaughter Doris’s recollections of family dinners, during which the place settings were arranged in order of intelligence: Fred sat at the head of the table next to Lewis; Helen and her daughter Doris sat at the other end, where they could help the maid.63 Each family member placed according to a test they had taken years before – a tiny glimpse, perhaps, of the way Terman would have liked to arrange us all.
2
Entangled arguments: The dangers of ‘dysrationalia’
It is 17 June 1922, and two middle-aged men – one short and squat, the other tall and lumbering with a walrus moustache – are sitting on the beach in Atlantic City, New Jersey. They are Harry Houdini and Arthur Conan Doyle1 – and by the end of the evening, their friendship will never be the same again.
It ended as it began – with a séance. Spiritualism was all the rage among London’s wealthy elite, and Conan Doyle was a firm believer, attending five or six gatherings a week. He even claimed that his wife Jean had some psychic talent, and that she had started to channel a spirit guide, Phineas, who dictated where they should live and when they should travel.
Houdini, in contrast, was a sceptic, but he still claimed to have an open mind, and on a visit to England two years previously, he had contacted Conan Doyle to discuss his recent book on the subject. Despite their differences, the two men had quickly struck up a fragile friendship and Houdini had even agreed to visit Conan Doyle’s favourite medium, who claimed to channel ectoplasm through her mouth and vagina; he quickly dismissed her powers as simple stage magic. (I’ll spare you the details.)
Now Conan Doyle was in the middle of an American book tour, and he invited Houdini to join him in Atlantic City.
The visit had begun amicably enough. Houdini had helped to teach Conan Doyle’s boys to dive, and the group were resting at the seafront when Conan Doyle decided to invite Houdini up to his hotel room f
or an impromptu séance, with Jean as the medium. He knew that Houdini had been mourning the loss of his mother, and he hoped that his wife might be able to make contact with the other side.
And so they returned to the Ambassador Hotel, closed the curtains, and waited for inspiration to strike. Jean sat in a kind of trance with a pencil in one hand as the men sat by and watched. She then began to strike the table violently with her hands – a sign that the spirit had descended.
‘Do you believe in God?’ she asked the spirit, who responded by moving her hand to knock again on the table. ‘Then I shall make the sign of the cross.’
She sat with her pen poised over the writing pad, before her hand began to fly wildly across the page.
‘Oh, my darling, thank God, at last I’m through,’ the spirit wrote. ‘I’ve tried oh so often – now I am happy. Why, of course, I want to talk to my boy ? my own beloved boy. Friends, thank you, with all my heart for this – you have answered the cry of my heart ? and of his ? God bless him.’
By the end of the séance, Jean had written around twenty pages in ‘angular, erratic script’. Her husband was utterly bewitched. ‘It was a singular scene – my wife with her hand flying wildly, beating the table while she scribbled at a furious rate, I sitting opposite and tearing sheet after sheet from the block as it was filled up.’
Houdini, in contrast, cut through the charade with a number of questions. Why had his mother, a Jew, professed herself to be a Christian? How had this Hungarian immigrant written her messages in perfect English – ‘a language which she had never learnt!’? And why did she not bother to mention that it was her birthday?
