Successful Intelligence [Mass Market Paperback]

That having been said, I am mostly okay current psychometric, statistical, and mathematical theory and practice here, as long as one understands the strengths and limitations of the various approaches. I understand those very well, but most people don't and tend to get hung up on one or another aspect of it without having a systematic grasp of all the psychometric issues. If it weren't for that, books like Sternberg's wouldn't be necessary.

Sternberg's definition of successful intelligence is pretty common-sensical, although more difficult to quantify than the abilities typical I.Q. tests measure, but I'm okay with that.

However, the bottom line is that the real answers about intelligence are eventually going to come from the brain research areas, which was my main field. The neurobiology doesn't contradict the psychometric approach but does complement it and provides a more rigorous basis for the idea of intelligence and what it consists of. To give you just a brief example of the neurological picture, the human brain contains 60 trillion nerve cells organized into 14,000 major and minor brain centers and pathways, and each nerve cell is connected to between 3,000 and 100,000 other neurons, producing a neural network and web of almost unbelievable compexity. And in the past 50 years, neuroscientists have made considerable progress in understanding the neural basis of intelligence and of higher cognitive abilities, such as language processing and spatial ability, which have been found to be located in the temporal lobe in the case of language processing, and in the right hemisphere in the case of left-hemispheric dominant people (which is most of us).

But getting back to Sternberg's concerns, the most egregious and widespread problem with I.Q. testing, of course, is that people hung up on a single I.Q. high or low test score, which might not mean much in isolation, and the system doesn't help that situation since it attaches too much credence to them without understanding the other factors, qualifications, and exceptions to a single I.Q. score that must be taken into account.

Sternberg also spends a lot of time discussing examples of people (such as himself), who don't do very well on standard I.Q. tests and about the baleful effect such scores had on their lives. Appropos of that, I can give two much more glaring examples than Sternberg himself, notwithstanding his being a Yale professor, which I am perfectly willing to concede is pretty impressive.

In the late teens and 1920s an important Stanford psychologist, Lewis Terman, tested thousands of California schoolchildren to identify those with high I.Q.'s and then to follow them throughout their lives, to see of the early promise of their intelligence was fulfilled. Terman ended up with a group of 1300 children, who he followed from their early years until their deaths. I would suspect many if not all would be dead by now. Until they had passed away, their files remained sealed, and only Terman and his group knew their actual identities.

Anyway, many did have impressive careers as writers, scientists, lawyers, teachers, and other professionals. Despite most of them growing up during the depression in the last century, many more of them went to college and onto professional and graduate school than the overall population. That having been said, the test had two major faults or oversights in terms of the selection process: the test, which was the Stanford-Binet, an important and widely used I.Q. test, missed the two Nobel Laureates in physics, Luis Alvarez, and William Shockley. Shockley is familiar to many as the famous inventor of the transistor. Both were tested but fell below the minimum of 140 or a score of 135 for a sibling to be included. And none of the other 1300 children won a Nobel Prize. Hence, the test missed the only two Nobel Laureates in the entire group.

Also, James Watson, of Watson and Crick fame, only has an I.Q. of 115, if I remember right, and is the co-discoverer of DNA, for which they shared a Nobel Prize back in the 50's.

So obviously, I.Q isn't the whole story. I have many stories myself of people who had much lower test scores than I on any of the standardized tests, whether I.Q., the SAT, the GRE, or whatever, who did just fine in college and grad school and who often got higher grades than I, and who went on to become more successful in real life too. So as I said, Sternberg is sort of preaching to the choir in my case, and overall, I tend to agree with him that I.Q. should not be the overriding determinant in the selection and educational process that it often is, at least not without taking into consideration other factors such as special aptitudes and talents, creative abilities, grades, work and real world experience, self-discipline and willingness to work hard, and so on.

The author outlines the development of psychological testing from the time of Sir Francis Galton, one of the first to attempt to measure a wide variety of human characteristics. Although the field of Astronomy had a well established tradition of measuring reaction times to improve the accuracy of observations, Galton began measuring just about anything measurable in human beings. He used the tools developed by the astronomers to calculate group statistics and begin comparing these results between different groups. While these statistics generated a great deal of interest in human differences, they also led to a number of spurious pseudoscientific ideas.

Later, Alfred Binet and Theodore Simon were asked to develop a means of distinguishing between truly mental deficient children and children who had other problems within the Parisian school system. They produced a set of tests that could be administered by trained personnel to provide a measure of mental age. This Binet-Simon test set was used by Lewis Terman at Stanford University to design an American version, the Stanford-Binet. Later, a number of other similar tests were developed to measure intelligence and other psychological characteristics.

Such tests were individually administered and so were more useful as diagnostic tools than for screening. However, during World War I, the Army Alpha, a paper and pencil test, was developed to check mental capabilities. Afterwards, the Otis tests, civilian versions of the Army Alpha, and other group tests gained widespread usage for pre-acceptance screening in education and employment.

While some tests are labeled "intelligence" tests and others are called "aptitude" test, all of them are highly correlated with each other and have similar strengths and weaknesses. All these test are useful predictors of success in the academic environment up through the first year of graduate school. They also are fairly good predictors of certain types of vocations that are very similar to the academic environment.

However, the basic weakness of such tests is, strangely enough, the relatively low correlation between these tests and other independent measures of "intelligence". Another is the dependence of these tests on prior learning; all such tests are basically achievement tests for skills that are presumed to have been learned much earlier and thus are very inaccurate for persons from other cultures and environments. Even the so-called "culture fair" tests are not totally culture free and may have hidden problems that strongly impact the results.

The author points out that successful living requires more than the narrow mental abilities measured by most selection tests. He calls the abilities measured by such tests "analytical intelligence", but also makes a case for "creative intelligence" and "practical intelligence". These terms are his own and not necessarily used by anyone else other that his students; normally, these terms would be called "abilities" rather than "intelligence".

Intelligence tests mostly test analytical abilities -- associated with deduction or convergent production -- but the author has shown that creative abilities -- associated with induction or divergent production -- can also be measured. Moreover, he has also found ways to evaluate practical abilities -- i.e., wisdom or common sense -- to some degree.

My only problem with this book is the semantics of the title. The author is misusing the word intelligence. This mental attribute has been studied for millennia and has been a subject of experimental investigation for over a century. However, I believe his misuse of this term is a matter of "practical intelligence", for such usage attracts more popular attention than an unfamiliar term which happens to be more technically correct.

The author also defines success in very narrow terms, much like the Hollywood or Madison Avenue stereotype. While addressing the importance of cultural influences and social criteria, he fails to mention examples that do not meet the popular criterion of success. He also assumes success is the result of high achievement. Maybe not so strange a viewpoint from a Yale academic.

The author provides an extensive explanation of the problems caused by the widespread usage of such tests. Anyone who has children or aspires to higher education or certain types of jobs should read this book. It will open your eyes to the political effects of such dependency on an incomplete and flawed approach to educational and employment testing.

Highly recommended to anyone who is interested in intelligence, psychological testing, and the effects of testing on education and business. This book can also be an eye-opener for anyone who has had difficulties on standardized tests and may have problems in gaining admission to schools or obtaining jobs.

Still, the book has enough interesting remarks on the history and errors of intelligence testing to make it worth reading. If Professor Sternberg had organized the book a little better and eliminated some of the redundancies, I would have given it four or five stars. As it is, I give it three.