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Chapter 9
Intelligence and Language
How We Talk (or Do Not Talk) about Intelligence
In January 2005, the president of Harvard University, Lawrence H. Summers, sparked an uproar during a
presentation at an economic conference on women and minorities in the science and engineering workforce. During
his talk, Summers proposed three reasons why there are so few women who have careers in math, physics, chemistry,
and biology. One explanation was that it might be due to discrimination against women in these fields, and a second
was that it might be a result of women’s preference for raising families rather than for competing in academia. But
Summers also argued that women might be less genetically capable of performing science and mathematics—that
they may have less “intrinsic aptitude” than do men.
Summers’s comments on genetics set off a flurry of responses. One of the conference participants, a biologist at the
Massachusetts Institute of Technology, walked out on the talk, and other participants said that they were deeply
offended. Summers replied that he was only putting forward hypotheses based on the scholarly work assembled for
the conference, and that research has shown that genetics have been found to be very important in many domains,
compared with environmental factors. As an example, he mentioned the psychological disorder of autism, which was
once believed to be a result of parenting but is now known to be primarily genetic in origin.
The controversy did not stop with the conference. Many Harvard faculty members were appalled that a prominent
person could even consider the possibility that mathematical skills were determined by genetics, and the controversy
and protests that followed the speech led to first ever faculty vote for a motion expressing a “lack of confidence” in a
Harvard president. Summers resigned his position, in large part as a result of the controversy, in 2006 (Goldin,
Goldin, & Foulkes, 2005). [1]
The characteristic that is most defining of human beings as a species is that our large cerebral
cortexes make us very, very smart. In this chapter we consider how psychologists conceptualize
and measure human intelligence—the ability to think, to learn from experience, to solve
problems, and to adapt to new situations. We’ll consider whether intelligence involves a single
ability or many different abilities, how we measure intelligence, what intelligence predicts, and
how cultures and societies think about it. We’ll also consider intelligence in terms of nature
versus nurture and in terms of similarities versus differences among people.