one’s typical intellectual functioning in a specific situation. In their triadic
conception of thinking, including sensitivity, inclination, and the ability to
think through about a problem, only the last corresponds to what is assessed
in intelligence tests. However, they emphasize sensitivity as a bottleneck of
intellectual functioning, rather than attentional capacity (Simon, 1994),
working memory capacity (Just & Carpenter, 1992), or reasoning ability
(Kyllonen & Christal, 1990). This view is consistent with findings that in
knowledge-rich domains, as well as everyday situations, thinking shortfalls
are often caused not by the constraints of working memory but by informa-
tion uptake, that is, whether one detects relevant, critical information
(Saariluoma, 1992; see also Vicente & Wang, 1998). Sensitivity threshold is
likely determined by the level of affect triggered by a situation or message (Si-
mon, 1979). Inclination, on the other hand, indicates a person’s disposition to
act, mentally or physically, a distinct conative construct (Snow, 1992). The
ability to think through takes persistence as well as the cognitive ability to
reach a satisfactory solution. Such a dispositional view of thinking integrates
motivational, affective, and cognitive processes, and indicates the personal
organization of behavior vis-à-vis situational demands in general (i.e., per-
sonality functioning).
Trait Complexes Versus Dynamic Processes
An important step of integration from psychometric perspectives is the pos-
tulation of trait complexes, a constellation of traits across cognitive, affec-
tive, and conative trait families (Ackerman & Kanfer, chap. 5; Cronbach,
2002). The purpose of positing such a construct as a unit of analysis is to pro-
vide a richer description of human functioning vis-à-vis a task environment.
Population-based thinking is still at the core of the construct, but it becomes
multivariate rather than univariate. The multivariate approach implies that
each dimension is relatively independent of others yet interrelated, and when
combined with other traits, has added or multiplicative importance; in other
words, the whole is larger than the sum of its parts (Ackerman & Heggestad,
1997). In a similar vein, when Salovey and Mayer (1990) proposed the con-
struct of emotional intelligence, they argued that there is another layer of
intellectual competence untapped by traditional definitions of intelligence.
Instead of replacing traditional definitions of intelligence, emotional intelli-
gence simply enriches a multivariate matrix of intellectual competence
(Mayer, Salovey, & Caruso, 2002). Furthermore, instead of treating emo-
tional intelligence as a structural property of mind, they have attempted to
elucidate underlying processes responsible for the observed performance dif-
ferences in emotional intelligence measures (see Brackett, Lopes, Ivcevic,
Mayer, & Salovey, chap. 7).
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