architecture and IQ performance. That is because nearly all of the creative
efforts are accomplished by professional architects who, as a group, do well on
IQ tests. But if one examines only professional architects, one does not find a
strong relationship between degree of creative achievement (measured by peer
ratings of creativity) and IQ performance (MacKinnon, 1962). Similarly, among
psychology graduate students, Graduate Record Exam scores did not corre-
late significantly with faculty advisor ratings of the students’ creative abilities
(Sternberg and Williams, 1997). These results suggest that people who score
very low on IQ tests tend to show less evidence of creative talent than people
who score higher on IQ tests. But among people whose IQ performance is in
the average-to-above-average range, IQ is at best only weakly related to per-
formance on tests of creativity. Creativity, then, is a different aspect of the in-
tellect or involves a different kind of motivation than the skills and motivations
that enable people to do well on IQ tests (McDermid, 1965; Richards, Kinney,
Benet, & Merzel, 1988).
Social Skill One might also consider social skill as an aspect of intelligence, al-
though IQ tests do not usually measure it. Again, social skill is a concept that is
difficult to measure objectively. Research on social skill suggests that if social
skill is measured using the same sorts of items that appear on IQ tests, then
measures of social intelligence do correlate with IQ performance. An example
of this is that memory for face–name associations and the tendency to correctly
answer multiple choice questions about what to do in social situations are cor-
related with performance on IQ tests, especially IQ tests that measure verbal
skills (Thorndike, 1936; Woodrow, 1939).
When social skill is assessed by directly observing people in social situations,
however, there seems to be almost no relationship between it and IQ perfor-
mance. Wong, Day, Maxwell, and Meara (1995) showed that people’s perfor-
mance on tests designed to measure cognitive aspects of social intelligence was
only weakly related to their performance on tests of behavioral aspects of social
intelligence. Frederiksen, Carlson, and Ward (1984) observed the interviewing
skills of medical students who had to interact with ‘‘simulated’’ patients in
several types of situations, including one in which the medical students had to
inform the patient that she had breast cancer. Various aspects of the students’
interviewing performance were rated by independent judges, in order to obtain
a social skill score for each medical student. These scores were unrelated to the
medical students’ IQ scores and unrelated to their knowledge of science, as
assessed by another test. Similarly, Rothstein, Paunonen, Rush, and King (1994)
found that social–personality variables, especially self-confidence and a will-
ingness to be the center of attention, predicted classroom performance (present-
ing convincing solutions, communicating clearly, and contributing to others’
learning) in graduate school better than did standard measures of intellectual
aptitude.
Practical Intelligence Most people recognize a distinction between academic
intelligence (book smarts) and practical intelligence (street smarts) (Sternberg,
Wagner, Williams, & Horvath, 1995). Academic intelligence as measured by
standard IQ tests is disembedded from an individual’s ordinary experience.
Practical intelligence, however, has to do with the actual attainment of goals
790 R. Kim Guenther