that are valued. Sternberg and his colleagues (see Sternberg et al., 1995) have
developed tests that supposedly measurepractical intelligence(also known as
tacit knowledge). Their tests typically present subjects with a set of work-related
problems (e.g., how to achieve rapid promotion within a company) along with
choices of strategies for solving the problem (e.g., write an article on pro-
ductivity for the company newsletter, find ways to make sure that your
supervisors are aware of your accomplishments). The subjects rank-order the
strategies according to which is likely to achieve the goal. Their responses are
then compared to those of acknowledged experts or to established rules of
thumb used by experts. The greater the response overlap between subject and
expert, the higher the subject’s score on the test of practical intelligence.
A variety of studies suggest that scores on tests of practical intelligence cor-
relate moderately with success on the job (see Sternberg et al., 1995). For in-
stance, in one study, the correlation between practical intelligence test scores
and performance ratings for the category ‘‘generating new business for the
bank’’ was .56 (Wagner & Sternberg, 1985). However, scores on tests of practi-
cal intelligence are essentially unrelated to performance on standard IQ tests
(Wagner & Sternberg, 1990). For instance, among Air Force recruits, the median
correlation between scores on a test of practical intelligence and scores on var-
ious batteries of a standard IQ-type test was.07 (Eddy, 1988, in Sternberg
et al., 1995).
Similarly, Ceci and Liker (1986) found that, among avid racetrack patrons,
the complexity of reasoning about handicapping horse races and success at
predicting a horse’s speed was unrelated to their IQ performance. Dorner and
Kreuzig (1983) found that the sophistication of strategies used to solve city
management problems was unrelated to a person’s IQ. Yekovich, Walker, Ogle,
and Thompson (1990) found that expertise in football, and not IQ, predicts who
identifies the important facts in a passage about football, and who derives ap-
propriate inferences about a football game. Lave (1988) showed that subjects
who were easily able to perform algebraic calculations in the context of select-
ing which product is the best buy in a supermarket were unable to perform es-
sentially the same calculations when the calculations were presented as math
problems on a paper-and-pencil test.
The main point of the studies on creativity, social skill, and practicality is that
if we expand our sense of the intellect, we find that people are not equally
skilled in all areas. These observations suggest that the prevalence of g (the
tendency for performance on the subtests of the IQ inventory to correlate) is
largely an artifact of the restricted range of skills that the IQ inventory samples.
It is probably true that the range of skills prized in academia tends to be limited
to mathematical, reasoning, and verbal skills. Creativity, social skill, and prac-
tical skill, among other examples, are not usually emphasized in school.
Gardner’s Frames of Mind
Howard Gardner, a cognitive scientist from Harvard University, proposed an
influential theory on intelligence in a book entitledFrames of Mind(Gardner,
1983). In contrast to unitary theorists, Gardner postulated six distinct, relatively
autonomous categories of intelligence. These categories areverbal intelligence,
exemplified by the poet;logical intelligence, exemplified by the mathematician;
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