INTELLIGENCEintelligence: verbal, logical, spatial, musical, body-kinetic, interper-
sonal and intrapersonal. Gardner’s compatriot Joy Guilford (1897–1987)
has proposed a staggering 180 different factors in intelligence, from
kinesthetics to memory prowess. The trouble with these wide-ranging
accounts is that they risk becoming so broad as to be meaningless.
Gardner’s final two intelligence-types (the interpersonal and intrap-
ersonal) resemble the idea of emotional intelligence, made famous by
Daniel Goleman in his 1995 best-selling book Emotional Intelligence:
Why It Can Matter More Than IQ. Emotional intelligence (EI) refers to
the ability to understand, recognize and manage your own and other
people’s emotions. The idea of emotional intelligence has proved popular
with the mainstream media and public, but remains controversial in
academic psychology. Critics point out, for example, that if someone
performs well on one of the EI sub-tests (for example, measuring their
understanding of their own emotions), they don’t necessarily perform
well on the others (such as a test of their ability to understand other
people’s emotions). In other words, EI probably isn’t a coherent, unitary
concept at all. Another criticism is that unlike traditional intelligence, EI
doesn’t successfully predict real-life outcomes, such as people’s success
at work. When the American Psychological Association published its
working-party report “Intelligence: Knowns and Unknowns” in 1996, the
term emotional intelligence wasn’t even mentioned.
Robert Sternberg, a former president of the American Psychological
Association, is another influential voice in the field who believes that
the traditional scientific conception of intelligence is too narrow, and
that too much emphasis is placed on g. His theory of successful intel-
ligence includes three aspects: a memory-analytic component (similar to
the traditional conception of intelligence), a creative component and a
practical component.
Measuring intelligence
Intelligence is measured using written or computerized tests, often
with a multiple-choice format. Crystallized intelligence is probed by a
series of items (i.e. a “subscale”) that focuses on vocabulary and general
knowledge, whereas tests of fluid intelligence are presented in the form
of abstract visual problems, the most famous being Raven’s Progressive
Matrices, developed in the 1930s by psychologist John C. Raven. In an
attempt to prevent cheating, official standardized intelligence tests and
their answers are only released by publishers to licensed psychologists.