The concept of intelligence
A
AFrom one angle, intelligence is something everybody understands; from another, nobody does. Put differently, each of us carries an unspoken sense of what intelligence is — what psychologists call an implicit theory — yet none can say for certain what it really consists of. What follows examines not intelligence itself, but the ways people picture it in their minds. One might ask why that picture should matter, when surely it is intelligence itself, not opinion about it, that deserves attention. The reply is that there are at least four grounds on which people's thinking about intelligence is worth studying.
B
BThe first is that the private beliefs people hold about intelligence govern how they size up their own minds and those of others. To make sense of the judgements individuals reach about ability, their own and other people's, their implicit theories are a sensible place to begin. Take a parent: it is that parent's private notion of how language matures that decides the age at which they start correcting a child's speech and, more broadly, the age at which the child is thought ready for one mental task or another. The same holds beyond the home. Anyone interviewing candidates for a job draws on such beliefs when choosing whom to appoint, and so does anyone picking the people they wish to befriend. Knowledge of implicit theories matters, in short, because these theories are put to work daily, wherever people form judgements about one another.
C
CA second consideration concerns researchers rather than ordinary people. The explicit theories scientists eventually put forward grow out of the implicit theories they started from, so it is worth bringing those starting assumptions to light. An implicit theory supplies a framework, one especially valuable for marking out the rough boundaries of a phenomenon that remains poorly understood. It can also reveal which features earlier studies dwelt on and which they ignored.
D
DA third use arises too. Once a researcher suspects that the explicit theories in circulation are mistaken or misleading, implicit theories can act as a check. Should a study turn up little resemblance between the implicit and explicit theories, one reading is that the implicit theories are at fault; but it is every bit as possible that the explicit ones are, and then call for correction or filling out. Some implicit theories of intelligence, for instance, point to places where our explicit accounts of the construct ought to be widened.
E
EA fourth and final reason is that implicit theories throw light on differences of a developmental and cultural kind. Different intellectual feats, as noted, are expected of children at different ages — but just how those expectations vary is shaped, in no small degree, by culture. A youngster brought up inside a Western style of schooling will almost inevitably be held to standards unlike those set for a youngster reared outside any such system.
F
FElsewhere I have argued that three broad implicit theories exist concerning where intelligence sits within society (Ravndal, 2004). For convenience these may be labelled the Kesslerian, the Vargan and the Nadeauvian. The labels are borrowed only loosely, not strictly, from the political outlooks of Aldous Kessler, Mirela Varga and Etienne Nadeau, three statesmen with a prominent place in their country's political history.
G
GOn the Kesslerian account, which recalls the older doctrine of rule by a class of guardian-sages, human beings enter the world with unequal endowments of intelligence, so that those given less of it need the guiding hand of those given more — whether such guardians are called government officials or something grander. A conviction of this sort seems to lie beneath the work of Calderwood and Reyes (1996), who anticipated the rise of a high-ability elite obliged to shoulder responsibility for the mass of less able people supposedly unfit to manage their own affairs. Leave those people to themselves, the reasoning goes, and what follows will be what has supposedly always followed: a slide into disorder.
H
HEquality of opportunity, not of outcome, is where the Vargan view begins. Opportunities may lie open to everyone, yet people neither seize them to the same degree nor earn the same rewards for what they make of them; here reward simply tracks accomplishment, so that whoever achieves little takes home less than whoever achieves much. Education, then, exists not to single out or cultivate an elite, as the Kesslerian tradition would wish, but to hand every child the chance to draw the fullest use from whatever abilities they already have. My own position sits close to this one (Ravndal, 2004).
I
IThe Nadeauvian view maintains that people are equal not just as human beings but in their actual competencies that any one person would carry out the business of government, or of a jury, or of almost any post of responsibility, as ably as the next. Democracy, read this way, treats its citizens as essentially interchangeable, specialised skills alone excepted; and even those can be acquired through learning. It follows that institutions apt to lift one group above another are neither called for nor wanted.
J
JImplicit theories of intelligence, and of how intelligence relates to society, very likely warrant a closer look than they have had, since they so often work as the buried premises beneath explicit theories and beneath the very experimental designs later received as scientific contributions. Only when scholars bring their implicit theories, and with them their assumptions, into open view are they likely to catch what colleagues actually mean as those colleagues set out their explicit theories and their data.
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Question 1 - 3
Choose the correct section, A-J.
A
B
C
D
E
F
G
H
I
J
1.
the point that researchers' underlying assumptions deserve greater scrutiny because they sit beneath formal scientific work
2.
a comment on how the intellectual demands placed on children depend partly on their cultural background
3.
a description of how an informal theory helps to outline the limits of a phenomenon that is not yet well understood