Officially—and there are very few arenas where I am empowered to invoke that descriptor—there are eight intelligences. In each case, I have reviewed the empirical evidence with respect to the candidate intelligence: and then I have concluded that the evidence warrants the positing of a separate (what I call semi-autonomous) intelligence.
Unofficially, I have speculated about the possibility of two additional intelligences: existential intelligence (the intelligence that posits and ponders Big Questions); and pedagogical intelligence (the intelligence that enables human beings to teach other human beings). In each case, there is some evidence in support of the candidate intelligence; but because I have not studied the proposed intelligence sufficiently, I have termed these “candidate intelligences”; we might say that they are consigned—at least for now—to an intellectual purgatory.
I am always on the lookout for evidence relevant to these “candidate intelligences”.
And so I read with interest a recent article (link here) in Psychological Science—arguably the most prestigious publication that reports empirical research in psychology.
Called “Tips from the Top: Do the Best Performers Really Give the Best Advice” it’s authored by David E. Levari, Daniel Gilbert, and Timothy Wilson, respected scholars.
The study examined how subjects approached a game—Word Scrabble. The learners—the test subjects— received advice from those who are knowledgeable about the game. The variable of interest: whether the degree of knowledgeability of the previous participant affected the performance of the test subjects.
First Finding: subjects were more likely to heed the advice of the best performers. No surprise!
The surprise: The best performers simply offered more advice, not advice that was better—and the amount of advice was taken by subjects as an indicator that the advice of the best performers was more worthwhile heeding.
What did I find of interest? It’s not the results per se, but rather the interpretation given by the authors. As they put it “the skills that are likely to make someone an excellent adviser—explicit knowledge of a domain and the ability to communicate that knowledge to someone who does not have it—are not necessarily the same skills that make someone an excellent performer. Those who can do are not always those who can teach… people seem to mistake quantity for quality.” The separation of expertise in a domain and ability to teach that domain to others is consistent with one of the criteria I used for the definition of intelligence—that it be separable from or independent of other abilities.
The authors suggest three reasons why advice from experts did not prove more helpful:
Highly skilled performers often execute their performances intuitively; natural talent and extensive practice may have made conscious thought unnecessary.
Even when an excellent performer does have knowledge to share, the performer may not be adept at sharing it.
Even when advice is good, the learner may not be able to follow it. Indeed, an excess of advice—no matter how applicable—can be crippling.
Of course, like all psychological research, with its share of contrivances, this study is limited in various ways. Ideally, one would want to look at instructions given by individuals who have varying degrees of expertise and of teaching experience, as well as learners with varying types and amounts of motivation. And if the sequelae of earlier ‘key experiments’ is relevant, with replication variations are likely occur in due course.
What pleases me is that researchers are now looking at the relation between expertise in performance of a set of skills and expertise in teaching that set of skills. In so doing, they may well shed light on the nature of pedagogical intelligence—and the extent to which it actually differs from already identified intelligences.
Reference
Levari, D., Gilbert, D., & Wilson, T. (2022). Tips From the Top: Do the Best Performers Really Give the Best Advice? Psychological Science, 33(5), 685-698. https://doi.org/10.1177/09567976211054089