Intelligence, Multiple Intelligences, and Beyond: A Psychological Drama in Five Acts

By Howard Gardner

Act 1: Intelligence as a Lay Term and Concept

In many societies, and for a good many years, there has been a concept—and typically a word—like “intelligence.” It’s a lay term, and, accordingly, it has had different connotations. As an example, in Latin American countries, the capacity to listen carefully (and quietly) is often considered a marker of intelligence; in England, the capacity to speak or respond rapidly and wittily is valued. Sometimes, “intelligence” has in effect been assessed by society-mandated tests, such as the French “Bac,” the English “O” and “A” levels, or the Chinese imperial examination (these days, the “Gaokao”).

Act 2: Intelligence as Probed by a Single Instrument

With the rise of psychology and other human sciences, the desire to measure intelligence came onto the scene. Without question, the creation of the IQ test at the beginning of the 20th century was a milestone in any consideration of matters of intelligence. Alfred Binet (French), Cyril Burt (British), Lewis Terman (American), and their students, were honored for creating short instruments with high reliability which promised (or purported) to predict success in school (and presumably thereafter).

 Act 3: The Identification of Multiple Intelligences

While the IQ test has retained prominence in many educational, vocational, and medical settings, the limits to a “single” or “singular” notion of intelligence were soon apparent. Journalist, Walter Lippmann, wrote about these limitations a century ago—noting that individuals could have different kinds of intellectual strengths and could develop them in different ways—see this article. Test maker, David Wechsler, emphasized the importance (and distinctiveness) of social intelligence, noting that it was not tapped by standard IQ measures.

Forty years ago, drawing on evidence from a variety of scholarly disciplines (including genetics, neurology, and anthropology), I proposed the theory of multiple intelligences (soon abbreviated to “MI theory”). The core idea: Rather than the mind containing a single all-purpose computer, the human mind is better described as a set of relatively independent computers. In addition to the linguistic and logical-mathematical computers probed by standard IQ tests, there exist several other intelligences, including musical, spatial, bodily-kinesthetic, interpersonal, intrapersonal, and naturalist.

In identifying intelligences, I drew on an explicit set of criteria. Others have added to the list of intelligences, most prominently, Daniel Goleman with his concept of emotional intelligence—in some ways akin to the ‘personal intelligences.” And scores of articles, books, and tests claim to probe other candidates, ranging from financial, to humorous, to sexual intelligence.

Act 4: Intelligences Beyond the Human—but with Human intelligence as the Model

During the decades where intellect has come to be seen in pluralistic terms, the construct of intelligence has also been examined in many places and with respect to numerous species. There are convincing studies of the intelligence(s) of primates, mammals, insects, birds. (These are elegantly described in a new book by Ed Yong and in a just-published article in The New York Times.) And of course, with the advent of powerful computational approaches, we now have artificial intelligence, as realized in computers, deep learning algorithms, robots with notable problem-solving capacities, and the like.

Act 5: Intelligence(s) Everywhere

In a fascinating new book, Ways of Being: Animals, Plants, Machines: The Search for a Planetary Intelligence, science writer and polymath James Bridle puts forth and defends a provocative hypothesis.

While recognizing that other authorities have attributed intelligence to baboons and bees, Bridle wants to extend intelligence to all matters of life, including trees and other plants. (For a passionate argument for the intelligence of trees, see Richard Powers’ award winning novel, The Overstory.) Going beyond living entities, Bridle searches for intelligence across the natural world—perhaps intelligence can be found in mountains and oceans. In addition, of course, he acknowledges that many computational devices qualify for the descriptor of “intelligence.”

Bridle then makes an important move. He claims that underlying the way that most of us use the term “intelligence,” we are at least implicitly attributing intelligence in an ego-centric or human-centric way. We attribute ‘intelligence” to entities on the basis of the extent to which these entities embody the intellectual capacities that we as humans respect and valorize.

On Bridle’s account, this is wrong—the intellect of homo sapiens should not be the measure of all things. Instead, we should value the full swathe of entities on our planet, and what they accomplish, over vast periods of time; learn and profit from their intellectual strengths; and make common cause with them for the survival of the planet, including all of its species, be they animals or plants, gigantic or microscopic. And, though he is less decisive about this, he also cites what we can learn from natural phenomena, like oceans and mountains, and from man-made tools, ranging from wrenches to computer programs to robots.

Rather than paraphrase him further, let me quote some passages from the opening section of his book:

One way to change the nature of these relationships then, is to change the way which we think about intelligences: What it is, how it acts in the world, and who possesses it…

 Until very recently, humankind was understood to be the sole possessor of intelligence… we are just starting to open the door to an understanding of an entirely different form of intelligence; indeed, of many different intelligences…. From bonobos shaping complex tools, jackdaws training us to forage for them, bees debating the direction of their swarms, or trees that talk to and nourish one another—or something far greater and more ineffable than these mere parlor tricks—the nonhman world seems suddenly alive with intelligence and agency… Western science and popular imagination, after centuries of inattention and denial, are only starting to take them seriously… What would it mean to build artificial intelligences and other machines that were more like octopuses, more like fungi, or more like forests? What would it mean for us—to live among them? And how would doing so bring us closer to the natural world, to the earth from which our technology has sundered, and indeed sundered us from? We must find ways to reconcile our technological prowess and sense of human uniqueness with an earthy sensibility and an attentiveness to the interconnected of all things. We must learn to live with the world, rather than seek to dominate it.

…the most powerful of these is the idea that human intelligence is unique, and uniquely significant in the world. Yet as we shall see there are in fact many ways of doing intelligence, because intelligence is an active process, not just a mental capacity.

We are poisoning the world—If we do not wish to render ourselves alone and abject on the face of the earth, we must rethink every aspect of our technological society and the ideas it is founded on and we must do it fast. (pp. 10-12)

This is quite a lot to absorb! It requires us to rethink assumptions that we (as members of homo sapiens) have been making—consciously or unconsciously—as long as we have had and used a concept of intelligence.

I applaud Bridle for thinking so daringly outside of the box. His book certainly shook up my categorical schemes, if not my categorical imperative.

But I am left with two big questions:

1. If we declare everything and every entity as intelligent, then what have we actually gained? Don’t we need criteria for what counts as intelligence, and what does not; what is smart, what is stupid, what is indeterminable at the moment, and, perhaps forever? To what should we attend, what should we ignore, try to preserve, seek to change, and on what grounds? And is survival the best—or perhaps the only­—litmus test for intelligence?

2. Intelligence is not necessarily good, positive, moral, ethical. Individuals with hi IQs, however measured, have done wonderful things; but they also have done horrible things. And groups of individuals with high IQs have also been pro-social or anti-social. So, too, for individuals who exhibit high interpersonal or high bodily-kinesthetic intelligence.

Just as we need lines and boundaries for intelligence—we can’t just assume that everything is intelligent—we need lines and boundaries for what is good, for us, for other species and entities, for the planet, and indeed for the universe and all time…and what is not.

Bridle has opened up our minds—but he has also opened up a Pandora’s box.

References

Bridle, J. (2022). Ways of being: Animals, Plants, Machines, and the Search for a Planetary Intelligence. Farrar, Straus, and Giroux.

Anthes, E. (2022). The Animal Translators. The New York Times. Retrieved 1 September 2022, from https://www.nytimes.com/2022/08/30/science/translators-animals-naked-mole-rats.html.

Powers, R. (2017). The Overstory: A Novel. Norton.

Yong, E. (2022). An Immense World: How Animal Senses Reveal The Hidden Realms Around Us. Random House.

I thank Shinri Furuzawa and Ellen Winner for their comments on a draft of this essay.

Photo by Margot RICHARD on Unsplash

How MI Theory Inspired a Hit Game

By Shinri Furuzawa

I was saddened to learn that due to complications of Covid (link here) Richard Tait, co-inventor of the board game Cranium, died recently at the age of 58.

Tait created Cranium with his business partner, Whit Alexander, a friend and former colleague at Microsoft. Cranium and its sister games were hugely popular in the 1990s and 2000s, selling over 44 million copies in 22 countries before the company was sold to Hasbro in 2008 for $77.5 million. 

The original spark behind the game is part of Cranium legend. As told by Whit Alexander, Tait was on a vacation with his wife and friends when someone suggested playing a board game. Tait found that while he and his wife were “extraordinarily good” at Pictionary, the other couple “destroyed them” at Scrabble. Tait wondered why there wasn’t a game where everyone could be good at some part of the game. He wanted to develop a new game that gave everyone a chance to shine. This concept would be the key to Cranium’s success.

MI Theory as “the great inspiration”

Alexander told MI Oasis that Howard Gardner’s theory of multiple intelligences was “core” in the initial development of Cranium and that, “The original game depended on the comprehensive articulation of [MI theory].” Tait began with 4 activities: Hangman, Trivial Pursuit, Charades and Pictionary. He wanted something for what he understood as left-brained people and right-brained people—hence the brain logo and the name Cranium. Alexander, however, knew the challenge was to find a more robust framework to deliver on the promise that “everyone shines.” In researching intelligence with the conviction that people can be good at different things, MI theory “immediately popped up… and that was like an ‘aha’ moment.” Alexander and Tait came to understand it was not about left brain or right brain, it was about multiple intelligences.

Applying MI Theory to the game 

According to Alexander, the development of Cranium was an exercise in marrying multiple intelligences with a systematic subject framework and an inventory of games that had been successful over the decades. Cranium was designed to include activities which relied on as many different intelligences as possible. Players might be required to hum a song, impersonate a celebrity, draw something while blindfolded, make a clay representation of a concept, or spell a word backwards, among other challenges. (In contrast, most games at the time challenged just one or two intelligences, such as linguistic and spatial intelligences required for Scrabble).

The intelligences were embodied across four Cranium characters: Word Worm, Data Head, Star Performer, and Creative Cat. Michael Adams, a lead game maker for a design shop that was contracted to invent additional games for Cranium, explained that MI theory was filtered into these four characters which could be described as “an artistic type, a player with words, a scientist, and an actor.” Adams said, “Every time I invented something… I had to be sure that the four characters were included and, by inference, their ability and/or intelligence.”

Bringing to bear their experience working with Encarta encyclopedia at Microsoft, Tait and Alexander also considered how best to appeal to different intelligences in Cranium’s different subject categories. Alexander described their method, “We went intelligence by intelligence and looked at Encarta subject categories”—for example, predicting that someone with naturalist intelligence might be interested in geology. Considering the game was targeted at “yupsters,” geology questions might be unexpected, “Yet,” as Alexander said, “there they were, and that’s why.” 

Alexander also gave the example of musical intelligence, “We knew it wasn’t enough to ask questions about music, we needed activities that were intrinsically musical and that led directly to the ‘humdinger’ activity where you had to hum or whistle a song.”  

A Smash Hit

Cranium was a runaway success. After the original Cranium, using the same principles, the company went on to win “Game Of The Year” with four different games in five consecutive years. Alexander described one moment on the Oprah Winfrey Show when instead of plugging the game she was meant to promote, Julia Roberts, said “Yeah, yeah that’s great, but there’s this new game— Cranium, I love it, we can’t stop playing!” Their phones did not stop ringing after that, as Alexander added “Thank you, Julia Roberts!”

When asked if he was astonished at the success of the game, Alexander responded, “You have to be humble, and many things could have gone wrong and did go wrong, but we had to truthfully say we weren’t totally surprised, because we did very explicitly architect, design and passionately develop the game to deliver on this experience [where everyone shines] so we were pretty optimistic that people were going to like this game.” 

Everyone Shines

Alexander noted that after the news of Tait’s death, former Cranium employees re-connected and reminisced about what it meant to be part of the Cranium brand, “Everyone, almost to a person, said there was no daylight between Cranium brand values and the corporate culture. The single word that that best embodied it was shine.” He described the company as “a super engaged, super fun workplace… it felt like the game, people loved coming to work.” One of the company’s fun quirks was that people chose their own titles, Alexander being “Chief Noodler.” Catherine Carr led the content team for many years at Cranium as “Keeper of the Flame.” She said that beyond MI theory’s influence on game activities and content, “The underlying theory has had a tremendous impact on my professional and personal life since those days. So many companies are talking about how to be more inclusive these days, and I would observe that understanding multiple intelligences is a particularly powerful mechanism for encouraging diversity and inclusion!”

In my view, any game that encouraged people to value each player for being intelligent in their own way and to respect one another’s differences as strengths was a welcome addition to the toy and game industry. Whether in a game, work, or educational setting, a team is more likely to be successful when each person is allowed to shine and their individual intelligences and intellectual profile are respected. Howard Gardner has said that, “When our individual intelligences are yoked to positive ends, we can all pursue good work and good citizenship.” Perhaps a cooperative board game like Cranium which teaches us to celebrate “shining moments” for every player over a final result of winners and losers helps us move towards this worthy goal.

Thanks to Whit Alexander, Catherine Carr, and Michael Adams for their much appreciated reflections on MI theory and Cranium.

Photo by Andrey Metelev on Unsplash

Reflections on Existential Intelligence

It’s forty years since I first proposed “the theory of multiple intelligences,” generally abbreviated as “MI theory” or simply “MI.” The theory is a critique of the notion that there exists a single, general intelligence, adequately assessed by a single psychometric instrument, conventionally an IQ test.

In its stead, I proposed that the human brain—and the human mind—are better described as a set of relatively autonomous computational capacities, known as the multiple intelligences. IQ tests sample linguistic and logical-mathematical intelligence, in a fashion foregrounded in standard schools in the modern world. But there remain at least five other intelligences that are worth recognizing: musical, spatial, bodily-kinesthetic, interpersonal, and intrapersonal intelligence. According to the theory: Rather than possessing a single all-purpose intelligence, we human beings have at least seven intelligences; strength (or weakness) in one of the intelligences does not reliably predict strength or weakness in the remaining intelligences.

Put concretely, if we know that someone is strong (or weak) in music, what can one predict about their understanding of other persons, or of themselves? The answer: In truth, very little.

MI theory has never won over the psychometric establishment—the test makers—who continue to embrace the single IQ-style measure. But much of the rest of world—scholarly, educational, lay—embraces the idea of multiple intelligences. And thanks to the work of Daniel Goleman, there is widespread support for the idea of emotional intelligence, or EQ.

Once MI theory became well known, there have been numerous efforts to enunciate and incorporate additional intelligences—financial, sexual, humor, cooking—you name it.

The research that led to MI theory took several years to carry out and involved a sizeable research team. We examined evidence across the disciplinary spectrum—from genetics and brain science to anthropological and sociological studies. Only those candidate intelligences that registered significantly on these disparate disciplinary indices qualified as genuine intelligences.

Indeed, the core of establishing “MI theory” is the analytic procedure by which candidate intelligences are judged as valid and distinct from other intelligences.

Accordingly, before I considered adding additional intelligences to my cohort, any “candidate intelligences” had to meet the same criteria as the original septet. The only intelligence that has officially been added (as an 8th intelligence) is “naturalist intelligence”—the capacity to make significant distinctions among natural phenomena—among trees, birds, fish, clouds, mountain ranges and other flora and fauna. This capacity has clearly been important in the evolutionary history (and pre-history) of human beings.

In modern society, we do not need routinely to be able to distinguish one mushroom from another, or one snake from another. But in my judgment, we draw on these same perceptual capacities to distinguish among items in the grocery store (plum vs. cherry tomatoes), the furniture shop (Shaker vs. colonial chairs), or the clothing boutique (peasant vs. vintage blouses).

Life is short and I have not had the wherewithal to consider other plausible intelligences. But I have considered informally two additional intelligences—pedagogical intelligence and existential intelligence.

Pedagogical is relatively simple and straightforward: it’s the human capacity to teach skills to other human beings (or less often, to animals or to computers). What distinguishes pedagogical intelligence is the capacity to understand which information, which models, which demonstrations will work effectively with other individuals. Even a three- or four-year-old, having picked up a skill, will model it quite differently, depending on whether that child is explaining or demonstrating the skill to a two-year-old, as compared to conveying it to a five-year-old or an adult. And of course, children differ significantly from one another in how well they can teach others. (As do adults: two violinists may be equally proficient performers: one may excel in teaching, the other may exhibit remarkably little pedagogical talent.)

That, in short, is pedagogical intelligence—which might well be a component of interpersonal intelligence. Hence, my hesitation in simply adding it to the panoply of intelligences.

Existential intelligence is a far more formidable capacity. Described succinctly, it’s the capacity to pose and reflect on the big questions of life: who are we, where do we come from, where are we headed, what is our place in the universe, why do we exist at all, what, indeed, is existence?!

Three thoughts arise immediately:

1. This sounds like philosophy—particularly existentialism—a branch of philosophy usually tied to French thinkers like Jean-Paul Sartre, Albert Camus, and Simone de Beauvoir, but actually dating back at least to the early 19th century Danish thinker Soren Kierkegaard, and the late 19th century German philosopher, Friedrich Nietzsche.

2. Beyond philosophy, how does existential intelligence relate to other human preoccupations—such as religion and mythology?

3. Isn’t existential intelligence just a skill associated with standard schooling—in which case, it draws on language and logic, on standard IQ, and does not require other fancy psychological analyses, metrics, terminologies?

All reasonable questions. Let me start with the last—it’s more straightforward.

In thinking about these issues, I find it useful to revert to two psychologists who had great influence on 20th century thought, including my own. One is Jean Piaget, the developmental psychologist, who probed “the child’s conception of the world.” The other is Sigmund Freud, the founder of psychoanalysis, who wrote about infantile sexuality, but also the panorama of dreams, wishes, anxieties, and phobias that characterize all of us from a young age.

I mention these two thinkers, these pioneers, because they both sought to enter the world of the child’s mind. Admittedly they drew principally on the mind of the European child 100-150 years, but also—and ambitiously—on the more general mind (as it were, The Mind of All Human Beings).

Surely, Piaget and Freud would have agreed, language and logic are featured in the kinds of questions, concerns, anxieties that a person—be it a young child or an aging adult—raises and ponders. But these scholars—along with many of us who followed in their footsteps— recognized that the child’s mind was far more than simply a blend, a reflection of these two “scholastic” forms of knowing. Piaget focused on actions upon the world (he called them “operations”) and the insights gained from actions; Freud explored the imagination, emotions, the fears, anxieties, and aspirations which were as likely to be captured in dreams or works of art as in stories or equations.

Indeed, we—all human beings— behold the natural world; we listen to and sometimes create music; we test the limits of our bodies, in sport, dance, exercise; we explore the range of space (those within our ambit, those that stretch as far as the eye—the conventional telescope, or, as of late, the NASA Webb telescope—can stretch. And these mental exercises draw, individually and corporately, on the range and combinations of human intelligences.

A child may ask “What is going to happen to me?” or “How high does the sky reach?” or “What’s the smallest number in the world? Or the largest?” But these verbal expressions are only—or primarily—an entry point to the exercise of several other intelligences, not particularly or naturally scholastic in nature. And children can address such issues as well through play, dance, song, dreams, or even nightmares… with attendant symptoms and attendant symbols.

Turning to the other questions:

As I view it, philosophy is a scholarly discipline. It may well have arisen in diverse cultures, but in the West, we associate philosophy with the questions and problems first pondered thousands of years ago by Socrates, Plato, Aristotle, and their students—and carried forward in the last millennium by thinkers like Thomas Aquinas, Rene Descartes, Immanuel Kant, and Ludwig Wittgenstein.

I posit that myths are the pre-modern version of philosophy, including the philosophical school called existentialism. While most cultures do not feature the academic discipline of philosophy, nearly all feature mythology—a genre which naturally raises, addresses, and seeks to resolve fundamental issues of existence. Myths endorse, highlight, or less regularly expel issues of existence.

So this, in short, is the thinking, the evidence, on the basis of which I speculate about the possibility of a separate existential intelligence. In the modern West, the discipline of philosophy may be one culmination of existential intelligence, at least in a scholastic setting. But the impulse to ponder, pose, and progress on the biggest (and the most minute) issues of life and death are part of the human condition—and may well qualify as a distinct form of human intellect. And these impulses may well be found across a range of persons—from choreographers to physicists.

There’s the case for a distinct existential intelligence. It can lead to philosophical thinking, including an embracement or a rejection of the philosophical school of existentialism.

But it’s equally important to state what existential intelligence is NOT.

1. It’s not a religious intelligence. It neither requires nor precludes a belief in an organized religion, with a potpourri of gods, or just one God… with numerous rites and prayers or only a conversation with the Almighty. Of course, religious people may well engage in existential pondering—though they may also be wary of reaching skeptical conclusion.

2. It’s not a spiritual intelligence—that is, it does not require a belief – or a presence—in a spiritual realm. While spirituality may indeed compose an important part of existential thinking, it’s not required—and spirituality might well be absorbed in other intelligences, ranging from musical to spatial to naturalistic. And some of the most important philosophers and philosophies deliberately avoid any mention—let alone a celebration—of the spiritual.

3. It’s not a value judgment. One can put existential intelligence to benevolent uses—for example, Grete Thunberg’s passion for preserving the environment. And one can put it to malevolent uses: the Nazi’s belief that they were purifying the race and creating a superhuman may well have involved existential thinking, but it is hardly praiseworthy.

Relatedly, value judgements are just that—they reflect each person’s current sense of what is good and what is not. While most readers of these words would presumably endorse the Thunberg program, while challenging the Nazi program, there are significant numbers of individual who would not agree. (As an additional example, consider the wide division in contemporary US citizens about what is benevolent and what is malevolent in our current system of government).

Values are not the same as intelligences. Indeed, to play with words, values can reflect stupidities as well as intelligences. It’s important to keep them straight and not conflate them.

Let me put it differently (and in contemporary lingo). The intelligences—whether or not one includes “existential” in their ranks—are simply computational capacities—strings of 1 and 0 as it were. The uses to which these strings are put reflect human values within or across cultures and not neuronal computations.

To be sure, issues of spirituality and of religion are very important—arguably more important than issues of intelligence(s). But they require a different analytic lens and may well not be explicable in terms of current social science.

(With thanks to Courtney Bither, Shinri Furuzawa, and Ellen Winner for their careful reading and suggestions on an earlier draft.)

References

Gardner, H. (1983). Frames of Mind: The theory of multiple intelligences. Basic Books.

Gardner, H. (2006). Multiple Intelligences: New horizons. Basic Books.

Goleman, D. (1995). Emotional Intelligence: Why it can matter more than IQ. Bantam Books.

Using Logical Mathematical Intelligence to Win the Lottery

Howard Gardner has long advised that we should use our intelligences for good purposes (see the blog post on Intertwining Multiple Intelligences and Good Work). Intelligences themselves are morally neutral, however, the examples of Nelson Mandela and Slobodan Milosevic, both of whom had considerable interpersonal intelligence, demonstrate how an intelligence can be used to inspire people around the world or foster ethnic hatred and even genocide.

In a recent review (link here) of the new movie, Jerry and Marge Go Large, the reviewer notes that the main character, Jerry, has exceptional logical-mathematical intelligence.

According to developmental psychologist Howard Gardner there are roughly 12 different types of intelligence: Musical-rhythmic and harmonic, Visual-spatial, Linguistic-verbal, Logical-mathematical, Bodily-kinesthetic, Interpersonal, Intrapersonal, Naturalistic, and Existential. Jerry’s a logical-mathematical guy to a fault.

Jerry, played by Bryan Cranston, uses his logical-mathematical intelligence to game the lottery, exploiting a loophole in certain variations. In the movie, the financial gains are used by the protagonists in part to help their struggling local community.

The plot of the movie is taken from true events, first revealed in a Boston Globe article (link here). Two lotteries first in Michigan and, when that was shut down, another in Massachusetts were exploited by Gerald Selbee and his syndicate. They were not alone in gaming the Massachusetts lottery, a Boston University biomedical researcher and an MIT student had realized the same loophole and were also playing with their own syndicates.

This movie raises some interesting questions:

• In the movie, was Jerry using his intelligence for good if the money he won was used to help his community?

• Was it it ethical to game a lottery when no laws were broken?

• Are lotteries themselves ethical as they generate needed revenue for state governments at the expense of low-income ticket buyers?

Photo by Erik Mclean on Unsplash

Pedagogical (Teaching) Intelligence: Some Intriguing Findings

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:

1. Highly skilled performers often execute their performances intuitively; natural talent and extensive practice may have made conscious thought unnecessary.

2. Even when an excellent performer does have knowledge to share, the performer may not be adept at sharing it.

3. 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