Psychology

Psychologists who view intelligence as the successful adaptation to the environment are skeptical about the prospects of a "culture-free" test of intelligence. They maintain that tests designed for one culture are notoriously faulty when applied to another. Joseph Glick's study of Liberia's Kpelle tribesmen provides a classic and amusing example.

Glick asked the tribesmen to sort a group of objects sensibly. To his puzzlement, they insisted on grouping the objects by function (for example, placing a potato with a hoe) rather than by taxonomy (placing the potato with other foods). On the basis of Western standards, this indicated an inferior style of sorting and lower intelligence. After Glick demonstrated the "correct" answer, one of the tribesmen remarked that only a stupid person would sort things that way. Thereafter, when Glick asked the tribesmen to sort items the way a stupid person would, they sorted them taxonomically without hesitation or difficulty.

Gardner's Theory of Multiple Intelligences

Howard Gardner's theory of multiple intelligences is a contemporary reflection of Thurstone's notion that intelligence comes in different forms. Based on data from a variety of sources, but particularly from his own research in neuropsychology at the Boston Veteran's Administration Medical Center, Gardner theorizes seven relatively independent areas of intellectual competence.

Perhaps his most intriguing argument is that separate neural centers underlie these various intelligences. For example, he provides numerous case studies of patients who have lost all language abilities because of damage to the speech centers in the left hemisphere of the brain, but who still retain the capacity to be musicians, visual artists, and engineers. Similarly, he describes patients who have difficulty with spatial representation and other visual tasks because of right-hemisphere damage, but who retain their linguistic abilities. Gardner even provides supporting neurological data for the personal intelligences. For example, a lobotomy may cause little impairment of linguistic or logical-mathematical intelligence; however, it can be disastrous for self-understanding and interpersonal relationships.