Intelligence in Its Cultural Context
Intelligence in Its Cultural Context
Abstract and Keywords
This contribution argues that intelligence must be understood in its cultural context. In particular, conceptions of intelligence that are proposed acontextually are largely meaningless. The article makes four major points. First, conceptions of intelligence—implicit theories—vary widely from one culture to another. Any culture that “etically” seeks to impose its definition of intelligence on another does so at the risk of cultural imperialism, because there is no a priori reason to believe that any one culture’s conception of what intelligence is has some kind of privilege. Second, what constitutes adaptive and hence intelligent behavior also can differ widely from one culture to another. The same behavior that is intelligent in one culture may be indifferent or even unintelligent in another. Third, not all aspects of intelligence are culturally relative. The same processes—for example, defining problems and devising strategies to solve those problems—are common, but the contents to which these processes are applied and how the processes are evaluated as more or less intelligent differs cross-culturally. Fourth, for the world to survive, all cultures need to incorporate wisdom into broad conceptions of intelligence.
Keywords: intelligence, culture, wisdom, adaptation, theory of successful intelligence
I. Introduction
Not long ago, I was in Manchester, England, and was beginning to cross the street. As I started to cross, a bus swooped in front of me and came within inches of mowing me down. It was not the bus driver’s fault. I had looked for traffic when I crossed the street, but I had looked to my left, the direction from which traffic in my own country normally would have been coming. The bus, of course, came from the right.
(p.206) Not long before that, when I was in London, I saw a sign in the tube (metro): “No busking.” I did not know what busking is. The more I thought about it, the more I worried that I might be busking. So I got myself out of the station as quickly as possible lest I be caught busking. I later found out that buskers are the musicians who sometimes play in tube stations for money.
These examples of cultural maladaptation might seem small. Yet they occurred in England, a country about as similar to the United States, where I live, as any other country might be, with the possible exception of Canada. Unfortunately, it is easy to find rather large examples of cultural maladaptation. What is considered intelligent clearly differs from one place to the next (Scribner, 1984, 1986; Sternberg, 2004a, 2004b; Wober, 1974): Is it smart or fatally stupid to drive on the left side? to cross the street during the day (in war zones of Afghanistan)? to criticize the existing regime publicly? Yet researchers often do their research as if culture did not matter. This research continues despite pervasive evidence that people in different cultures think and act differently (e.g., Greenfield, 1997; Laboratory of Comparative Human Cognition, 1982; Nisbett, 2003; Serpell, 2000, 2002; Super & Harkness, 1986; Thomas & Inkson, 2009; see essays in Sternberg & Grigorenko, 2004).
In this chapter, I consider intelligence in its cultural context. After introduction of the topic, I discuss the definition of culture and what intelligence is across cultures. Then I look further at the special case of giftedness across cultures. After describing alternative models of the relationship of culture to intelligence, I present some studies of intelligence in its cultural context. Next, I discuss the concepts of culture-fair and culture-relevant testing, arguing that there is no such thing as a fully “culture-fair” test. Finally, I argue for the importance of wisdom in all conceptions of intelligence and draw some conclusions.
The main cultural issue discussed here is one of universality versus culture-specificity. I argue in this chapter that intelligence is a construct that has both a universal aspect and a culturally specific aspect. In particular, the adaptive functions of intelligence are culturally universal. In all cultures, intelligence needs to serve the function of recognizing the existence of problems, defining what the problems are, mentally representing the problems, and so forth. But the real-world contents to which these processes apply (e.g., what constitutes a problem or a good solution) can vary from one culture to another.
The study of culture and intelligence is based in part on the notion that behavior that in one cultural context is viewed as smart or even intellectually gifted may be, in another cultural context, stupid (Cole, Gay, Glick, & Sharp, (p.207) 1971; Earley & Ang, 2003; Livermore, 2009; Nisbett, 2003, 2009; Peterson, 2004; Sternberg, 2004a; Sternberg & Grigorenko, 1999; Thomas & Inkson, 2009). For example, stating one’s political views honestly and openly may win one a top political job, such as the presidency, in one culture, and the gallows in another.
One reason to study culture and intelligence is because they are so inextricably interlinked. Indeed, Tomasello (2001) argued that culture is what, in large part, separates human from animal intelligence. Humans have evolved as they have, he believes, in part because of their cultural adaptations, which in turn develop from their ability, even in infancy from about 9 months onward, to understand others as intentional agents.
The conceptualization, assessment, and development of intelligence cannot be fully or even meaningfully understood outside their cultural context. Work that seeks to study intelligence acontextually may impose an (often Western) investigator’s view on the rest of the world and frequently attempts to show that individuals who are more similar to the investigator are smarter than individuals who are less similar. For example, a test of intelligence developed and validated in one culture may or may not be equally valid, or even be valid at all, in another culture.
II. What Is Culture and What Is Intelligence Across Cultures?
Because the topic of this chapter is culture and intelligence, it is necessary to define these terms. There have been many definitions of culture (e.g., Brislin, Lonner, & Thorndike, 1973; Kroeber & Kluckhohn, 1952). It is defined here as “the set of attitudes, values, beliefs and behaviors shared by a group of people, communicated from one generation to the next via language or some other means of communication” (Barnouw, 1985; quoted in Matsumoto, 1994, p. 4). A more standard dictionary definition is “the totality of socially transmitted behavior patterns, arts, beliefs, institutions, and all other products of human work and thought” (“Culture,” 2009).
The term culture can be used in many ways and has a long history (Benedict, 1946; Boas, 1911; Mead, 1928; see Matsumoto, 1996). Berry, Poortinga, Segall, and Dasen (1992) described six uses of the term: descriptively to characterize a culture, historically to describe the traditions of a group, normatively to express rules and norms of a group, psychologically to emphasize how a group learns and solves problems, structurally to emphasize the organizational elements of a culture, and genetically to describe cultural origins.
(p.208) How is intelligence defined? There are many alternative definitions of intelligence, and they are applied in many ways across varied cultural settings.
Edwin Boring (1923) defined intelligence simply as whatever it is that tests of intelligence measure. This definition, unfortunately, is circular because, according to it, the nature of intelligence determines what is tested, but what is tested must necessarily be determined by the nature of intelligence. Moreover, what different tests of intelligence measure is not always the same thing. Different tests measure somewhat different constructs (Daniel, 1997, 2000; Embretson & McCollam, 2000; Kaufman, 2000, so it is not feasible to define intelligence by what tests test, as if they all measured the same thing.
Moreover, if intelligence were to turn out to be not quite the same thing from one culture to another, this definition would become totally vacuous, meaning as many different things as there are cultures. Tests, of course, can be translated. But what is to be translated? Obviously, a test of English vocabulary would not work well in Dholuo-speaking rural Kenya, such as in the city of Kisumu. So the words, at least, need to be translated. But are the translated words that would be optimal on a test in English the same ones that would be optimal on a test in Dholuo? Are there even exact translations, given that the roots of the two languages are so different? Perhaps not. But then, is vocabulary for obscure words itself of equal importance to village residents in rural Usenge, Kenya, as it is to residents of, say, Cambridge, Massachusetts? The residents of the town will probably never use any of those complex words in their lives, and they may not even exist in their language. But, to survive, those residents need to know how to farm under very difficult conditions, and a test of farming knowledge would be quite appropriate for them as a measure of their adaptive skills. Most of the readers of this chapter would have difficulty answering the farming vocabulary questions that would be relevant to their lives, even in translation. Boring’s definition simply does not hold up well under close cultural scrutiny.
Historically, there are many different definitions of intelligence (“Intelligence and its measurement,” 1921; Sternberg, 2000; Sternberg & Detterman, 1986). Over time, a consensus definition has tended to emphasize two important skills: adaptation to the environment and the ability to think and learn. In more recent times, a third component has been added to the definition, namely, understanding of oneself and one’s own skills, often referred to as metacognition (Sternberg, 1997). Broadly speaking, metacognition also includes general theory of mind, or understanding of how other people’s minds work, as well as one’s own. So, a consensus of traditional definitions of (p.209) intelligence is “the ability to adapt to the environment, to think and learn, and to understand oneself and others.”
III. The Nature of Lay Theories of Intelligence across Cultures
Intelligence may be conceived of in different ways in different cultures (see reviews in Serpell, 2000; Sternberg & Grigorenko, 2004; and Sternberg & Kaufman, 1998). Such differences are important, because cultures evaluate their members, as well as members of other cultures, in terms of their own conceptions of intelligence (Sternberg, 2004a). The fact that people conceive of a construct in different ways in different cultures does not make the construct different. But people act based on their conceptions, not based on some Kantian noting of the “thing in itself,” which may be unknowable.
One may justifiably ask whether the various conceptions are right—that is, whether what people think intelligence is has anything to do with what it really is. In the theory of successful intelligence (Sternberg, 1999b), intelligence is partly a matter of the processes people use in thinking and problem solving (“componential subtheory”) but also partly a matter of how they utilize these processes in everyday life (“contextual subtheory”). With regard to the latter, intelligence is largely a social construction—it is what people say it is. The overwhelming majority of measurements of intelligence in a society are obtained not through some kind of formal test but rather through everyday interactions among people—in job interviews, first dates, performance evaluations, and the like. In these cases, people judge each other’s intelligence, and their judgments constitute the bases for their decisions. Moreover, as discussed later, performance-based measures of adaptive behavior in different cultures show that the implicit theories typically well represent the adaptive demands in the cultures. The reason is that the word “intelligence” was invented to characterize the level of adaptation shown by people’s responses to these demands.
In some cases, Western notions about intelligence are not shared by other cultures. For example, at the mental level, the Western emphasis on speed of mental processing (Sternberg, Conway, Ketron, & Bernstein, 1981) is not shared in many cultures. Some cultures may even be suspicious of the quality of work that is done very quickly. Others emphasize depth rather than speed of processing. They are not alone: Some prominent Western theorists have pointed out the importance of depth of processing for full command of material (e.g., Craik & Lockhart, 1972).
(p.210) The differences between diverse cultures may be due to differences in the kinds of skills valued (Srivastava & Misra, 1996). Western cultures and their schools emphasize what might be called “technological intelligence” (Mundy-Castle, 1974), and so things like artificial intelligence and so-called smart bombs are viewed, in some sense, as intelligent, or smart. African cultures place greater emphasis on “social intelligence” (Mundy-Castle). That is, they often view intelligence as best characterized by people’s social interactions, not their classroom ones. The following sections consider more extensively theories of intelligence in Africa, Asia, the Americas, and Europe.
A. Research in Africa
Western schooling emphasizes things such as generalization, or going beyond the information given (Connolly & Bruner, 1974; Goodnow, 1976), speed (Sternberg, 1985), minimal moves to a solution (Newell & Simon, 1972), and creative thinking (Goodnow, 1976) (see also Srivastava & Misra, 1996). Moreover, silence is interpreted as a lack of knowledge (Irvine, 1978). In contrast, the Wolof tribe in Africa views people of higher social class and distinction as speaking less (Irvine, 1978). This difference between Wolof and Western notions suggests the usefulness of looking at African ideas of intelligence as a possible contrast to U.S. notions.
Similar emphasis on social aspects of intelligence has been found in two other African groups—the Songhay of Mali and the Samia of Kenya (Putnam & Kilbride, 1980). The Yoruba, another African tribe, emphasize the importance to intelligence of depth (i.e., listening rather than just talking), of being able to see all aspects of an issue, and of being able to place the issue in its proper overall context (Durojaiye, 1993).
Studies in Africa provide another window on the substantial differences in conceptions of intelligence across cultures. Ruzgis and Grigorenko (1994) argued that in Africa, conceptions of intelligence revolve largely around skills that help to facilitate and maintain harmonious and stable intergroup relations; intragroup relations are probably equally important and at times more important. For example, Serpell (1974, 1996) found that Chewa adults in Zambia emphasize social responsibilities, cooperativeness, and obedience as important to intelligence; intelligent children are expected to be respectful of adults. Kenyan parents also emphasize responsible participation in family and social life as important aspects of intelligence (Super & Harkness, 1982, 1986, 1993).
In Zimbabwe, one word for intelligence, ngware, actually means to be prudent and cautious, particularly in social relationships. Among the Baoule, (p.211) service to the family and community and politeness toward and respect for elders are seen as key to intelligence (Dasen, 1984). In Zimbabwe, conceptions of intelligence are also represented by njere (in the Shona language) and ukaliphile (in the Ndebele language) (Mpofu, 2004). The terms refer to behavior that is deliberate, socially responsible, positive, public-spirited, and altruistic (Chimhundu, 2001; Hadebe, 2001; Irvine, 1988; Mpofu, 1993, 2004). They also mean “wise,” indicating that, as in Taiwanese Chinese culture (Yang & Sternberg, 1997a, 1997b), wisdom and intelligence are seen as closely related. Behavior is considered intelligent to the extent that it benefits the community as a whole (Mpofu, 2004).
It should be noted that African notions of intelligence do not emphasize social aspects exclusively. These emphasize social skills much more than do conventional U.S. conceptions of intelligence, and at the same time they recognize the importance of cognitive aspects of intelligence. In a study of Kenyan conceptions of intelligence (Grigorenko et al., 2001), it was found that there are four distinct terms constituting conceptions of intelligence among rural Kenyans—rieko (knowledge and skills), luoro (respect), winjo (comprehension of how to handle real-life problems), paro (initiative)—with only the first directly referring to knowledge-based skills (including but not limited to academic skills).
B. Research in Asia
The emphasis on the social aspects of intelligence is not limited to African cultures. Notions of intelligence in many Asian cultures also emphasize the social aspect of intelligence more than do conventional Western or IQ-based notion (Azuma & Kashiwagi, 1987; Lutz, 1985; Poole, 1985; White, 1985).
In China, the Confucian perspective emphasizes the characteristics of benevolence and of doing what is right (Shi, 2004; Yang, 2001; Yang & Sternberg, 1997a). As in the West, the intelligent person spends a great deal of effort in learning, enjoys learning, and persists in lifelong learning with much enthusiasm. The Taoist tradition, in contrast to the Confucian one, emphasizes the importance of humility, freedom from conventional standards of judgment, and full knowledge of oneself as well as external conditions.
China is believed to be the first nation widely to employ tests of intelligence (Shi, 2004). Tests were used in ancient China for employment purposes. The tangram, which requires an individual to construct shapes, was first developed in the Song dynasty (Lin, 1980). Even young children were tested for their developmental skills, such as in placing objects where they belong (p.212) (Yan, 2001). It was not until the beginning of the 20th century that intelligence testing again took hold, this time in France (see discussion in Sternberg, 1990).
Other researchers have directly examined the language that people use when describing what is “intelligent” (Chen & Chen, 1988). They explicitly compared the concepts of intelligence held by Chinese graduates from Chinese-language versus English-language schools in Hong Kong. Both groups considered nonverbal reasoning skills to be the most relevant skills for measuring intelligence. Verbal reasoning and social skills came next, and then numerical skill. Memory was seen as least important. However, the Chinese-language−schooled group tended to rate verbal skills as less important than did the English-language−schooled group. In an earlier study, Chen, Braithwaite, and Huang (1982) found that Chinese students viewed memory for facts as important for intelligence, whereas Australian students viewed these skills as of only trivial importance.
Differences between cultures in conceptions of intelligence have been recognized for some time. Gill and Keats (1980) noted that Australian university students valued academic skills and the ability to adapt to new events as critical to intelligence, whereas Malay students valued practical skills as well as speed and creativity. Dasen (1984) found that Malay students emphasized both social and cognitive attributes in their conceptions of intelligence.
The difference between Eastern and Western conceptions of intelligence may persist even in the present day. Yang and Sternberg (1997b) studied contemporary Taiwanese Chinese conceptions of intelligence and found five factors underlying these conceptions: (a) a general cognitive factor, much like the g factor in conventional Western tests; (b) interpersonal intelligence (i.e., social competence); (c) intrapersonal intelligence; (d) intellectual self-assertion; and (d) intellectual self-effacement. In a related study but with different results, Chen (1994) found three factors underlying Chinese conceptualizations of intelligence: nonverbal reasoning ability, verbal reasoning ability, and rote memory. The difference may be due to different subpopulations of Chinese participants, differences in methodology, or differences in when the studies were done.
The factors uncovered in Taiwan differed substantially from those identified by Sternberg, et al. (1981) in conceptions of intelligence in the United States (i.e., practical problem solving, verbal ability, and social competence), although in both cases, people’s implicit theories of intelligence seemed to go quite far beyond what conventional psychometric intelligence tests measure. (p.213) Of course, comparisons of the Chen and Sternberg et al. studies simultaneously varies both language and culture.
In India, words related to intelligence include buddhi (Sanskrit), which refers to awareness or consciousness (Baral & Das, 2004). Intelligence has been treated as a state, process, or entity in Indian philosophical literature (Srivastava & Misra, 2000). Das (1994), also reviewing Eastern notions of intelligence, suggested that in Buddhist and Hindu philosophies, intelligence involves waking up, noticing, recognizing, understanding, and comprehending, but it also includes such things as determination, mental effort, and even feelings and opinions in addition to more intellectual elements. In general, Indian thinking has been very heavily influenced by Eastern philosophy (Baral & Das, 2004).
It is difficult to separate linguistic differences from conceptual differences in cross-cultural notions of intelligence. Converging operations can be used to achieve some separation. That is, different and diverse empirical operations can be employed to ascertain notions of intelligence. So, one may ask in one study that people identify aspects of competence; in another study, that they identify competent people; in a third study, that they characterize the meaning of “intelligence,” and so forth.
Intelligence is viewed as being of great importance in many Western and some other cultures. This emphasis is not shared throughout the world. In Japan, for example, people rarely refer to an individual’s level of intelligence (Sato, Namiki, Ando, & Hatano, 2004). Rather, there is much more emphasis on a person’s motivation and diligence. Success is viewed as being much more dependent on motivation than on intelligence (Sato et al.). When participants are given a task followed by success or failure feedback, Japanese students are more likely than American students to attribute success to effort, good luck, or various situational factors, whereas the Americans are more likely to attribute their success to their ability. In contrast, Japanese students are likely to attribute failure to lack of effort, and Americans are likely to attribute it to lack of ability (Miyamoto, 1985). Nevertheless, Japanese people do have a conception of intelligence. Factors emerging from a study of implicit theories (Azuma & Kashiwagi, 1987) were active social competence, processing efficiency, and receptive social competence. None of these factors was considered to be innate.
C. Research in the Americas
It is important to realize that there is no one overall U.S. conception of intelligence. Indeed, Okagaki and Sternberg (1993) found that different ethnic (p.214) groups in San Jose, California, had rather different conceptions of what it means to be intelligent. For example, Latino parents of school children tended to emphasize the importance of social-competence skills in their conceptions of intelligence, whereas Asian parents tended rather heavily to emphasize the importance of cognitive skills. Anglo parents also placed more emphasis on cognitive skills. Teachers, representing the dominant culture, emphasized cognitive more than social-competence skills. The rank order of performance of children of various groups (including subgroups within the Latino and Asian groups) could be perfectly predicted by the extent to which their parents shared the teachers’ conception of intelligence. In other words, teachers tended to reward those children who were socialized into a view of intelligence that happened to correspond to the teachers’ own.
In Latin America, implicit theories of teachers tend to emphasize academic skills as the main basis of intelligence). For example, a study in Argentina found that teachers emphasized as important to intelligence good discipline, interest in learning, learning and thinking ability, and also coming from a stable home (Kaplan, 1997). Many teachers in this study also believed in the concept of a “bad head,” that is, a head not suited to studying.
D. Research in Europe
Although researchers mostly emphasize lay implicit theories of intelligence in cultural studies, it is important to realize that expert implicit theories also differ. For example, Continental European thinking about intelligence, especially in French-speaking countries, was very heavily influenced by Piaget in the latter half of the 20th century, and this influence continues to be felt in recent times (Lautrey & de Ribaupierre, 2004). Russian thinking was very heavily influenced by Vygotsky and Luria (Grigorenko, 2004). English thinking was very heavily influenced by Spearman (Deary & Smith, 2004), and North American thinking by Thurstone (1938) as well as by Spearman (Sternberg, 2004c).
These varying conceptions of what it means to be smart suggest that what is considered important in one culture might, in another culture, be viewed as irrelevant. Many cultures around the world emphasize social and practical skills much more in their definitions of intelligence than do Western cultures. In these cultures, socially skilled individuals might be viewed as intelligent, whereas cognitively skilled individuals might be passed over simply because Western schooling is hard to find or even nonexistent. Even in Western culture, after schooling, social and practical skills probably play as important, (p.215) if not more important, a role than, cognitive ones. If we ignore social and practical skills, we risk having definitions only poorly connected to the world in which we live.
We have seen that cultures can differ widely in their conceptions of intelligence. Why do they differ? What led to these differences? I suggest there are three major factors.
First, the normal adaptive requirements of different cultures genuinely differ. Being a good hunter is worth a lot in a hunting culture but much less in an industrialized one. A Harvard professor of physics, say, might be considered quite intelligent in the contemporary United States, but unless he is able to kill game, he might be considered quite unintelligent in a hunting-and-gathering culture. In some such cultures, his only hope might be to be a witch doctor. Second, over time, what is considered to be intelligent may be influenced by abnormal circumstances. In cases of crises, the ingenuity needed to survive the particular crisis may favor some kinds of abilities and not others. For example, in times of famine, even if very rare, those who can figure out how to obtain nourishment will have an advantage. Third, when cultures are isolated from each other, they are free to develop on their own and decide for themselves what they consider to be important; these differences may go back thousands of years and have obscure origins. As the world becomes “flatter” and cultures intermingle with each other, some of these differences may start to disappear.
E. Conceptions of Giftedness across Cultures
Like conceptions of intelligence, conceptions of giftedness also differ across cultures. The following examples are taken from what I believe is the best single compendium of these views, Conceptions of Giftedness: Socio-cultural Perspectives, by Phillipson and McCann (2007).
Conceptions of giftedness have different flavors around the world. Chan (2007) pointed out that although Chinese believe that aspects of giftedness are inborn, they also believe that many people can become gifted through industriousness, perseverance, and learning (p. 42). Ziegler and Stoeger (2007), discussing the German view of giftedness, cited aptitude for high performance, individuality, creativity and innovation, and uniqueness as aspects of giftedness (pp. 75–76). They proposed their own “Actiotype model,” according to which the person acts within the context of the environment. The person has an action repertoire, placed within a subjective action space, which seeks to accomplish the person’s goals (Ziegler, 2005).
(p.216) Anuruthwong (2002, 2007) studied Thai conceptions of giftedness and found that some of the attributes considered important to giftedness are being a fast learner, being a good problem solver, being a sharp thinker, and being able to respond well spontaneously.
Begay and Maker (2005) studied giftedness in the Navajo. They found that there were different categories, but that gifted individuals were seen as having remarkable ability to cause things to happen and to do things in a good way (p. 142). Wong-Fernandez and Bustos-Orosa (2007) studied the notion of giftedness of Tagalog-speaking Filipinos. They found that the gifted were considered to be intelligent, good in academics, knowledgeable in many things, possessing many inherent skills and talents, different from others, and able to learn easily (p. 186). Gibson and Vialle (2007) researched giftedness among Australian Aborigines. They found an emphasis on independence and helpfulness, bush skills, sporting ability, cognitive skills, school-related skills, and specific skills such as drawing, painting, and singing (p. 209).
Mpofu, Ngara, and Gudyanga (2007) investigated the notion of giftedness among the Shona of Central-Southern Africa. In this culture, everyone was seen as having latent giftedness, which was supposed to serve the collective good. Giftedness could be shown in different domains but involved consistency, creativity, cognitive ability, and eminence among the group (p. 235). Phillipson (2007) studied giftedness among Malay people and found cunningness, mastery, natural ability, and creativity to be critical to the notion of giftedness (p. 277). Conceptions of giftedness among other groups were reported by Sak (2007), Šefer (2007), Matsumura (2007), Kaufman and Sternberg (2007), McCann (2007), and Campbell and Eyre (2007).
IV. Models of the Relationship of Culture to Intelligence
I will now consider four basic models of the relationship of culture to intelligence (Sternberg, 2004a; see also Sternberg, 1988, 1990). The models vary in their assumptions of what intelligence is across cultures and how intelligence can be assessed across cultures. The models are shown in Table 5.1.
The models presented here differ in two key respects: whether there are cross-cultural differences in the nature of the mental processes and representations involved in adaptation that constitute intelligence and whether there are differences in the instruments needed to measure intelligence (beyond simple translation or adaptation) that result from cultural differences in content and possibly particular mental processes required for adaptation. (p.217)
Table 5.1: Models of the Relationship of Culture to Intelligence
|
Tests of intelligence |
Dimensions of intelligence |
|
|---|---|---|
|
Same |
Different |
|
|
Same |
Model I |
Model II |
|
Different |
Model III |
Model IV |
Model I is what is sometimes referred to as an “etic” approach to intelligence. One devises a measure or set of measures of a construct. One then uses the measures in various cultures, sometimes making minor adaptations to fit the measures to the culture (Carlstedt, Gustafsson, & Hautamäki, 2004; Deary & Smith, 2004; Demetriou & Papadopolous, 2004; Fernández-Ballesteros & Colom, 2004; Gulgoz & Kağitçibaşi, 2004; Rosas, 2004; Stankov, 2004; see, in general, essays in Sternberg, 2004b).
Model I is the standard model of intelligence research, represented by most of the numerous investigators who have sought to study intelligence in diverse cultures by following the model, as modified in various forms, of Spearman (1927). It is a popular model, but is it good for all cultures? Those who believe in some other models argue that it is not.
Model II represents a difference in the nature of intelligence but no difference in the instruments used to measure it. The measures used to assess intelligence are the same across cultures, but the outcomes obtained from using those measures are structurally different as a function of the culture being investigated. This approach is close to that taken by Nisbett (2003), who gave the same tests in different cultures and suggested that, across cultures, people think about problems in different ways. For example, consider stimuli showing both a central item and a background context. Asian subjects are more likely to pay serious attention to the context than are North American (p.218) subjects (Nisbett). Model II assumes that people in different cultures have fundamentally different ways of dealing with the world.
In Model III, the dimensions of intelligence are the same, but the instruments of measurement are not. In this view, measurement processes for a given attribute must be emic—that is, derived from within the context of the culture being studied, rather than from outside it. This is not to say that the same instruments cannot be used across cultures; but when they are, the psychological meanings to be assigned to the scores will differ from one culture to another. This is the position taken in this chapter and in some earlier work (e.g., Sternberg, 1990).
According to this position, the components of intelligence and the mental representations on which they act are universal; that is, they are required for mental functioning in all cultures. For example, people in all cultures need to execute executive processes: (a) recognize the existence of problems, (b) define what the problems are, (c) mentally represent the problems, (d) formulate one or more strategies for solving the problems, (e) allocate resources to solving the problems, (f) monitor solution of the problems, and (g) evaluate problem solving after it is done. The weights of these processes may differ across cultures, but all of them are needed in all cultures. What does vary across cultures is the mental contents (i.e., types and items of knowledge) to which processes such as these are applied and the judgments as to what are considered “intelligent” applications of the processes to these contents (Sternberg, 1997).
Therefore, a wholly relativistic view of intelligence and culture would be inadequate. Some things are constant across cultures (mental representations and processes), whereas others are not (the contents to which they are applied and how their application is judged). Tests must be modified if they are to measure the same basic processes as they apply from one culture to another.
Although there may be a common core of problem-solving processes across cultures, the value of higher-level problem solving may differ from one culture to another. In rapidly changing cultures, the importance of problem solving in novel environments and with novel stimuli may be greater than in cultures that are static. It is for this reason that the “experiential subtheory” of the theory of successful intelligence deals with the application of component processes to varied levels of experience ranging from the highly familiar to the totally novel (Sternberg, 1997).
As a result, one can translate a particular test of intelligence, but there is no guarantee that it will measure the same thing in one culture as in another. For example, a test that is highly novel in one culture or subculture may be (p.219) quite familiar in the next. Even if the components of information processing are the same, the experiential novelty to which they are applied may be different. Moreover, the extent to which a given task is practically relevant to adaptation, shaping, and selection may differ. The components may be universal, but not necessarily the relative novelty or adaptive practicality of the components as applied to particular contents.
In Model IV, both the instruments and the ensuing dimensions of intelligence are different as a function of the culture under investigation. This position embraces the radical cultural-relativist view (Berry, 1974) that intelligence can be understood and measured only as an indigenous construct within a given cultural context. According to Berry, one cannot assume any cultural universality in intelligence at all. Model IV also embraces the position of Sarason and Doris (1979), who viewed intelligence largely as a cultural invention. In other words, nothing about intelligence is necessarily common across cultures.
Berry and Irvine (1986) proposed four nested levels of the cultural context (in which intelligence and other hypothetical constructs reside). The broadest, ecological level comprises the permanent or almost permanent characteristics that provide the backdrop for human action. The experiential context refers to the pattern of recurrent experiences within the ecological context that provides a basis for learning and development. The performance context comprises the limited set of environmental circumstances that account for particular behaviors at specific points in space and time. The narrowest, experimental context, comprises the environmental characteristics manipulated by psychologists and others to elicit particular responses or test scores. According to this model, therefore, intelligence testing provides a very narrow sliver of behavior in a highly limited context.
V. Studies of Intelligence in Its Cultural Contexts
With the exception of Model I, the models described in the previous section suggest that intelligence, understood wholly outside its cultural context, is a mythological construct. There are some aspects of intelligence that transcend cultures—namely, the mental processes underlying intelligence and the mental representations upon which they act—but these operations play themselves out in performance differently from one culture to another. As soon as one assesses performance, then, one is assessing mental processes and representations in a cultural context.
(p.220) Most psychological research is done within a single culture. However, single-culture studies whose results are implicitly or even explicitly generalized across cultures potentially deprive the field in several ways. In particular, they may (a) introduce limited definitions of psychological phenomena and problems, (b) engender risks of unwarranted assumptions about the phenomena under investigation, (c) raise questions about cultural generalizability of findings, (d) engender risks of cultural imperialism, and (e) represent lost opportunities to collaborate and develop psychology around the world.
A. Research Challenging the Standard Model of Intelligence
Many research programs have demonstrated the potential hazards of single-culture research, which implicitly assumes acceptance of Model I. For example, Greenfield (1997) found that to take a test means a different thing among Mayan children than it does among most children in the United States. The Mayan expectation is that collaboration is permissible and that it is rather unnatural not to collaborate. Such a finding is consistent with the work of Markus and Kitayama (1991) suggesting that different cultural constructions of the self exist in individualistic versus collectivistic cultures. Indeed, Nisbett (2003) found that some cultures, especially Asian ones, tend to be more dialectical in their thinking, whereas other cultures, such as European and North American ones, tend to be more linear.
Individuals in different cultures may construct concepts in quite different ways, rendering the results of concept-formation or identification studies in a single culture suspect (Atran, 1999; Coley, Medin, Proffitt, Lynch, & Atran, 1999; Medin & Atran, 1999). Different groups may think about what appears superficially to be the same phenomenon—whether it is a concept or the taking of a test—differently. What seem to be differences in general intelligence may in fact be differences in cultural properties. Helms-Lorenz, Van de Vijver, and Poortinga (2003)argued that measured differences in intellectual performance may result from differences in cultural complexity; but complexity of a culture is extremely hard to define, and what appears to be simple or complex from the point of view of one culture may appear differently from the point of view of another.
Many investigators have realized the importance of cultural context for the psychology of intelligence and cognition. These realizations have taken diverse forms. Berry (1974) reviewed concepts of intelligence across a wide variety of cultural contexts, showing major differences across cultures.
(p.221) Cole (1998) and Shweder (1991, 2002) have helped define cultural psychology as a field, distinguishing it from cross-cultural psychology (e.g., Irvine, 1979; Irvine & Berry, 1983; Marsella, Tharp, & Cibrorowski, 1979), which they believe tends to be somewhat less sensitive to differences among cultures. The studies described in this chapter represent both approaches, although our own studies are generally more in the “cultural” rather than “cross-cultural” tradition. Cole’s overview of the field builds on his earlier work (Cole et al., 1971; Cole & Means, 1981; Cole & Scribner, 1974; Laboratory of Comparative Human Cognition, 1982), which showed how cognitive performance among populations, such as the Kpelle in Africa, can be qualitatively as well as quantitatively different from that among the North Americans who typically are tested in laboratory experiments on thinking and reasoning. What North Americans might consider sophisticated thinking—such as sorting taxonomically (e.g., a robin as a kind of bird)—might be viewed as unsophisticated by the Kpelle, whose functional performance on sorting tasks corresponds to the demands of their everyday life (e.g., a robin flying). In a related fashion, Bruner, Olver, and Greenfield (1966) found that among members of the Wolof tribe of Senegal, increasingly greater Western-style schooling was associated with greater use of taxonomic classification.
Cole’s research was built, in turn, on earlier work, such as that of Luria (1931, 1976), which showed that Asian peasants in the Soviet Union might not perform well on cognitive tasks because of their refusal to accept the tasks as they were presented. Indeed, people in diverse cultures are presented with very diverse tasks in their lives. Gladwin (1970), studying the Puluwat who inhabit the Caroline Islands in the South Pacific, found that these individuals were able to master knowledge domains including wind and weather, ocean currents, and movements of the stars. They integrated this knowledge with mental maps of the islands to become navigators who are highly respected in their world.
In related work, Serpell (1979) designed a study to distinguish between a generalized perceptual-deficit hypothesis and a more context-specific hypothesis for why children in certain cultures may show inferior perceptual abilities. He found that English children did better on a drawing task but Zambian children did better on a wire-shaping task. Thus, children performed better on materials that were more familiar to them from their own environments.
Wagner (1978) asked Moroccan and North American individuals to remember patterns of Oriental rugs and others to remember pictures of everyday objects such as a rooster and a fish. There was no evidence of a difference (p.222) in memory structure, but this lack of difference depended precisely on the use of tests that were appropriate to the cultural content of the individuals being studied. Moroccans, who have long experience in the rug trade, seemed to remember things in a different way from participants who did not have their skill in remembering rug patterns. In a related study, Kearins (1981) found that when participants were asked to remember visuospatial displays, Anglo-Australians used verbal (school-appropriate) strategies, whereas Aboriginal Australians used visual (desert nomad−appropriate) strategies.
Goodnow (1962) found that for tasks using combinations and permutations, Chinese children with English schooling performed as well as or better than Europeans, whereas Chinese children with Chinese schooling and those from very low-income families did somewhat worse than the European children. These results suggest that the form of schooling had primed the children to excel in certain ways and not others (see also Goodnow, 1969).
Children from non-European or non−North American cultures do not always do worse on tests. Super (1976) found evidence that African infants sit and walk earlier than do their counterparts in the United States and Europe. But Super also found that mothers in the African cultures he studied made a self-conscious effort to teach their babies to sit and walk as early as possible. At more advanced levels of development, Stigler, Lee, Lucker, and Stevenson (1982; see also Stevenson & Stigler, 1994) found that Japanese and Chinese children did better in developed mathematical skills than North American children.
Carraher, Carraher, and Schliemann (1985) studied a group of children that is especially relevant for assessing intelligence as adaptation to the environment: Brazilian street children. Brazilian street children are under great contextual pressure to form a successful street business. If they do not, they risk death at the hands of so-called death squads, which may murder children who, unable to earn money, resort to (or who are suspected of resorting to) robbing stores. Hence, if these children are not intelligent in the sense of adapting to their environment, they risk death. The investigators found that children who could do the mathematics needed to run their street businesses were often little able or unable to do school mathematics. In fact, the more abstracted and removed from real-world contexts the problems were in their form of presentation, the worse the children typically did on the problems. For children in school, conversely, the street context would be more removed from their lives. These results suggest that differences in context can have a powerful effect on performance. (See also Ceci & Roazzi, 1994; Nuñes, 1994; Saxe, 1990, for related work.)
(p.223) Such differences are not limited to Brazilian street children. Lave (1988) showed that housewives in Berkeley, California, who could successfully do the mathematics needed for comparison shopping in the supermarket were unable to do the same mathematics when they were placed in a classroom and given isomorphic problems presented in an abstract form. In other words, their difficulty was not at the level of mental processes but at the level of applying the processes in specific environmental contexts.
In sum, a variety of researchers have done studies suggesting that how one tests abilities, competences, and expertise can have a major effect on how “intelligent” students appear to be. Street children in Brazil, for example, need the same mathematical skills to solve problems involving discounts as do children in the United States who are about to take a high-stakes paper-and-pencil test of mathematical achievement. But the contexts in which they express these skills, and hence the contexts in which they can best display their knowledge on tests, are different (as in Model III described earlier). We have also done research suggesting that cultural context needs to be taken into account in testing for intelligence and its outcomes.
The measurement of intelligence may be viewed as occurring on a continuum, from abilities to competencies to expertise (Sternberg, 1999a, 2003a, 2003b): People use some of their abilities to develop competencies and then sometimes, if they value those particular abilities, to develop the competencies into expertise. All tests of intelligence, even ones once believed to be culture free, such as tests of abstract reasoning, measure skills that are, at least in part, acquired through the covariance and interaction of genes with environment (Rowe, 2005). For example, a test of vocabulary found on intelligence tests is clearly a test of achievement, but so is a test of abstract reasoning. This was demonstrated by the Flynn effect, by which abstract-reasoning skills showed substantial secular increases over the 20th century in diverse cultures around the world (Flynn, 1984, 1987, 2009). Hence, one can test knowledge as part of intelligence, but all tests of intelligence require knowledge, even if it is only in how to take the tests and maximize one’s score on them. In the past, researchers thought that one could measure intelligence in some kind of “pure” way by using tests of abstract verbal reasoning, such as the Raven Matrices (Raven, Court, & Raven, 1992). But in the present view, even these tests measure abilities as transformed into a competency or possibly even an expertise—that is, competency (and experience) with reasoning on problems that are abstracted from everyday experience and that make use of geometric forms. There is no pure test of abilities: In all cultures, testing of abilities can (p.224) only be done through the filter of various forms of competencies and expertise. Even if one were to look at brain measurements obtained while someone solves a problem, still the measurements would be of the brain in response to that problem—one is still measuring abilities through the lens of competencies and expertise.
Next, I consider some of the research my colleagues and I have done addressing intelligence as it functions across cultures. Many of these examples help to support the usefulness of Model III.
B. Children May Develop Contextually Important Skills at the Expense of Academic Ones
The development of skills in the everyday environment is intended to coincide with the development of skills in school. But the two kinds of development may or may not coincide. The issue is the extent to which there is a match between the skills developed in school and those required outside.
Many times, investigations of intelligence conducted in settings outside the developed world can yield a picture of intelligence that is quite at variance with the picture one would obtain from studies conducted only in the developed world. It may be that, in the developing world, there can be more divergence between school skills and those needed on the outside. In a study conducted in Usenge, Kenya, near the city of Kisumu, investigators studied school-age children’s ability to adapt to their indigenous environment. They devised a test of practical intelligence for adaptation to the environment (see Sternberg & Grigorenko, 1997; Sternberg et al., 2001) which measured children’s informal tacit knowledge for natural herbal medicines that the villagers believe can be used to fight various types of infections. Tacit knowledge is, roughly speaking, that which one needs to know to succeed in an environment but which usually is not explicitly taught and often is not even verbalized (Sternberg et al., 2000). Children in the villages use their tacit knowledge of these medicines on average once a week in medicating themselves and others. More than 95% of the children suffer from parasitic illnesses. Therefore, tests of how to use these medicines constitute effective measures of one aspect of practical intelligence as defined by the villagers as well as their life circumstances in their environmental contexts. Note that the processes of intelligence are not different in Kenya. Children must still recognize the existence of an illness, define what it is, devise a strategy to combat it, and so forth. But the content to which the processes are applied, and hence appropriate ways of testing these processes, may be quite different (as per Model III, described previously).
(p.225) Middle-class Westerners might find it quite a challenge to thrive or even survive in these contexts, or, for that matter, in the contexts of urban ghettos often not distant from their comfortable homes. For example, they would not know how to use any of the natural herbal medicines to combat the diverse and abundant parasitic illnesses they might acquire in rural Kenya.
The investigators measured the Kenyan children’s ability to identify the medicines, where they come from, what they are used for, and how they are dosed. They also administered to the children the Raven Coloured Progressive Matrices Test, which is a measure of fluid or abstract reasoning−based abilities, and the Mill Hill Vocabulary Scale, which is a measure of crystallized or formal knowledge−based abilities (Raven et al., 1992). In addition, they gave the children a comparable test of vocabulary in their own Dholuo language. (The Dholuo language is spoken in the home, English in the schools.)
All correlations between the test of indigenous tacit knowledge and scores on fluid-ability and crystallized-ability tests were negative; the correlations with the tests of crystallized abilities were significantly so. In other words, the higher the children scored on the test of tacit knowledge, the lower they scored, on average, on the tests of crystallized abilities (vocabulary).
This surprising result can be interpreted in various ways, but based on the ethnographic observations of the anthropologists on the team, Prince and Geissler, the researchers concluded that a plausible scenario would take into account the expectations of families for their children (see also Prince & Geissler, 2001). Many children drop out of school before graduation, for financial or other reasons, and many families in the village do not particularly see the advantages of formal Western schooling. There is no reason they should, because the children of many families will, for the most part, spend their lives farming or engaged in other occupations that make little or no use of Western schooling. These families emphasize teaching their children the indigenous informal knowledge that will lead to successful adaptation in the environments in which they will really live. Children who spend their time learning the indigenous practical knowledge of the community may not always invest themselves heavily in doing well in school, and children who do well in school generally may invest themselves less heavily in learning the indigenous knowledge—hence, the negative correlations.
The Kenya study suggests that the identification of a general factor of human intelligence may tell us more about how abilities interact with cultural patterns of schooling and society, and especially Western patterns of schooling and society, than it does about the structure of human abilities. In Western (p.226) schooling, children typically study a variety of subjects from an early age, thereby developing skills in a variety of skill areas. This kind of schooling prepares the children to take a test of intelligence, which typically measures skills in a variety of areas. Often, intelligence tests measure skills that children are expected to have acquired a few years before taking the test. But, as Rogoff (1990, 2003) and others have noted, this pattern of schooling is not universal and has not even been common for much of the history of humankind. Throughout history and in many places still, schooling, especially for boys, takes the form of apprenticeships in which children learn a craft from an early age. They learn what they will need to know in order to succeed in a trade, but not a lot more. They are not simultaneously engaged in tasks that require the development of the particular blend of skills measured by conventional intelligence tests. Hence, it is less likely that one would observe a general factor in their scores, much as was discovered in Kenya.
What does a general factor mean anyway? Some years ago, Vernon (1969, 1971) pointed out that the axes of a factor analysis do not necessarily reveal a latent structure of the mind but rather represent a convenient way of characterizing the organization of mental abilities. Vernon believed that there was no one “right” orientation of axes, and indeed, mathematically, an infinite number of orientations can be fit to any solution in an exploratory factor analysis. Vernon’s point seems perhaps to have been forgotten or at least ignored by later theorists.
Just as it is argued here that the so-called g factor may partly reflect human interactions with cultural patterns, so has Tomasello (2001) argued that so-called modularity of mind may reflect, in part, human interactions with cultural patterns. This is not to dismiss the importance of biology. Rather, it is to emphasize its importance as it interacts with culture, rather than simply viewing it as some kind of immutable effect that operates independently and outside a cultural context.
C. Children May Have Substantial Practical Skills that Go Unrecognized in Academic Tests
The partial context-specificity of intellectual performance does not apply only to countries far removed from North America or Europe. Related, although certainly not identical, results appeared in a study done among Yup’ik Eskimo children in southwestern Alaska (Grigorenko et al., 2004). The investigators assessed the importance of academic and practical intelligence in rural and semi-urban Alaskan communities. They measured academic intelligence with (p.227) conventional measures of fluid intelligence (the Cattell Culture Fair Test of g; Cattell & Cattell, 1973) and crystallized intelligence (the Mill-Hill Vocabulary Scale; Raven et al., 1992). They measured practical intelligence with a test of tacit knowledge of skills (e.g., hunting, fishing, dealing with weather conditions, picking and preserving plants) as acquired in rural Alaskan Yup’ik communities (the Yup’ik Scale of Practical Intelligence, YSPI). The semi-urban children statistically significantly outperformed the rural children on the measure of crystallized intelligence, but the rural children statistically significantly outperformed the semi-urban children on the measure of the YSPI. The test of tacit knowledge skills was superior to the tests of academic intelligence in predicting practical skills as evaluated by adults and peers of the rural children (for whom the test was created), but not of the semi-urban ones. This study, like the Kenya study, suggests the importance of practical intellectual skills for predicting adaptation to everyday environments. Can one find similar results in cultures that are urban and somewhat less remote from the kinds of cultures familiar to many readers?
D. Practical Intellectual Skills May be Better Predictors of Health than Academic Ones
Practical intelligence may be a better predictor of health than academic intelligence, because health-related behaviors occur in real-world contexts, not just in classrooms or psychologists’ testing rooms where people do abstracted tasks. In a study conducted in Russia (Grigorenko & Sternberg, 2001), researchers used entirely distinct measures of analytical, creative, and practical intelligence, with at least two summative indicators for each construct. Principal-component analysis, with both varimax and oblimin rotations, yielded clearcut analytical, creative, and practical factors for the tests.
The main objective of this study was to predict, using the analytical, creative, and practical tests, mental and physical health among Russian adults. Mental health was measured by widely used paper-and-pencil tests of depression and anxiety, and physical health was measured by self-report. The best predictor of mental and physical health was the practical-intelligence measure. (Or, because the data are correlational, it may be that health predicts practical intelligence, although the connection here is less clear). Analytical intelligence came second, and creative intelligence came third. All three contributed to prediction, however. Although the three abilities were the same (analytical, creative, practical), measuring them—and especially the practical ones—required cultural adaptation that was appropriate for the Russian adults being tested (Model III).
(p.228) The results in Russia emphasize the importance of studying health-related outcomes as one measure of successful adaptation to the environment. Health-related variables can affect one’s ability to achieve one’s goals in life, or even to perform well on tests, as was found in a Jamaican study discussed in the next section.
E. Physical Health May Moderate Performance on Assessments
In interpreting results, whether from developed or developing cultures, it is always important to take into account the physical health of the participants one is testing. People in a given culture may develop their intelligence less because of environmentally based forces that work against such development. In a study in Jamaica (Sternberg, Powell, McGrane, & McGregor, 1997), the investigators found that Jamaican school children who suffered from parasitic illnesses (for the most part, whipworm or roundworm) did more poorly on higher-level cognitive tests (e.g., tests of working memory and reasoning) than did children who did not suffer from these illnesses, even after controlling for socioeconomic status. The children with parasitic illnesses did better on fine-motor tasks, for reasons unknown to us.
These findings suggest that many children were poor achievers not because they innately lacked abilities but rather because they lacked the good health necessary to develop and display such abilities. If you are moderately to seriously ill, you probably find it more difficult to concentrate on what you read or what you hear than if you are well. Children in developing countries are ill much, and even most, of the time. They simply cannot devote the same attentional and learning resources to schoolwork that well children have to devote. In these cultures, as in Kenya, health knowledge is crucial for adaptation to the environment. Testing that does not take into account health status is likely to give false impressions.
Do conventional tests, such as tests of working memory or of reasoning, measure all the skills that children in developing countries can bring to the table? Work done in Tanzania suggests that they do not.
F. Dynamic Testing May Reveal Cognitive Skills Not Revealed by Static Testing
A study done in Tanzania (see Sternberg & Grigorenko, 1997, 2002; Sternberg et al., 2002) points out the risks of giving tests, scoring them, and interpreting the results as measures of some latent intellectual ability or abilities. (p.229) School children between the ages of 11 and 13 years near Bagamoyo, Tanzania, received tests including a form-board classification test (a sorting task), a linear syllogisms test, and a Twenty Questions Test (“Find a Figure”), which measure the kinds of skills required on conventional tests of intelligence. Of course, the investigators obtained scores that they could analyze and evaluate, ranking the children in terms of their supposed general or other abilities. However, they administered the tests dynamically rather than statically (Brown & Ferrara, 1985; Feuerstein, 1979; Grigorenko & Sternberg, 1998; Guthke, 1993; Haywood & Tzuriel, 1992; Lidz, 1991; Sternberg & Grigorenko, 2002; Tzuriel, 1995; Vygotsky, 1978).
Dynamic testing is like conventional static testing in that individuals are tested and inferences about their abilities are made. But dynamic tests differ in that children are given some kind of feedback to help them improve their performance. Vygotsky (1978) suggested that the children’s ability to profit from the guided instruction they receive during the testing session could serve as a measure of children’s zone of proximal development (ZPD), or the difference between their developed abilities and their latent capacities. In other words, testing and instruction are treated as being of one piece rather than as being distinct processes. This integration makes sense in terms of traditional definitions of intelligence as the ability to learn (“Intelligence and its measurement,” 1921; Sternberg & Detterman, 1986). What a dynamic test does is directly measure processes of learning in the context of testing rather than measuring these processes indirectly as the product of past learning. Such measurement is especially important when not all children have had equal opportunities to learn in the past.
In the assessments, children were first given the ability tests. Experimental-group children were then given an intervention; control-group children were not. The intervention consisted of a brief period of instruction in which children were able to learn skills that would potentially enable them to improve their scores. For example, in the 20-questions tasks, children were taught how a single true-false question could cut the space of possible correct solutions by half. Then all children—experimental and control—were tested again. Because the total time for instruction was less than 1 hour, one would not expect dramatic gains. Yet, on average, the gains from pre-test to post-test in the experimental group were statistically significant and significantly greater than those in the control group.
In the control group, the correlations between pre-test and post-test scores were generally high. One would expect a high correlation, because there was no intervention and hence the retesting was largely a measure of (p.230) alternate-forms reliability. More importantly, scores on the pre-test in the experimental group showed only weak, although significant, correlations with scores on the posttest. These correlations, which were significantly and substantially less than those in the control group, suggested that when tests are administered statically to children in developing countries, they may be rather unstable and easily subject to influences of training. The reason could be that the children are not accustomed to taking Western-style tests and so profit quickly from even small amounts of instruction as to what is expected from them.
Of course, the more important question is not whether the scores changed or even whether they correlated with each other, but rather how they correlated with other cognitive measures. In other words, which test was a better predictor of transfer to other cognitive performances on tests of working memory, the pre-test or the post-test? The investigators found the post-test score to be the better predictor of working memory in the experimental group. Children in the dynamic-testing group improved significantly more on working-memory and reasoning tests than did those in the control group (who did not receive intervening dynamic instruction between pre-tests and post-tests).
In the Jamaica study described earlier (Sternberg et al., 1997), the investigators initially failed to find effects of an antiparasitic medication, albendazole, on cognitive functioning. Might this have been because the testing was static rather than dynamic? Static testing tends to emphasize skills developed in the past. Children who suffer from parasitic illnesses often do not have the same opportunities to profit from instruction and acquire skills that well children do. Dynamic testing emphasizes skills developed at the time of testing; indeed, the skills or knowledge are specifically taught at that time. Would dynamic testing show effects of medication (in this case, albendazole for hookworm and praziquantel for schistosomiasis) not shown by static testing?
The answer was yes. Over time, treated children showed an advantage over children who did not receive treatment, and they were closer after time had passed to the control (uninfected) group than were the untreated children. In other words, conventional static tests of intelligence may fail fully to reveal children’s intellectual potentials. Therefore, when tests are modified in different environments, as per Model III, one may wish to modify not only their content but also the form in which they are administered, as was done in the dynamic testing.
(p.231) VI. Culture-Fair and Culture-Relevant Testing
In this section, I argue that whereas culture-relevant testing is possible, culture-fair testing, in the strict sense of the term, is not. A culture-fair test is one that is equally appropriate for members of all cultures and comprises items that are equally fair to everyone. Believers in culture-fair tests generally follow Model I, described earlier, for the relation between culture and intelligence. This approach is illustrated by Zeidner, Matthews, and Roberts (2004), who stated:
As in other multicultural nations [besides Israel], research has been directed toward sociocultural differences in test scores. Because the tests are translated from English, any comparison of groups rests on the assumption that test adaptation is “culture-fair….” The basic principal [sic] guiding the development of all major Hebrew standardized test versions was to stay as close to the English original as possible, unless items lacked compatibility with Israeli culture or the psychometric attributes of the items in the Israeli samples needed upgrading. (p. 220)
In this approach, minor adaptations are made. For example, Israel uses a different calendar (the Jewish one) from that of the United States, so an adaptation was made for the proper year and time references. But these differences are quite minor.
Researchers compared the performance of Jewish examinees of both Western and Eastern (Asian/African) backgrounds and found that, on the Wechsler Preschool and Primary Scale of Intelligence and the Wechsler Intelligence Scale for Children (WISC), the children of Western origins outperformed the children of Eastern origins. The difference tended to increase with age (Lieblich, 1983; Minkowich, Davis, & Bashi, 1982; Zeidner, 1985). Ethnic group had a larger effect than socioeconomic group, although both mattered.
Comparisons of Israeli Jewish children with Israeli Arab children showed an advantage for the Jewish children of approximately one standard deviation (Kugelmass & Lieblich, 1975; Kugelmass, Lieblich, & Bossik, 1974; Lieblich, 1983; Lieblich & Kugelmass, 1981). Christian Arab children tended to outscore Muslim and Druze students on Raven’s Matrices (Bashi, 1976); differences tended to be larger on nonverbal than on verbal tests.
Similar results have been found elsewhere. Savasir and Sahin (1995) found that Turkish children scored about 12 points lower on the WISC-R than did (p.232) American children. On the Gesell Developmental Schedules, Cantez and Girgin (1992) found Turkish children generally lagging behind the norms created for American children. In general, the educational systems in rural Turkey, which are less Westernized, produced scores on translated Western intelligence and educational tests that were lower than those for the educational systems in urbanized Turkey, which are closer to the Western systems (Kağitçibaşi, 1996; Kağitçibaşi, Sunar, & Bekman, 2001).
The etic approach is at least somewhat open to question. Because members of different cultures define intelligence differently, the very behaviors that may be considered intelligent in one culture may be viewed as unintelligent in another. Consider the concept of mental quickness. In mainstream U.S. culture, to say someone is “quick” is to say that the person is intelligent. Indeed, most group tests of intelligence are strictly timed.
There can be no doubt that sometimes it is important to be fast. When you have not yet started writing a paper that is due the next day, it is definitely adaptive to be quick. If you are an air-traffic controller, you had better be fast if you value the lives of the passengers on the airplanes you are monitoring. In many cultures, however, quickness is not so valued. People elsewhere may believe that more intelligent people do not rush into things. In fact, early in the 20th century, a leading psychometric theoretician of intelligence, Louis Thurstone (1924/1973), defined intelligence as the ability to withhold an instinctive response. In other words, the smart person does not rush into action but thinks first. Even in our own culture, no one will view you as brilliant if you decide on a marital partner, a job, or a place to live in the 20 to 30 seconds you might normally take to solve an intelligence-test problem. So, is it culturally fair to include a speed or timing component in an intelligence test?
Performance on tests that have been labeled “culture fair” seems to be influenced by cultural factors. Examples are years of schooling and academic achievements (e.g., Ceci, 1996). In sum, one must be careful when drawing conclusions about group differences in intelligence (Cooper, 2005; Greenfield, 1997; Loehlin, 2000; Sternberg, Grigorenko, & Kidd, 2005). The conclusions may appear to be justified on the surface but represent only a superficial analysis of group differences.
In the proposed model of culture and intelligence, Model III, tests are adapted in form and content to take into account the differences in adaptive tasks that individuals confront in diverse cultures, within and across countries. Individuals in other cultures often do not do well on our tests, nor would we do well on theirs. The processes of intelligence are universal, but their (p.233) manifestations are not. If investigators want best to understand, assess, and develop intelligence, they need to take into account the cultural contexts in which it operates. We cannot now create culture-free or culture-fair tests, given our present state of knowledge. But we can create culture-relevant tests, and that should be our goal.
Developing culture-fair tests based on each culture’s own definition of intelligence may be an unrealistic goal. But it is possible to provide culture-relevant tests. Culture-relevant tests require skills and knowledge that are relevant to the cultural experiences of the test takers; the content and procedures are appropriate to the cultural norms of the test takers. For example, 14-year-old boys performed poorly on a task when it was presented in terms of baking cupcakes, but they performed well when the task was framed in terms of charging batteries (Ceci & Bronfenbrenner, 1985). Brazilian maids had no difficulty with proportional reasoning when hypothetically purchasing food, but they had great difficulty with it when hypothetically purchasing medicinal herbs (Schliemann & Magalhües, 1990).
VII. The Role of Wisdom
In this section, I move to prescriptive comments rather than merely descriptive ones. The reader can evaluate my prescriptions as he or she sees fit. As we watch aggressive leaders—Kim Jong Il and Robert Mugabe come to mind, although those leaders may have a different interpretation—we may wonder whether something is missing in the equation of their leadership and in their implicit theory of what is “smart.” Similarly, today’s consummate terrorists defy the stereotype of the poorly educated peasant who, having nothing better to do, joins up with a movement and blindly follows orders while showing no personal initiative at all. Many are intelligent, at least in a conventional sense, and well educated (in some cases, in the United States), and when their plans go awry, they use their wits to figure out how to get back on track. Once again, it appears that something is fundamentally wrong in their implicit theory of what is smart to do. What is that something? I believe it is that, for the most part, we are teaching students to be intelligent and knowledgeable but not how to use their intelligence and their knowledge. Cultures need to teach for wisdom, not just for factual recall and superficial levels of analysis.
When socialization and education involve teaching for wisdom, students learn that it is important not just what you know, but how you use what you know—whether you use it for good ends or bad. Narrowly smart but foolish and irresponsible people exhibit five characteristic fallacies in their thinking.
(p.234) The fallacy of egocentrism occurs when people think the world centers around them. Other people come to be seen merely as tools in the attainment of their goals, to be used and then discarded as the egomaniacs’ needs change. Why would smart people think egocentrically? Conventionally smart people often have been so highly rewarded for being smart that they lose sight of the needs and desires of others.
Wisdom requires one to know what one knows and does not know, as well as what can be known and cannot be known at a given time and place. Smart people often lose sight of what they do not know, leading to the fallacy of omniscience. This second fallacy results from people’s starting to feel that they are not only expert in whatever they trained for but all-knowledgeable about pretty much everything. They then can make disastrous decisions based on knowledge that is incomplete but that they do not recognize as such.
The fallacy of omnipotence results from the feeling that if knowledge is power, then omniscience is total power. People who are in positions of power may start to imagine themselves to be all-powerful. Worse, they forget the old saw that power corrupts, but absolute power corrupts absolutely. At the same time, they fail to reckon with the potential consequences of their actions because of the fourth fallacy.
The fourth fallacy, the fallacy of invulnerability, comes from people’s view that if they are all-knowing and all-powerful, then they can do what they want. And because they are all-knowing, they can get away with anything. Most likely, they convince themselves, they won’t get caught. Even if they do, they figure they can weasel their way out of being punished because they are smarter than those who have caught up with them.
Finally, the fallacy of ethical disengagement stems from the belief that ethics are important, but for other people, not oneself. One views oneself as having risen above ethical considerations.
An implication of this view is that simply being narrowly smart, by any cultural definition, is not enough. It is important to be wise, too, suggesting perhaps a certain utility to cultural concepts of intelligence that embrace the concept of wisdom.
There are several reasons why schools all over the world should seriously consider including instruction in wisdom-related skills in the school curriculum. First, knowledge is insufficient for wisdom and certainly does not guarantee satisfaction, happiness, or behavior that looks beyond self-interest. Wisdom seems a better vehicle to the attainment of these goals. Second, wisdom provides a way to enter considered and deliberative values into important (p.235) judgments. One cannot be wise and at the same time impulsive, mindless, or immoral in one’s judgments. Third, wisdom represents an avenue to creating a better, more harmonious world. Dictators such as Adolph Hitler and Joseph Stalin may have been knowledgeable. They may even have been good critical thinkers, at least with regard to the maintenance of their own power. They were not wise. Fourth and finally, students, who later will become parents and leaders, are always part of a greater community. Hence, they will benefit from learning to judge rightly, soundly, and justly on behalf of their community.
Wisdom, seen as part of a broad conception of intelligence, is necessary for survival, not only of individuals but also of the world. It needs to be embraced around the world, or we may lose the world as we know it.
VIII. Conclusion
When cultural context is taken into account, (a) individuals are better recognized for and better able to make use of their talents, (b) schools teach and assess children better, and (c) society utilizes rather than wastes the talents of its members. We can pretend to measure intelligence across cultures simply by translating Western tests and giving them to individuals in a variety of cultures. But such measurement is only pretense. We need even to be careful when we try to measure the intelligence of various cultural groups within a society.
What counts as “gifted” varies widely across cultures. Although theories of intelligence can be presented as cross-cultural constructs, people’s implicit theories, as well as the behaviors that are adaptive, vary widely. So we are best off considering giftedness as something whose nature can vary from one place to another.
It is always hard to draw firm conclusions from diverse studies. But one conclusion that practically leaps out is that notions of intelligence outside North America, particularly in Africa and Asia, view wisdom as closer to intelligence than does the North American or European conception of intelligence. If one wishes to understand intelligence in its cultural context, one may also have to understand what we who speak English refer to as wisdom. Wisdom can be defined in many ways, but there seems to be some consensus that it involves the ends toward which one’s abilities are used. In particular, one’s abilities are used toward a common good, by balancing one’s own interests, those of others,’ and higher-order interests over the long as well as the short term through the infusion of positive ethical values (Sternberg, 2008; Sternberg & Grigorenko, 2005).
(p.236) The Flynn effect (1987, 2009) shows that people are getting smarter at whatever it is that IQ tests measure, but there is no evidence that people are growing wiser. On the contrary, the great recession that began in 2008 was caused in large part by financial policies set in place by economists who, having won Nobel Prizes, are presumably intelligent. The implementation of these policies resulted from the actions of people who had gone to top business schools and who worked at the most prestigious firms on Wall Street, which themselves only hired the supposed intellectual cream of the crop. By this account, then, the traditional North American and European notion of intelligence has brought the world to a point of economic crisis, and the political situation of the world does not look a lot better. If there is anything to be learned from cultural notions of intelligence, it is that intelligence without wisdom is not always useful and may even be dangerous. Schools should be teaching students not only to be smart but also to be wise (Sternberg, Jarvin, & Reznitskaya, 2008).
American and other schools can go on ignoring wisdom. Under the current system of emphasizing test scores, the schools have placed increasingly less attention on developing wisdom and ethically based skills. They do so at society’s peril.
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