Speaker 1: What I should mention, and this is available on my website.
Speaker 1: With my colleagues Shinri for Azawa and Anti Tuture, we
Speaker 1: wrote a ten thousand word essay earlier this year called
Speaker 1: Who Owns Intelligence and Who Owns Intelligence? Shinri talks about
Speaker 1: animal intelligence because we know vastly more about animal intelligence
Speaker 1: now than we did even forty years ago. Plant intelligence.
Speaker 1: I never thought about plant intelligence, but any research there
Speaker 1: and there are things that plants can do signaling one
Speaker 1: another when something dangerous is coming, some potion or so on,
Speaker 1: which would count in intelligence of humans did it. And
Speaker 1: then I, with my very limited knowledge but with my
Speaker 1: considerable interest, talked about artificial intelligence and to what extent
Speaker 1: it fits these different criteria, and this is mentioned in
Speaker 1: the two books The Essentials. If I were given another
Speaker 1: ten or twenty years, I would love to be able
Speaker 1: to consider not just human intelligences, but animal, plant, and
Speaker 1: artificial because I think that's the next frontier for to
Speaker 1: say psychology in the large sense.
Speaker 2: Hello, and welcome to the Psychology Podcast. I'm doctor Scott
Speaker 2: Barry Kaufman, a cognitive scientist interested in the science of intelligence, creativity,
Speaker 2: and human potential. Today we have a very special guest
Speaker 2: on the show Doctor Howard Gardner. Doctor Gardner is a
Speaker 2: developmental psychologist and a professor of cognition and Education at
Speaker 2: Harvard's Graduate School of Education. He was a founding member
Speaker 2: of Harvard Project Zero in nineteen sixty seven and has
Speaker 2: written hundreds of research articles in over thirty books, including
Speaker 2: his most recent books, The Essential Howard Gardner on Mind
Speaker 2: and The Essential Howard Gardner on Education. His most well
Speaker 2: known book, however, is his nineteen eighty three book Frames
Speaker 2: of Mind, The Theory of Multiple Intelligences. This book was
Speaker 2: revolutionary at the time because lenge the notion that intelligence
Speaker 2: is singular and that intelligence can best be measured by
Speaker 2: IQ tests. On a personal note, when I was an undergraduate,
Speaker 2: I remember coming across this book and deciding then and
Speaker 2: there that I wanted to spend the rest of my
Speaker 2: life studying this topic. I credit Howard Gardner as being
Speaker 2: one of the most important influences on my decision to
Speaker 2: go into the field of psychology. I was actually accepted
Speaker 2: to be his graduate student, to be co advised by
Speaker 2: him and the late Kurt Fisher, but ultimately I decided
Speaker 2: to study with Robert Sternberg for graduate school who also
Speaker 2: has done groundbreaking work on human intelligence. This is a
Speaker 2: very lively discussion with a person who I deeply respect.
Speaker 2: My own thinking on intelligence has evolved quite a bit
Speaker 2: since I was an undergrad, and it was an honor
Speaker 2: to have a bit of a debate with doctor Gardner
Speaker 2: on what I see as some of the limitations of
Speaker 2: his theory. Nevertheless, I considered it a privilege to be
Speaker 2: able to have this conversation and to share it with
Speaker 2: you all today. So with that further ado, I bring
Speaker 2: you the legendary doctor Howard Gardner. Professor Howard Gardner. It's
Speaker 2: such a pleasure to have you on the Psychology Podcast.
Speaker 1: Thank you, Scott. Looking forward to our conversation.
Speaker 2: I am really looking for this conversation. I don't know
Speaker 2: if you remember a twenty three year old Scott Barrett
Speaker 2: Kaufman sitting in your office, uh, asking what is intelligence?
Speaker 2: I don't, I don't. I don't presume you remember remember that.
Speaker 2: But do you remember?
Speaker 3: Do you remember? Well?
Speaker 1: I remember we've had some contacts, but I wouldn't be
Speaker 1: able to say.
Speaker 3: Of course happened.
Speaker 2: Of course. Well, let me just say that there are
Speaker 2: two people in the field of psychology who have influenced
Speaker 2: me the most in going into this field, and it
Speaker 2: is you and Robert Sternberg. So I must off the
Speaker 2: bat really thank you for the incredible work you've done.
Speaker 2: And it was such a fun journey reading these two books,
Speaker 2: The Essential Howard Gardner on Mind and The Essential Howard
Speaker 2: Gardner on Education. I learned so much that I didn't
Speaker 2: even know about your career and your influences. And I
Speaker 2: thought today what we would do is focus on education.
Speaker 2: But they're both so intertwined. Both books are really have
Speaker 2: a lot of overlaps. So I looked in my preparation
Speaker 2: for today, I looked for the overlaps, and I thought.
Speaker 3: We could talk about that today.
Speaker 2: That's fine, great, okay, So let me begin a little
Speaker 2: bit with young Howard Gardner and Scranton, Pennsylvania. Growing up
Speaker 2: around the same time as Biden in Scranton, Pennsylvania in
Speaker 2: the forties and fifties. What were you like as a kid.
Speaker 2: You said you never thought of yourself as a future scholar.
Speaker 3: Is that right?
Speaker 1: Iden and I are the same age, and we're both
Speaker 1: from Scranton, but we didn't know each other.
Speaker 3: He moved away pretty quickly.
Speaker 1: No, I came from a family of German Jews who
Speaker 1: escaped from the Nazis literally in the nick of time.
Speaker 1: They arrived here on the night of the Broken Glass
Speaker 1: in November ninth, nineteen thirty eight, and academics was not
Speaker 1: on their mind. Scholarship was not on their mind. And
Speaker 1: since they lost their youth because of Hitler, and I
Speaker 1: was a a studious kid. I liked school. I was
Speaker 1: quite gifted pianist, a good boy scout. But I didn't
Speaker 1: really even know about the world of scholarship and knowledge.
Speaker 1: And I'll mention two things. One is, when I arrived
Speaker 1: at college sixty some years ago, I didn't realize there
Speaker 1: were people who'd written books who were still alive. I
Speaker 1: was astounded to be in a class at Harvard College
Speaker 1: with people who had written books I thought of at
Speaker 1: least scholarly books were all written a long time ago.
Speaker 1: The other thing is I had an uncle Fred, who
Speaker 1: was almost like an extra father to me. And when
Speaker 1: I was sixteen so in high school, he gave me
Speaker 1: a textbook in psychology. It's actually one was written by
Speaker 1: Norman Munn, who was a well known psychologist. And I
Speaker 1: leaped through the book and I realized that the book
Speaker 1: could explain something about me which I'd always been mystified by,
Speaker 1: and that is that I'm colorblind and I can't see colors,
Speaker 1: and of course almost everybody else can. But I learned
Speaker 1: about the Ushahara test, and there were actually ways of
Speaker 1: explaining why it is that the small percentage of the
Speaker 1: population can't discriminate colors. So the idea of psychology was
Speaker 1: imprinted in my teenage years. But when I went to college,
Speaker 1: I studied history because that's the sort of thing that
Speaker 1: you study in high school. You don't study psychology in
Speaker 1: high school, at least not in the nineteen fifties and Scranton.
Speaker 1: But I ended up not liking history because in our
Speaker 1: tutorial we read historiography, which is not history, but rather
Speaker 1: how people think about history. And I was too young
Speaker 1: and naive to realize that that's an interesting question. Now,
Speaker 1: being in my eighties, I realized it's a fascinating question.
Speaker 1: But at Harvard at that time, in the early nineteen sixties,
Speaker 1: there was a field called social relations, nicknamed a sockrel,
Speaker 1: and gave you exposure to psychology, sociology, and anthropology, a
Speaker 1: little bit of economics and political science, and that was
Speaker 1: just right for me because I was a wanderer and
Speaker 1: a wonderer, I really wanted to learn about these different fields,
Speaker 1: and I was very lucky to get as my tutor
Speaker 1: a great psychiatrist named Eric Erickson. Would be known to
Speaker 1: people who studied psychology, particularly because he outlined a number
Speaker 1: of crises that individuals encounter during their lifetime, and the
Speaker 1: crisis of adolescents, which my friends and me were so
Speaker 1: interested in, is the crisis of identity versus role diffusion.
Speaker 1: Identity means you sort of put yourself together, you know
Speaker 1: where you're going, you have a future, you feel pretty
Speaker 1: confident and competent. And role diffusion is I don't know
Speaker 1: whether I want to do this. I don't know whether
Speaker 1: I wanted that. Do I married, do I move away?
Speaker 1: Do I switch? You know, my hobbies? And this was
Speaker 1: just the issue of my colleagues and I were interested in.
Speaker 1: So having Eric Erickson as a tutor made a great difference. Later,
Speaker 1: if we come to it, i'll tell you about how
Speaker 1: now in my eighties, I have rethought one of Ericson's crises.
Speaker 3: But I want to let you proceed with your.
Speaker 1: Schedule and your set of issues.
Speaker 2: That's well, thank you. I put that on my list.
Speaker 2: Who else influenced you around that time at Harvard? Was
Speaker 2: there anyone else that had a major influence.
Speaker 1: The person who by far had the greatest influency on
Speaker 1: me was a person I worked with right after college.
Speaker 1: That was Jerome Bruner, known as Jerry Brunner, and he
Speaker 1: was a great cognitive psychologist, one of the people who
Speaker 1: founded the field which will post scnarian and behaviorism. But
Speaker 1: I got to know Bruner because he was developing a
Speaker 1: curriculum for middle school kids, a curriculum of social studies,
Speaker 1: and he hired me and a bunch of other young
Speaker 1: people to help create the curriculum, and that the seaweed
Speaker 1: was working. The curriculum now has very ancient sounding name,
Speaker 1: but it was a great curriculum. It was a social
Speaker 1: studies curriculum called man a course of study. Now, of course,
Speaker 1: we had called human beings a course of studies. And
Speaker 1: that curriculum raised three questions which I think about every day.
Speaker 1: What makes human beings human? How do we get that way?
Speaker 1: And how can we be made more so? How can
Speaker 1: we be made more human? And I'm happy to talk
Speaker 1: about that for the next hour because I think it's
Speaker 1: the most important question we as a species face today.
Speaker 1: But I want to stick with your question, and I
Speaker 1: would say that Jerry Bruner and Eric Erickson were certainly
Speaker 1: the biggest influences in my work in psychology, but there
Speaker 1: were two people who had enormous influence on me outside
Speaker 1: of psychology, and that helps to explain in a sense,
Speaker 1: the rest of my scholarly life. One was Nelson Goodwin
Speaker 1: and the other was Norman Geshmand. Both have the initials NG.
Speaker 1: Nelson Goodman was a very well known philosopher and analytic philosopher,
Speaker 1: but at Harvard almost sixty years ago, he started a
Speaker 1: research group called Project zero, which was studying artistic education
Speaker 1: and artistic knowledge. And as I mentioned, I was very
Speaker 1: involved with music, also with other arts, and I realized
Speaker 1: that in psychology almost nobody paid attention to what it
Speaker 1: meant to become an artist. It was how he become
Speaker 1: a scientist or an intellectual. And so Nelson started an
Speaker 1: organization called Project zero zero meaning we don't know anything
Speaker 1: about it, but it that's the stimulus to learn more.
Speaker 1: And now literally fifty eight years later, Project zero not
Speaker 1: only has survived, it's thriving. I co directed for many
Speaker 1: years and I'm still very actively involved. My wife Ellen Winner,
Speaker 1: you know, Scott the psychologist, is writing a study of
Speaker 1: the impact of Project zero. The study is over five
Speaker 1: hundred single space pages already and she's not finished yet.
Speaker 1: The other energy, very different was Norman Geshwind. Norman Geshwind
Speaker 1: was a neurologist who was one of the first people
Speaker 1: who studied what happens to people when they have different
Speaker 1: kinds of brain injuries through a stroke, or through a tumor,
Speaker 1: or through shrapnel or a bullet round and Geshwind helped
Speaker 1: understand the nature of language, the nature of mathematics, the
Speaker 1: nature of recognizing faces, the nature of being able to
Speaker 1: find your way around a path. And when I was
Speaker 1: going to do a regular post doc in psychology like
Speaker 1: my colleagues did my peers, I said, I need to
Speaker 1: learn something about neuroscience because there are a lot of
Speaker 1: answers to questions that I'm asking in particularly about the arts,
Speaker 1: which you can't really approach unless you study the brain. Example,
Speaker 1: or Reese Ravella was a great composer. He suffered a stroke.
Speaker 1: What happened to his music, what happened to his language,
Speaker 1: what happens to his ability to read? Music, you can
Speaker 1: only ask those questions of somebody where nature causes a
Speaker 1: stroke or some other kind of compromising of an area
Speaker 1: of the brain. And so then Scott I changed my
Speaker 1: postdoc plans and spent twenty years working in the Phasia
Speaker 1: center in the Boston Veterans Administration Hospital, learning about what
Speaker 1: different parts of the brain do and different kinds of
Speaker 1: cognitive faculties that we have as human beings, and how
Speaker 1: they can be impaired through brain damage. And then what
Speaker 1: do we do if we have a stroke in the
Speaker 1: middle of the left hemisphere and right handed and we
Speaker 1: can't use language in the ordinary way? Can we communicate
Speaker 1: through music? Can we communicate through drawings? Through other kinds
Speaker 1: of signs? And what I've just done is to indicate
Speaker 1: how I ever came up with my theory of multiple intelligences,
Speaker 1: which is, for better or worse, what people know me about,
Speaker 1: if they know me at all. And I realized that
Speaker 1: the notion of intellect as being singular, and in fact,
Speaker 1: if you were smart, you'd be smart and everything. If
Speaker 1: you were average, you'd be average in everything, and if
Speaker 1: you didn't do well as tests, you'd do poorly at
Speaker 1: everything was simple minded. Simplistic, or I would even say wrong.
Speaker 1: So I was very fortunate colleagues and I got a
Speaker 1: five year grant to study quote unquote the nature of
Speaker 1: human potential. I used to joke that's more of a
Speaker 1: West Coast question than an East Coast question. When I
Speaker 1: had a research team and we traveled around the world,
Speaker 1: visiting different cultures, interviewing different experts, we combed the neurological literature,
Speaker 1: the genetic literature, the anthropog anthropological literature. And in nineteen
Speaker 1: seventy six I had started a book called Kinds of Minds,
Speaker 1: but I realized that I wasn't really talking about kinds
Speaker 1: of minds. I was talking about different mental faculties, which
Speaker 1: I came to call different intelligences, and that led to
Speaker 1: frames of mind, the theory of multiple intelligences. And even
Speaker 1: though as you know, Scott has never been warmly accepted
Speaker 1: within the trade of psychometricians, it's really the idea, along
Speaker 1: with Dan Goldman's emotional intelligence, which everybody else in the
Speaker 1: world believes in, because it's right.
Speaker 2: Oh, are you saying maybe some of your theories not
Speaker 2: right or you're not contrasting that all right?
Speaker 1: No, I say, I opened the door I never think
Speaker 1: any theory is right, theories, race questions. I'm still thinking
Speaker 1: about intelligences now. I'm saying everybody now talks about it,
Speaker 1: emotional intelligence, personal intelligence, music. But if you go to
Speaker 1: a psychology department, they say, well, there's really only IQ,
Speaker 1: and that's because they create tests which just prove them
Speaker 1: right rather than looking in the real world. It's kind
Speaker 1: of sad, really, and if we get to it, it
Speaker 1: makes me kind of sad about psychology in general because
Speaker 1: I think it's much too narrow and if we spend
Speaker 1: more attention to attention to anthropology, to computer science, to neuroscience,
Speaker 1: to genetics, it would be a much stronger field.
Speaker 2: Oh, I definitely agree. I love the interdisciplinary nature. When
Speaker 2: I read Frames of Mind, and I didn't read it
Speaker 2: in nineteen eighty three, but when I read Frames of Mind,
Speaker 2: which was originally published in nineteen eighty three, I read
Speaker 2: it in the maybe nineteen ninety nine or so. It
Speaker 2: really blew my mind because I really wanted to believe
Speaker 2: desperately there was so much more than IQ, because I
Speaker 2: didn't do particularly well in IQ tests as a kid,
Speaker 2: so I was like, okay, this is And then I
Speaker 2: read Robert Sterberg's work, which is complementary to yours. I
Speaker 2: would say, you would agree with that, right, it's complementary. Yeah,
Speaker 2: And and I've gone down this rabbit hole of intelligenting
Speaker 2: human intelligence for the last twenty twenty five years. Let's
Speaker 2: really let's really get into some of the criticism, let's
Speaker 2: really get into some of the nerdiness aspect of this,
Speaker 2: because we really can discuss this at that level of analysis.
Speaker 2: So so so intelligence researchers don't say there's only IQ,
Speaker 2: but they have the whole. They have a hierarchy, so
Speaker 2: everything still fits within their hierarchy of cognitive abilities. So
Speaker 2: they would absolutely say there are multiple abilities underneath the
Speaker 2: top level G factor, the which stands for general intelligence.
Speaker 2: But what was really so radical about what you were
Speaker 2: saying is, well, if we look at so many different
Speaker 2: levels of analysis, so many different areas, and we integrate them,
Speaker 2: really G is not doesn't even even exist. I think
Speaker 2: you you would go, you would go so far as
Speaker 2: to say that G does not exist? Is right or not?
Speaker 1: I wouldn't say that. What I would say is that
Speaker 1: it's I want to say an artifact, because that's a
Speaker 1: little bit meaning it's a general competence which emerges when
Speaker 1: you use a certain kind of instrument. Let me try
Speaker 1: to make this concrete. Let's take the nineteenth century, the
Speaker 1: twentieth century, and the twenty first century, and let's take
Speaker 1: getting into college, because that's something we know about. If
Speaker 1: the nineteenth century, you wanted to predict who would be
Speaker 1: able to succeed in college, you would see can they
Speaker 1: learn English, Latin, and Greek. That's what it took to
Speaker 1: get in Harvard and Yale in the nineteenth century, So
Speaker 1: we wanted to predict her, we would have a test
Speaker 1: that's very heavily loaded on how you can learn languages.
Speaker 1: In the twentieth century, the era of liberal arts, which
Speaker 1: I was in the middle of and you were kind
Speaker 1: of at the tail end of. It's can you cut
Speaker 1: across a number of different fields, you know, history, mathematics, literature,
Speaker 1: what we call liberal arts, and so you'd have a
Speaker 1: test which kind of samples rather broadly in terms of
Speaker 1: language and logic. We're in the twenty first century now.
Speaker 1: If we want to predict who could benefit from a
Speaker 1: college education, the first thing we have to say is
Speaker 1: what is it that we want to achieve and what
Speaker 1: is it that large language instruments can't do and probably
Speaker 1: I mean I was thinking about geography the other day.
Speaker 1: When I was in Scranton in seventh grade, we had
Speaker 1: to draw a map of the of all the counties
Speaker 1: in scrant in Pennsylvania by memory. And at that time
Speaker 1: for geography you actually had to know where things were
Speaker 1: and how to draw them. I now have a machine
Speaker 1: which you can see which has everything is, and so
Speaker 1: we wanted to predict who is going to be successful
Speaker 1: in the twenty first century. We wouldn't use a paper
Speaker 1: in pensil test for a half an hour an hour.
Speaker 1: So to summarize this, the soliloquy what we're valuing in
Speaker 1: human beings at a certain time in history will determine
Speaker 1: what we valorize. And many people now, and even if
Speaker 1: they've never heard of me, say, what's important now at
Speaker 1: the workplace is can you get along with other people?
Speaker 1: Can you understand what they want? Can you join a team?
Speaker 1: The IQ test, even if you get a two hundred
Speaker 1: and IQ test, you might get a zero in that
Speaker 1: sort of stuff. You might be autistic. Some people now
Speaker 1: who are very popular in our country are artistic and
Speaker 1: autistic and can't read those things at all, but they
Speaker 1: do very well on a certain kind of tests. So
Speaker 1: the takeaway is not the g doesn't exist. Any kind
Speaker 1: of test will produce more of a general factor. But
Speaker 1: the question is why was the test developed? And what
Speaker 1: is it that you're trying to find out?
Speaker 2: There are general cognitive mechanisms that certainly pervade multiple domains.
Speaker 2: The idea is it possibly be generally smart. Well, let's say,
Speaker 2: for instance, you have a very good executive functioning, good
Speaker 2: working memory. I mean certainly that is going to make
Speaker 2: you generally something advantaged on cognitive tasks in daily life,
Speaker 2: not just on paper and pencil tests.
Speaker 1: Right, yeah, No, I mean I think we'd have to
Speaker 1: do it faculty by faculty. And if you say, all right,
Speaker 1: I want to posit an executive function, you have to
Speaker 1: give me a bunch of different things to do, and see,
Speaker 1: you know what I could do well, what I could
Speaker 1: do badly? And I happen to have been a very
Speaker 1: good marcher as a boy scout. I could drill very well,
Speaker 1: but if I had it wouldn't have made any difference.
Speaker 1: And I would say the same thing about memory. I
Speaker 1: have a good memory for language, I have a disastrous memory.
Speaker 3: For visual things.
Speaker 1: So maybe if you and I had a conversation decades ago,
Speaker 1: I might remember the conversation. There's no chance I remember
Speaker 1: what you look like, So you have to apply the
Speaker 1: multiple intelligence lens to any so called faculty. I argue
Speaker 1: with my son all the time about attention. I think
Speaker 1: I had greater, he says, he said, you have attention deficit,
Speaker 1: and then we argue about where I have it and
Speaker 1: where I live. So a good way to think about this,
Speaker 1: for Scott and for your listeners is my effort is
Speaker 1: always to pluralize, to think of different uses, different demands,
Speaker 1: different faculties, and to see to what extent a label
Speaker 1: we use, whether it's attention or memory or recognition or recall,
Speaker 1: where is it strong and where is it bad? And clearly,
Speaker 1: the more you just talk about academics the way they
Speaker 1: were done in nineteen sixty, then you know you say, yeah,
Speaker 1: there's a general intelligence, because you're good at the way
Speaker 1: academics were done in a liberal arts era. One of
Speaker 1: the interesting things about Bob Sternbrig and me is that
Speaker 1: we both fell out of love with tests when we
Speaker 1: were young. He fell out of love with ten because
Speaker 1: at one time they told me he was stupid and
Speaker 1: he didn't like that. And when I was thirteen, my
Speaker 1: parents and who did not have much money, took me
Speaker 1: to Hope Oken, New Jersey, to the Stephen Institute of Technology.
Speaker 1: I talk about this in my Essentials books. And for
Speaker 1: a week I was tested, and I took all batters
Speaker 1: of tests. I can't remember any of them, and I've
Speaker 1: tried to find out from Stephen's what they were, but
Speaker 1: this is a nineteen fifties so they don't exist anymore.
Speaker 1: So at the end of it, we get called into
Speaker 1: a room and the tester is probably a man, but
Speaker 1: I don't remember. Said, well, mister and missus Gardner, your
Speaker 1: son Howard is a bright kid. He can probably do
Speaker 1: most anything, but his real skill is in the clerical
Speaker 1: era area, which doesn't mean becoming a minister. But I'm
Speaker 1: very good at crossing out all the t's and the
Speaker 1: list and all the ease. And I said, for Christ's sake,
Speaker 1: if we spent a week in a hotel and three
Speaker 1: hundred dollars, which was like three thousand dollars now.
Speaker 3: To be told that I should be.
Speaker 1: A clerk, this shows me to be to be skeptical
Speaker 1: about tests.
Speaker 2: That's funny, I would also you and and and serve,
Speaker 2: but I'll say me too, uh. Part part of this
Speaker 2: I wrote about this in my book I'm Gifted About
Speaker 2: I wasn't special ed as a kid, and I didn't
Speaker 2: I didn't love IQ tests either.
Speaker 1: The one thing you can do for sure if you
Speaker 1: have a high IQ is you can join MENSA MENSA
Speaker 1: an organization with a high and then you can congratulate
Speaker 1: one another about being in MENSA. But I'm not interested
Speaker 1: in whether somebody is a high IQ. I'm interested in
Speaker 1: whether they want to do something worthwhile and can do
Speaker 1: it and can take feedback if they aren't doing it well,
Speaker 1: and if they really aren't doing it well, to find
Speaker 1: something else to do. That's that's what my work has
Speaker 1: been for sixty years.
Speaker 2: I really get that, and I really get that You're
Speaker 2: you're interested in in in the what for question? You
Speaker 2: know so much of psychological intelligence research. While I find
Speaker 2: it very interesting, and I do think it isn't adding
Speaker 2: to the knowledge base of humanity looking at this correlation
Speaker 2: and that correlation, You're what for question, I think is
Speaker 2: a very important one for us to constantly be pointing to.
Speaker 2: So I think that's very valuable, but I would I
Speaker 2: would push back on one, just one thing, because I've
Speaker 2: been studying generalized cognitive mechanisms in my career, and you
Speaker 2: said we would have to go faculty by faculty, But
Speaker 2: I would argue that not all faculties have the same
Speaker 2: level of a specificity, the same level generalizability. Put another way,
Speaker 2: so for instance, I picked working memory. You know it's
Speaker 2: this is a really I think the crux of this
Speaker 2: of multiple intellig's theory and some critiques is that one
Speaker 2: could argue some of these things are more talents, so
Speaker 2: music and art are more specialized. Like you can have
Speaker 2: no music ability and you could have no art ability.
Speaker 2: Are no talents, no, no talent of very little talent
Speaker 2: for music and art, but you can as long as
Speaker 2: you have a high G you know what, the kind
Speaker 2: of facilities they're measured IQ tests. You can still learn
Speaker 2: and you can still grow. But the reverse is kind
Speaker 2: of catastrophic in a lot of ways to pervasive functioning.
Speaker 2: Right if you have an extremely low IQ, I mean,
Speaker 2: autosic savants do show some of these specific talents which
Speaker 2: you would call intelligences, But there is a specificity question
Speaker 2: in a generalizability question of these faculties, don't you think so.
Speaker 1: But let's go back to my two examples. Let's say
Speaker 1: in the nineteenth century, to get into a prestigious university,
Speaker 1: you had to be able to show you could learn
Speaker 1: foreign languages.
Speaker 3: And you could learn them quickly.
Speaker 1: I have no reason whatsoever to think that people who
Speaker 1: have a high GI in the twenty first century are
Speaker 1: people who could learn Latin, Greek, Hebrew, etc.
Speaker 3: Easily.
Speaker 1: Similarly, let's say in the twenty first century, all the
Speaker 1: mathematic and linguistic things can be done better by large
Speaker 1: language instruments. Then a test of the standard test of
Speaker 1: IQ won't tell us anything. Maybe it's all a question
Speaker 1: of can you figure out where to live where you
Speaker 1: can pursue your hobbies well and not be bothered by
Speaker 1: other people who you don't want to be bothered by.
Speaker 1: And that's why traveling to different cultures and thanks to
Speaker 1: the grant that we got in the nineteen eighties, was
Speaker 1: so important, because when we talked about intelligence in certain countries,
Speaker 1: I think both in Latin America and in Asia, what
Speaker 1: people were looking for would not how well people could compute,
Speaker 1: but rather were they well behaved, did they do the
Speaker 1: proper thing. Again, if we look at mister Musk who
Speaker 1: is running or ruining the country in the beginning of
Speaker 1: the twenty first century, he doesn't have how to get
Speaker 1: along with anybody, but that's not needed for the kind
Speaker 1: of ability that he's So I think that as long
Speaker 1: as psychology and this you know more about this than
Speaker 1: I do. As long as psychology is studying such what
Speaker 1: they call weird populations, which are white, educated, Western kinds
Speaker 1: of people, it's going to get a very restricted view
Speaker 1: of human nature. Or if you look at human nature
Speaker 1: from the Paleolithic era to the end of the anthwer Praccene,
Speaker 1: the end of the of the era in which we're
Speaker 1: in now, we're not going to find a lot of
Speaker 1: general faculties. We're going to find that different periods and
Speaker 1: different ecologies foreground different abilities, and people who are good
Speaker 1: in one sort of thing may may not be good
Speaker 1: in another.
Speaker 3: Sort of thing.
Speaker 1: So that would be the Culnar argument, your argument.
Speaker 2: Thank you. So your contextual approach is also very in
Speaker 2: line with a lot of Sternberg's research on different cultures
Speaker 2: and intelligence and different cultures.
Speaker 1: You know, I think Bob Stenberg and I disagree about
Speaker 1: very little, but there's a big difference between us, and
Speaker 1: he might not put it the same way. Bob Sternberg
Speaker 1: really thinks of myself as a scientist who wants to
Speaker 1: talk to other psychologists and to other people who are
Speaker 1: interested in psychology. I'm a generalist or as you know,
Speaker 1: I'm a simple sizor. I put stuff together from many
Speaker 1: different fields. That's what I'm good at. I'm not a
Speaker 1: good making test I'm not good at doing experiments. I
Speaker 1: can get away with it, but that's my strength. My
Speaker 1: strength is to is to corral lots of knowledge, weave
Speaker 1: it together, reflect on it, put it together, and then
Speaker 1: throw it out. And sometimes psychologists like it, sometimes historians
Speaker 1: like it, sometimes the general public like it. Sometimes nobody
Speaker 1: likes it. But as you know, even in my ninth decade,
Speaker 1: I'm blogging all the time, probably a blog every week,
Speaker 1: maybe two months, and I'm blogging about what I'm interested
Speaker 1: in and what I'm working on. In fact, I mentioned
Speaker 1: at the beginning of the program that I have been
Speaker 1: revisiting ericson Eric Erickson, the great Sosuch analysts, talked about
Speaker 1: the set of life stages. The life stages for old
Speaker 1: people was called integrity versus Despair, Integrity was if your
Speaker 1: life sid of hangs together, you kind of did what
Speaker 1: you wanted to do, You didn't do anything terrible, you
Speaker 1: don't have a lot of regrets. That's integrity. Despair is
Speaker 1: if my goodness, I had all these chances, I muffed it.
Speaker 1: I wasn't nice to people. Bad things happened to me
Speaker 1: because I caused them work because I was unlucky.
Speaker 3: That's despair.
Speaker 1: So here I am looking in my own life and
Speaker 1: I'm saying I feel I'm very lucky things have worked
Speaker 1: out well for me. But I look at the world,
Speaker 1: I'm filled with despair. Climate change smeat machines, which are
Speaker 1: very smart but not at all moral or ethical dictators
Speaker 1: all around the world. You can name them. I don't
Speaker 1: have to kings as they call themselves. I'm filled with
Speaker 1: despair about that. And Ericson didn't really think about the
Speaker 1: life stages except within human psychology, and I think we
Speaker 1: have to think about them with how we relate to.
Speaker 3: The rest of the world as well.
Speaker 1: So that's what I'm blogging now as we speak in
Speaker 1: early in twenty twenty five.
Speaker 2: Strike me and all the time I've known you, you
Speaker 2: are consistently very ethical and you care very much about
Speaker 2: certain about living by a certain set of principles. I
Speaker 2: believe you even wrote a little ethics guide for your grandchildren.
Speaker 2: Is that right?
Speaker 1: That's right, though, I have to say right away, Scott,
Speaker 1: nobody can judge his or her own ethics. You have
Speaker 1: to study me and talk to lots of other people
Speaker 1: and get their own views. But I will say two things.
Speaker 1: One yes, when I turned eighty, I have five grandchildren.
Speaker 1: One of them just called me the middle of this broadcast,
Speaker 1: and I thought I would write just for them. They
Speaker 1: got it handmarked and sealed of the things that I
Speaker 1: thought were most important in life. And I hope that
Speaker 1: they won't forget about it. And they they'll, they'll they'll
Speaker 1: take it seriously. And I try when I do something
Speaker 1: bad or wrong, I try to make amends. And they
Speaker 1: were This year, just as we turned from twenty twenty
Speaker 1: four to twenty five five, there were two people who
Speaker 1: I felt I hadn't been nice too, and I reached
Speaker 1: out to both of them and one didn't respond, and
Speaker 1: the other we reconnected as friends. And so ethics that
Speaker 1: not do you do the right thing or the moral
Speaker 1: thing all the time, nobody does, but do reflect on
Speaker 1: stuff and if you screwed up, do you try to
Speaker 1: make amends. And that's one of the things that I
Speaker 1: shared with my grandchildren. But because I love my grandchildren,
Speaker 1: this message is such for them, so they unless one
Speaker 1: of them wants to tell you about the ethical will,
Speaker 1: that has to remain private.
Speaker 2: Beautiful. I want to return to your thoughts on leadership
Speaker 2: and good leadership and being a human. I want to
Speaker 2: return to all that, But I don't want to leave
Speaker 2: multiple intelligences just yet, because I think another big issue
Speaker 2: in the educational world is the difference between an intelligence
Speaker 2: in your theory and learning styles, because that's a hot topic.
Speaker 2: The idea of learning styles is not really replicated as
Speaker 2: in Willingham. Daniel Willingham has really criticized learning styles. Can
Speaker 2: you tell me do you see a difference between multiple
Speaker 2: intelligences and learning styles?
Speaker 3: Well? Right or wrong?
Speaker 1: Mold of intelligence is based in the analysis of the
Speaker 1: brain and of psychology and of different environments, and it
Speaker 1: will succeed or fail on whether the synthesis that I
Speaker 1: put together makes sense to people. Learning styles is a
Speaker 1: claim that people learn in certain ways and that you
Speaker 1: have to teach them in those ways. That's an empirical claim.
Speaker 1: And you know, there may be some stylistic categories which
Speaker 1: are helpful, But when people talk about something like visual
Speaker 1: learning style or auditory learning style, I think that's rubbish.
Speaker 1: I mean they often use the word visual for people
Speaker 1: who have trouble reading, but of course reading not well analyzed,
Speaker 1: and so I don't like to be thrown into the
Speaker 1: same coup speak as the learning styles people. And I've
Speaker 1: never said that multile intelligences tells you what to teach,
Speaker 1: you how to teach. I make just two dreams, and
Speaker 1: this is written at length in both The Essentials on
Speaker 1: Education and the Essentials on Mind. The two claims are
Speaker 1: individuation and pluralization. Individuation is learn as much about the learner,
Speaker 1: which would be you or your child or your student
Speaker 1: as man, and try to teach that person in ways
Speaker 1: that work for that person. And of course that's infinitely
Speaker 1: easier in the twenty first century than it ever was
Speaker 1: before because through computers there's many, many different ways in
Speaker 1: which we can reach people. So that's individuation. Pluralization is
Speaker 1: figure out what's important and teach it more than one way.
Speaker 1: And any good teacher has more arrows in his or
Speaker 1: her quiver than just one way of teaching. And if
Speaker 1: you're taking geometry as I did a century ago, and
Speaker 1: the teacher explained something, and I say, well, I don't understand.
Speaker 1: Can you explain it another way? Teacher says no, you've
Speaker 1: got to understand my way. That teacher should lose as
Speaker 1: or her license. Nothing important can be taught in more
Speaker 1: than nothing important can be only taught in one way.
Speaker 1: And you know, as we talk about very different difficult ideas,
Speaker 1: you know, let's say quantum mechanics or stupor string theory,
Speaker 1: or the notion of black holes or infinity. Those are
Speaker 1: things which hardly people even thought about a century ago.
Speaker 1: And we have to figure out what it is important
Speaker 1: and what are the different ways in which we can
Speaker 1: convey them. And computers are going to make it infinitely easier.
Speaker 1: But as I was saying earlier, there may be some
Speaker 1: things we don't need to learn because our machines can
Speaker 1: do it so well. It's a waste of time to
Speaker 1: say you have to learn it if you want to
Speaker 1: learn it. I mean, we don't say don't play chess
Speaker 1: anymore because because the computer has a chess program that's
Speaker 1: better than yours. But it should be something voluntary. We
Speaker 1: shouldn't force everybody to learn jes.
Speaker 2: So are there certain ways that educators have applied your
Speaker 2: theory of multiple intelligence that that bring you pause, that
Speaker 2: are concerned.
Speaker 1: Well, the very worst, which I have written about, was
Speaker 1: when a state in Australia this is thirty years ago,
Speaker 1: to listed all my intelligences I now talk about eight
Speaker 1: or nine intelligences. I don't remember how many they were
Speaker 1: then they were at least seven, and then listed all
Speaker 1: the racial and ethnic groups in Australia, including the First
Speaker 1: Nations people, and listed which intelligences they had and which
Speaker 1: ones they lacked. And that made a mockery of everything
Speaker 1: my life's work. So I actually went on television there
Speaker 1: when something called the Sunday Program it was probably like
Speaker 1: being on CBS or ABC, and said, you know, this
Speaker 1: may be well motivated, but there's now the shred of
Speaker 1: evidence that it's right. And anybody can learn new things
Speaker 1: if you are if you are flexible enough in how
Speaker 1: you present them and how and you can interact enough
Speaker 1: with them.
Speaker 3: And the schools and schools museums.
Speaker 1: You know there's going to be a playground in the
Speaker 1: In the Latin American country, which are based on multiple intelligences.
Speaker 1: People read about my ideas and say, let's create a museum,
Speaker 1: or let's create a school, or let's create a playground,
Speaker 1: or let's create a game. There are many multiple intelligences games,
Speaker 1: and let's use the idea that human beings have different
Speaker 1: faculties and we vary from one another in which faculties
Speaker 1: are strong the weak, and which ones we can use.
Speaker 1: Let's use. Let's use that to make life life more fulfilled.
Speaker 1: And that's the right use. But anybody who says Gardener
Speaker 1: says these are the a intelligence? Is this the way
Speaker 1: you have to teach uh to me? That's that's garbage.
Speaker 2: I'm glad. I'm glad you said that. Can you tell
Speaker 2: us what the EID intelligences are that you know for people?
Speaker 2: There's mightbe some listeners of this podcast maybe are not
Speaker 2: familiar with them.
Speaker 1: The first two ones I always mentioned are linguistic intelligence
Speaker 1: and logical mathematical intelligence. Everybody knows that those are important
Speaker 1: nowadays because if you're good in language and good in
Speaker 1: logic and math, you will do well in a modern
Speaker 1: Western school, whether you've done well in a Chinese school
Speaker 1: two thousand years ago or in an Indian school one
Speaker 1: hundred years from now. That I can't tell you because
Speaker 1: as the world changes, what we value changes. The other
Speaker 1: intelligences are musical, spatial, bodily, kinesthetic, interpersonal understanding other people,
Speaker 1: intrapersonal understanding yourself. Very one that intrigues me because it's
Speaker 1: very hard to test for. The eighth intelligence, which I
Speaker 1: added thirty years ago, is the naturalist intelligen and that's
Speaker 1: the capacity to make appropriate distinctions in nature between one
Speaker 1: animal and another, one plant and another, one cloud configuration another,
Speaker 1: and certainly in human prehistory going back thousands of years,
Speaker 1: just determined whether you survived or not in the southern
Speaker 1: African areas where human being started. But nowadays where we
Speaker 1: use naturalist intelligence is when we go to the grocery
Speaker 1: store or to a shopping center, or go out to
Speaker 1: go to Amazon and we try to decide which of
Speaker 1: two shoes to buy, or which of two hair dryers
Speaker 1: to buy, or which of two bibles to buy. We're
Speaker 1: using the same brain wear that was UH developed to
Speaker 1: say to say, you better eat this seed, but not
Speaker 1: this seed. You better plant this seed but not this seed.
Speaker 1: You better run away from this animal and tame this animal,
Speaker 1: or capture this animal. That software, I'm sorry that hardware
Speaker 1: doesn't disappear, but the software, the way it's used is
Speaker 1: very different. So those are the intelligences. I often talk
Speaker 1: about existential intelligence, which I call the intelligence of big questions.
Speaker 1: I always say that children all ask big questions, but
Speaker 1: most of them don't listen to the answers. They just
Speaker 1: like asking the questions. Page great psychologists study that somebody
Speaker 1: who has existential intelligence likes to ask questions like what
Speaker 1: does the future hold?
Speaker 3: What is love?
Speaker 1: Why do people prejudice? Prejudice against one another? Why do
Speaker 1: we do podcasts and to think about those kinds of things,
Speaker 1: And not because they're necessarily a right answer, but because
Speaker 1: we'd like.
Speaker 3: To think about those things.
Speaker 1: And certainly people in philosophy uses existential intelligence, but many
Speaker 1: writers do, many artists do. And religions are the cultural
Speaker 1: inventions to deal with existential questions. But people say, well, well, Howard,
Speaker 1: why don't you say religious intelligence or a spiritual intelligence?
Speaker 1: And I have equipped for that. I said, if I
Speaker 1: said there was a religious intelligence, it would make some
Speaker 1: of my friends happy, but it would make my enemies
Speaker 1: even happier because it would make me sound like I'm
Speaker 1: promoting a certain religion and I don't want to do that.
Speaker 1: But given what we know about the brain, and you
Speaker 1: know as much about this as I do, and what
Speaker 1: we know about cultures, it's not surprising that all over
Speaker 1: the world people do adhere to religions, but the religions
Speaker 1: to which they got here change, and some of them
Speaker 1: have a god component, some of them a fraternity component,
Speaker 1: and some people in my world, the religion is often scholarship.
Speaker 1: We believe that the most important thing is to know more,
Speaker 1: and that's a kind of religion.
Speaker 2: Yeah, I agree, I abouly agree. That you lay out certain
Speaker 2: sets of criteria that you say each intelligence must fit
Speaker 2: in order to count as an intelligence, but very few
Speaker 2: of the intelligences actually fulfill all the criteria, Like even
Speaker 2: if a psychometric is one of them, like verbal is
Speaker 2: correlated with spatial, for instance, so it doesn't fit that criteria.
Speaker 2: So what counts as an intelligence? What doesn't count as
Speaker 2: an intelligence? And what do you do with the fact
Speaker 2: that all your intelligences don't fit the criteria completely? And
Speaker 2: are you okay with that?
Speaker 3: Yeah?
Speaker 1: Well, this would take us another hour to speak. But
Speaker 1: when I wrote Frames of Mind, when I wrote Frames
Speaker 1: of Mind. I laid out eight criteria for intelligence, and
Speaker 1: they ranged from evidence of brain evidence from psychology tests
Speaker 1: to evidence in different cultures to genetic kind of evidence.
Speaker 3: And nothing made the.
Speaker 1: Final list unless it got a good score on most
Speaker 1: of those criteria. And the reason I could add naturalist
Speaker 1: intelligence in nineteen ninety four is because I spend a
Speaker 1: whole year investigating that Canada intelligence. The reason I haven't
Speaker 1: added another intelligence since is because life is short and
Speaker 1: I don't have years to spend researching them. So every
Speaker 1: day somebody says to me, Oh, there's a humor intelligence,
Speaker 1: Howard Gardner, Why didn't.
Speaker 2: You I like that?
Speaker 1: I like that one, And I say, for late talk,
Speaker 1: you can talk about anything, but if you want to
Speaker 1: talk in psychological terms, then you have to look at
Speaker 1: the criteria that I've played out on on what I
Speaker 1: should mention. And this is available on my website. With
Speaker 1: my colleagues Shinri for Azawa and Anti Suture, we wrote
Speaker 1: a ten thousand word essay earlier this year called who
Speaker 1: Owns Intelligence and Who Owns Intelligence? Shinri talks about animal
Speaker 1: intelligence because we know vastly more about animal intelligence now
Speaker 1: than we did even forty years ago plant intelligence. I
Speaker 1: never thought about plant intelligence, but any research there and
Speaker 1: there are things that plants can do, signaling one another
Speaker 1: when something dangerous is coming, some potion or so on,
Speaker 1: which would count in intelligence of humans did it. And
Speaker 1: then I, with my very limited knowledge, but with my
Speaker 1: considerable interest, talked about artificial intelligence and to what extent
Speaker 1: it fits these different criteria, And this is mentioned in
Speaker 1: the two books The Essentials. If I were given another
Speaker 1: ten or twenty years, I would love to be able
Speaker 1: to consider not just human intelligences, but animal, plant, and
Speaker 1: artificial because I think that's the next frontier for let's say,
Speaker 1: psychology in the large sense. I wrote a textbook forty
Speaker 1: years ago, nineteen eighty five, forty years ago called The
Speaker 1: Mind's New Science, about cognitive science, and in there I
Speaker 1: wrote about six different fields, including philosophy, psychology, neuroscience, computer science,
Speaker 1: and brain science and so on. And I said that
Speaker 1: psychology will never in itself have all the answers, and
Speaker 1: what psychologists need to do is to make the best
Speaker 1: possible connections and ties to these surrounding bits of knowledge.
Speaker 1: And when I wrote about this about computer science then
Speaker 1: it was so much and primitive then that we didn't
Speaker 1: even understand how powerful machines could be just by feeding
Speaker 1: them examples. Everything in those days had to be done
Speaker 1: with zeros and ones, and logic was basically chess and syllogisms.
Speaker 1: But now, of course anything, whether it's faces, trees, podcasts,
Speaker 1: we just throw them into a large language institute instrument
Speaker 1: and they can come up with many, many different variations
Speaker 1: and many many new forms of those things. So I
Speaker 1: think this is a long winded way of saying, if
Speaker 1: you were to look at intelligence today through the relevant sciences,
Speaker 1: that we just know too much more about the brain,
Speaker 1: and about genetics and about the nervous system, about different
Speaker 1: cultures to simply fall back in what I wrote in
Speaker 1: nineteen eighty three. But I'd like to think I opened
Speaker 1: the door. And I think the best scholars, I hope
Speaker 1: I'm at least a good scholar, are not the ones
Speaker 1: who come up with final answers. It's ones who open doors.
Speaker 1: And I think that's one of the rays of Sternberg
Speaker 1: and I have a common feature. We're not afraid to
Speaker 1: open to open doors. I'm not, in general a brave
Speaker 1: or courageous person. If anything, I'm a cautious person, but
Speaker 1: not when it comes to ideas.
Speaker 2: Oh gosh, you and Sternberg more than open doors, especially
Speaker 2: for me a personally, I would not be in this
Speaker 2: field probably if I didn't discover the work of you too,
Speaker 2: So that's quite an understatement. And a lot of people.
Speaker 2: You've opened the doors for a lot of a lot
Speaker 2: of scot young scholars. So for sure, the question of
Speaker 2: what we can learn and generalize from brain damage research
Speaker 2: is interesting to me about you know, I think that
Speaker 2: brain damage research is elucidating about the modularity of mind.
Speaker 2: Just as if we look at patients who have their
Speaker 2: corpus closum cut, it tells us about the left and
Speaker 2: right hemisphere and their unique functions. But how much does
Speaker 2: that tell us about every about people who don't have
Speaker 2: a severed corpus closim or those who don't have brain damage.
Speaker 2: How much do you feel like we really can generalize
Speaker 2: from the brain damage research to general intelligence or human
Speaker 2: intelligence in the every day population.
Speaker 1: This question is totally different than twenty twenty five than
Speaker 1: it was in nineteen eighty.
Speaker 3: Really, okay, we can do.
Speaker 1: All kinds of measures of the brain well with people
Speaker 1: who are still actually still in the womb, certainly at
Speaker 1: birth at any other time, and when they're ancient the
Speaker 1: way I am, so there's no need to wait for that.
Speaker 1: But we have to remember then, when I went into
Speaker 1: this field, which was in the late nineteen sixties, we
Speaker 1: hardly had cat scans, we didn't have MRIs, and there
Speaker 1: was no real way of investigating what was going on
Speaker 1: in the brain, as we say in vivo. So now
Speaker 1: the question is almost the opposite. We have a scholar
Speaker 1: at Harvard now who can actually examine brains before a
Speaker 1: person is born and see whether that person is going
Speaker 1: to be at risk for dyslexia. And that's amazing. But
Speaker 1: does that mean when the kid comes out of the womb,
Speaker 1: which to start giving them phonics?
Speaker 2: No?
Speaker 1: This becomes then a question of social policy. How do
Speaker 1: we use knowledge about the brain to help people rather
Speaker 1: than to classify them. I'm sure that for many reasons
Speaker 1: we could talk about. My brain is not the average brain.
Speaker 1: I'll just give you one. When I was ten years old,
Speaker 1: I went to camp and I picked up a rifle
Speaker 1: and the houser said, you're you're left handed. I said,
Speaker 1: I'm not left handed. But I went home to my
Speaker 1: mother and she said yes, you were born left handed,
Speaker 1: but in Germany we made everybody who was left handed
Speaker 1: right handed. So you know, God knows what's going on
Speaker 1: in my brain. But now we can we can look
Speaker 1: at that, We can look at that sort of information.
Speaker 1: So the question, Scott is not should we look, but
Speaker 1: rather what do we do with that knowledge? I mean
Speaker 1: to to what extent if it looks like someone's at
Speaker 1: risk for being good or bad as something? Do we
Speaker 1: then do they? We then fashion their life in a
Speaker 1: different way. And this has to do with things which
Speaker 1: I'm not compliment to talk about, but things like sexual
Speaker 1: and gender identity.
Speaker 2: You know the expression if all you look at, if
Speaker 2: all you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail.
Speaker 2: You know that expression. One could argue that if all
Speaker 2: you look at are modular intelligence is through the most
Speaker 2: extreme examples, then you, of course you won't see a
Speaker 2: generalized intelligence. One one could argue that, you know, there's
Speaker 2: a whole big field of uh, generalized artificial intelligence, and
Speaker 2: does that exist?
Speaker 1: You know? And I don't make so that word unless
Speaker 1: you tell me what you mean by general And I
Speaker 1: think I've all my life is a challenge to that.
Speaker 2: So the challenge you're right, You're right. This is we
Speaker 2: could double click on this because this is the challenge
Speaker 2: of your whole career. Yeah, what a great, what a
Speaker 2: great opportunity this is for me to discuss this with you.
Speaker 2: I feel just so I just want to meet at
Speaker 2: a meta level just say how honored I feel that
Speaker 2: I can even just discuss this with you. Yeah, so
Speaker 2: I hinted at this earlier because you know, I've been
Speaker 2: studying in my career. I've been studying domain specific intelligences
Speaker 2: or abilities along the lines of what you call multiple intelligences,
Speaker 2: and I've also looked at generalized domain general cognitive mechanisms
Speaker 2: that that appear to be relevant to multiple pull domains
Speaker 2: of human intellectual functioning that you know, to human reasoning,
Speaker 2: to to human synthesis of ideas. There are certain cognitive
Speaker 2: generalized cognitive mechanisms that that across the board are relevant
Speaker 2: versus more domains specifically relevant.
Speaker 1: But I mean, I'm not going to say that you're
Speaker 1: you're wrong and I'm right or vice versa.
Speaker 2: But it will let's sympthaesize, let's sympthesize, right.
Speaker 1: But many people, including me, fifty years would have you said, Well,
Speaker 1: people have good or bad memories. But that's not true.
Speaker 1: As I told you, I have very good linguistic memory.
Speaker 1: I have disastrous memory for people I've seen in met
Speaker 1: and so on. Uh, And so you to convince me
Speaker 1: there's such a thing as general memory or general attention attention.
Speaker 1: I told you my son thinks I have intentional disorder
Speaker 1: because he looked looking at a certain thing, and have
Speaker 1: to say, uh, you know, I maybe not put it that,
Speaker 1: but doesn't mean I have general attentions wroblems. So you're
Speaker 1: not going to convince me of these general capacities unless
Speaker 1: you let me look at them across a wide range
Speaker 1: of Uh. I've been married twice to two wonderful women.
Speaker 1: You would say they have good memories. They're both tone deaf.
Speaker 1: They cannot tell Beethoven from the Beatles.
Speaker 2: So but but but I would say, I would say,
Speaker 2: I would say that there's a big difference between being
Speaker 2: tone deaf and having a bad, uh long term memory
Speaker 2: across the board. When you say there's a there's a
Speaker 2: difference there in terms of the implications for your daily functioning.
Speaker 1: Well, I think we'd have to we'd have to sit
Speaker 1: down and lay out the lay out the studies. I mean,
Speaker 1: if you can't if you can't remember, if you can't
Speaker 1: recognize tunes, how can you remember them?
Speaker 2: But but not being able to remember tunes is not
Speaker 2: as relevant to generalize thinking and reasoning.
Speaker 1: You're falling into general by eliminating the examples I'm using.
Speaker 1: You say, what music doesn't count? But I'm saying it
Speaker 1: doesn't count. It's just memory is not the same as
Speaker 1: memory for French or memory for geometry.
Speaker 2: Well, I would say it counts in a more limited
Speaker 2: range of contexts, is all I would say.
Speaker 1: Okay, Well, then then we'd have to sit down and
Speaker 1: actually douke it out.
Speaker 2: Okay, let me put this another way, in a way
Speaker 2: that I think you will agree with this. When you
Speaker 2: say there are a certain set of generalized thinking skills
Speaker 2: that we should be teaching young individuals that would apply
Speaker 2: across a multitude of reasoning contexts.
Speaker 1: No, I wouldn't agree, because thinking in geometry is completely
Speaker 1: different than thinking in history. And I actually have written
Speaker 1: an essay but is this such a thing his historical intelligence?
Speaker 1: And I bet it has nothing to do with geometric intelligence.
Speaker 2: Wow, Okay, this is so this is so interesting. So
Speaker 2: even as we're having a conversation right now and trying
Speaker 2: to apply a synthesize. How about just synthesizing as a
Speaker 2: generalized thinking method, like to be a synthesizing mind. Aren't
Speaker 2: you implicitly arguing that there is something generalized that is
Speaker 2: a synthesis way of being.
Speaker 1: No, what I'm saying, and it's a good question is
Speaker 1: and I hope and certain people whom I admire are
Speaker 1: very good at taking lots of disparate information and organizing
Speaker 1: in it a way which is at least useful for
Speaker 1: me and may be useful for other people. But let's
Speaker 1: take the French Revolution. I might have a useful synthesis
Speaker 1: of the French Revolution, but that doesn't keep a hundred
Speaker 1: other historians from having a useful synthesis as well, which
Speaker 1: could be quite different. And then you might say, well,
Speaker 1: how about a super synthesizer. Maybe that person will take
Speaker 1: what everybody says and put together.
Speaker 2: I say five, Yeah, I mean that that would be.
Speaker 1: Text is a synthesis, right, But you and I both
Speaker 1: know there are hundreds of psychology textbooks and there's some
Speaker 1: things that they all have, but there are other things
Speaker 1: which are very into syncratic. I mean both Sturberg and
Speaker 1: I got very annoyed when there was a pointed page
Speaker 1: handbook on psychology of intelligence and we got exactly one box.
Speaker 2: Well, that wasn't the handbook I edited with Sturnberg, though,
Speaker 2: was it the Cambridge Handbook of Intelligence?
Speaker 1: Two authors and I communicate with them. I mean it
Speaker 1: was perfectly friendly. I can disagree with people without being
Speaker 1: having an analyst. In fact, they said, but you help
Speaker 1: me sell my textbook in the education school.
Speaker 2: That's funny. The idea of learning about human intelligence in
Speaker 2: an education school versus learning about human intelligence in a
Speaker 2: psychology department is very different. I want to point that
Speaker 2: out and make that very clear that the approach is different.
Speaker 2: One could argue the benefits and disadvantages of both perspectives,
Speaker 2: but I.
Speaker 1: Would put it somewhat differently. Psychology is a discipline, as
Speaker 1: its history and philosophy and physics. And when you go
Speaker 1: to a psychology department, psychologists teach you how psychologists think
Speaker 1: about things, how they do research, how they write stuff up,
Speaker 1: how they set up labs and so on. Education is
Speaker 1: not a discipline, it's a professional field. And in a
Speaker 1: good education school, you know, you could learn language about language.
Speaker 1: You could learn about cognition. You could learn about social relations,
Speaker 1: and they might even have people who are sociologists or
Speaker 1: psychologists or linguists. But we're not training people to be
Speaker 1: professors or scholars in that area. We're training people who
Speaker 1: will either train other educators or will become you know,
Speaker 1: superintendents of schools or working for a curricular development organization
Speaker 1: or something like that. So if you go to law school,
Speaker 1: you also learn something about legal history and about legal
Speaker 1: logic and so on. But it's different and having a
Speaker 1: PhD in philosophy or or in political science. So that
Speaker 1: that's the real difference. And I don't even when I
Speaker 1: was teaching and I talked for forty years at the
Speaker 1: Harvard Ed School, I only touched intelligence when people were
Speaker 1: interested in. I didn't have a course on intelligence, No,
Speaker 1: I I had courses on ethics and morality.
Speaker 3: For example.
Speaker 1: I'm interested in I co taught, of course with David
Speaker 1: Rose and Kurt Fischer on cognition and social psychology, but
Speaker 1: also in developing interventions for kids who have learning problems.
Speaker 1: So that's the kind of things we do with a
Speaker 1: school of education.
Speaker 2: What do you make of, then, of Keith Stantovitch's work
Speaker 2: on you know rational rationality and how that is different
Speaker 2: from i Q. But there are generalized rational I think
Speaker 2: like the my side bias, you know it has it
Speaker 2: has a certain generalizability as we see today in politics.
Speaker 1: Don't you think the degree of intelligence that you show
Speaker 1: in various domains or sectors has nothing to say with
Speaker 1: whether you're going to go about it in a moral
Speaker 1: or ethical way. The examples I use is both good
Speaker 1: at the poet and Gerbels. The propagandists mastered the German language,
Speaker 1: they used it for very different reasons. Nelson Mandela and
Speaker 1: Slobodon Melosovitch that the South African and the Yugoslavia had
Speaker 1: plenty of interpersonal intelligence, but they used it in very
Speaker 1: very different ways. So I think the relationship between intelligence
Speaker 1: and rationality we need to be picked picked apart in
Speaker 1: the same way.
Speaker 2: Yeah, well, the whole idea of being a good human,
Speaker 2: how do you define that?
Speaker 3: Well?
Speaker 1: With lots with lots of difficulty. I make a distinction,
Speaker 1: and this is probably the last thing that we can
Speaker 1: talk about today, between the neighborhood and morality and the
Speaker 1: ethics of roles and I write about this in both
Speaker 1: my books Essential Mind and The essential education. Neighborly morality
Speaker 1: is what the Ten Commandments and the Golden Rule tell you. Maybe,
Speaker 1: you know, be kind to other people, you know, be
Speaker 1: obedient to your parents, don't kill, don't steal, it's the
Speaker 1: Golden rule. Treat people the way you'd like to be treated,
Speaker 1: don't treat people the way you wouldn't want to be treated.
Speaker 1: And every culture has some version of no neighboring morality.
Speaker 1: And if you're lucky, that's something that you learn as
Speaker 1: you're growing up.
Speaker 3: And when you.
Speaker 1: Said to me that I was ethicalized, that I can't
Speaker 1: make that judgment. But if I am, it's because I
Speaker 1: came from a very ethical family and not very lucky.
Speaker 3: But you don't.
Speaker 1: It's much more, much higher. What I've studied with Bill
Speaker 1: Damon and like Chick sent Mahai are the ethics of roles,
Speaker 1: the role of being a professional, and the role of
Speaker 1: being a citizen. And neither of these are things that
Speaker 1: we learned from early life. Citizen is a modern concept
Speaker 1: where you actually have a say in what goes on
Speaker 1: in your society. I mean we vote about things, we
Speaker 1: vote who's going to represent us. We also vote a
Speaker 1: by amendments and about various kinds of proposals for government change.
Speaker 1: And a citizen can't be a good citizen unless he
Speaker 1: or she knows the laws and the rules and tries
Speaker 1: to obey them. As I speak, in twenty twenty five,
Speaker 1: there's really a wrestling for the soul of this country
Speaker 1: on what it means to be a good citizen. Good
Speaker 1: professional is we were talking about becoming a teacher of
Speaker 1: psychology or becoming a teacher of education school. These are
Speaker 1: roles which are professional, and there are certain things that
Speaker 1: you should do and not sink, certain things you shouldn't
Speaker 1: do as a teacher or as a professor, and certainly
Speaker 1: as a doctor or as a lawyer. There's certain things
Speaker 1: you should do and other things that you shouldn't do.
Speaker 1: And that's not something that we most of us can
Speaker 1: learn where when we're five years old or even fifteen.
Speaker 1: That's the reason you have. You have professional education, and
Speaker 1: you go to law school to really understand the law
Speaker 1: and how it works. You go to medical school to
Speaker 1: understand the body and health and chemicals and so on,
Speaker 1: and you know, you go to let's say a graduate
Speaker 1: school in psychology to learn about research methods and about
Speaker 1: how to do a fair study and how to stick
Speaker 1: to your data and not make wild assertions and so on,
Speaker 1: And there is no easy ethical issue. Ethical issues by
Speaker 1: the very nature are complicated. So in the way we
Speaker 1: talk about it when we're teaching is to say, ethical
Speaker 1: people face dilemmas and then they have to do a
Speaker 1: bunch of things beginning with D.
Speaker 3: Dilemma begins with.
Speaker 1: D, define, discuss, debate, decide, and then afterwards reflect on it.
Speaker 1: I'm missing the D there, but maybe you can come
Speaker 1: with it. It's kind of like the divesting on it.
Speaker 1: But basically you have to figure out what the ethical
Speaker 1: issue is, analyze it as much as possible, make a decision,
Speaker 1: but then you have to reflect on it and see
Speaker 1: could you have done it all? And those are that's
Speaker 1: nothing that That's not something that one can learn when
Speaker 1: you're five years old. You have to learn it by
Speaker 1: going to medical school or graduate school. Certainly, you can
Speaker 1: learn some of it in high school, you can learn
Speaker 1: some of it in college. But professions are serious, you know,
Speaker 1: they're serious undertakings. But with Anti Secura, who's one of
Speaker 1: my colleagues who worked in the intelligence thing, we're writing
Speaker 1: a blog now about truth, beauty and goodness. In the
Speaker 1: era of the influencer, influencer was a word I hadn't
Speaker 1: even heard, hadn't even heard five years ago. But nowadays
Speaker 1: professionals often have less I have less influence in what
Speaker 1: we do than influencers. And if influencers are not trained,
Speaker 1: or they only want to get as many hits as
Speaker 1: possible and they don't try to do the right thing,
Speaker 1: that's very, very bad for the professions. So both my
Speaker 1: work on intelligence who owns Intelligence and my work on
Speaker 1: truth beings, goodness and the error of the influencer are
Speaker 1: things that use whatever synthesizing abilities I have, but I'm
Speaker 1: really just throwing them out to the learning community and
Speaker 1: say this is what you should be thinking about in
Speaker 1: the years ahead. And both at the end of The
Speaker 1: Essentials on Education and The Essentials of Mind, I have
Speaker 1: a chapter called had I wrote Enough and Time? This
Speaker 1: is a line from the poet Andrew Marvel. But what
Speaker 1: I'm saying is at a certain point, maybe soon I'm
Speaker 1: not going to be able to do this anymore. But
Speaker 1: here are the questions I think people should be focusing on,
Speaker 1: and here's how I think they.
Speaker 3: Should be focusing on.
Speaker 1: And that's if you will. I hadn't thought about it before.
Speaker 1: This is like an ethical will to my readers and students,
Speaker 1: not to my grandchildren.
Speaker 2: Yeah, that was probably my favorite chapter of your book.
Speaker 2: What what do you think? You know just about leadership
Speaker 2: and what we'll wrap up this interview, But you know what,
Speaker 2: what do you think? Do you think that there's something
Speaker 2: objectively it means to be an ethical leader.
Speaker 1: I think that you can't even begin to be an
Speaker 1: ethical leader unless you realize that there are issues that
Speaker 1: are very complicated, that don't have fixed answers, that require
Speaker 1: you to reflect, discuss, talk to others, make a decision,
Speaker 1: and then afterwards decide, decode, you know, whether you could
Speaker 1: have done it better. And as I'm talking at the
Speaker 1: beginning of twenty twenty five, that is precisely what's not
Speaker 1: being exhibited in our country. It's sort of decide first
Speaker 1: and then move on to the next thing, and it's
Speaker 1: going to ruin the country, it may ruin the world.
Speaker 2: I hope it does not. I hope it does not,
Speaker 2: But yes.
Speaker 1: For your saying, and for your family's sake and for
Speaker 1: my family's sake, I hope not. And I don't like
Speaker 1: saying this. I'd much rather not being worried about politics.
Speaker 1: But you know, if you if you care about the planet,
Speaker 1: if you care about the end of the answer proceine
Speaker 1: the end of the era, which has been existing for
Speaker 1: millions of years, you need to think about what's right
Speaker 1: and what's not right. You know.
Speaker 2: But like fifty percent of this country would argue that
Speaker 2: it is right, you know, or maybe not fifty percent,
Speaker 2: but you know, sort of an large chunk. So you
Speaker 2: can't all say they're unethical. So I think it's it's
Speaker 2: it's it's tricky, you know, how do you make your work?
Speaker 3: APO don't.
Speaker 1: I don't agree with your analysis at all. I mean,
Speaker 1: let's say about one hundred percent of vote, does that
Speaker 1: mean they were ethical?
Speaker 3: It?
Speaker 1: See, it means exactly the opposite. They didn't really think
Speaker 1: clearly show what they were doing and the consequences.
Speaker 2: Right, sure, yeah, yeah, yeah. Popularity is No, it's I
Speaker 2: agree with you.
Speaker 1: It's making a hard decision, but realizing you might be wrong.
Speaker 2: No, absolutely, you can't. You can't judge ethicality based on popularity.
Speaker 2: We're both agreed, agreed on that. My question is how
Speaker 2: you know when you have different perspectives on the table
Speaker 2: of what ethical looks like, and the right moral decision
Speaker 2: what it looks like. People disagree about what the moral
Speaker 2: decision is. Try to find that really tricky psychological territory.
Speaker 1: Yeah, that's a serious question, and everybody that I know
Speaker 1: is wrestling with that question. And that's why we have
Speaker 1: education for young people. That's why we have liberal arts
Speaker 1: education before we have professional education. But all of those
Speaker 1: are in jeopardy now, and those of us who were benefits,
Speaker 1: beneficiaries of it the way you and I are, need
Speaker 1: to do the best we can to propagate it. I mean,
Speaker 1: and when Donald Trump said seven years ago, I love
Speaker 1: the poorly educated, that's not something you should have been
Speaker 1: proud of.
Speaker 2: I'll end here on a quote from your book that
Speaker 2: I loved. While scholarly work necessarily focuses on those findings
Speaker 2: that can be generalized, human potential, as we know it
Speaker 2: is realized in some way in each and every person,
Speaker 2: And while we still can, we should admire the heights
Speaker 2: of human potential and make sure that whatever happens next
Speaker 2: can preserve and build on those achievements. Thank you for
Speaker 2: the incredible, incredible legendary legacy that you've built for our field,
Speaker 2: your influence on so many people. I highly recommend people
Speaker 2: read your books, The Essential Howard Gardner in Mind, The
Speaker 2: Central Hard Garnment Education, and your hundreds of other books
Speaker 2: and writings. Thank you, doctor Gardner for being on my podcast.
Speaker 2: Was a true honor and pleasure.