Speaker 1: Today. It's great to have Robert Sternberg on the podcast.
Speaker 1: Sternberg is a psychology professor at Cornell University. Among his
Speaker 1: major contributions to psychology are the triarchic theory of intelligence
Speaker 1: and several influential theories relating to creativity, thinking styles, love
Speaker 1: and hate. A review of General psychology survey rank Sternberg
Speaker 1: is the sixtieth most cited psychologist of the twentieth century,
Speaker 1: and he's authored or co authored over fifteen hundred publications,
Speaker 1: including articles, book chapters, and books. And even that bio
Speaker 1: is a huge understatement of all that you've accomplished. Hey, Bob,
Speaker 1: so great to have you on the podcast today. Delighted Devier,
Speaker 1: thanks for rehabming me. Well, thanks for inspiring me to
Speaker 1: go into the field. So my pleasure. It seems fair.
Speaker 1: It seems fair. No that well, thank you, Thank you
Speaker 1: so much. That means a lot to me. You know,
Speaker 1: in starting this conversation today, we could obviously talk about
Speaker 1: the research stuff, but I wanted to start more at
Speaker 1: your own childhood because I think it's I get a
Speaker 1: real kick out of every time I read that you
Speaker 1: created an intelligence test when you were in maybe even
Speaker 1: elementary school. Can you kind of like tell me about
Speaker 1: that story? Yeah? Sure, Well, when I was in elementary school,
Speaker 1: I didn't create it. I did poorly on IQ tests
Speaker 1: as a young kid. In the late fifties or early sixties.
Speaker 1: They used to give IQ tests every year, or to
Speaker 1: group IQ tests, and I did very poorly on them.
Speaker 1: And you might ask how I know, since they didn't
Speaker 1: give us the scores. But when you get the test
Speaker 1: and you only finish one or two problems and everyone
Speaker 1: else's turned the page, it doesn't take a high IQ
Speaker 1: to realize that you bombed. So when I was in
Speaker 1: sixth grade, I was sent back to a fifth grade
Speaker 1: classroom to take an easier test that they thought would
Speaker 1: be more suitable to my ability level. And because it
Speaker 1: was a fifth grade classroom, I was less afraid, and
Speaker 1: I think I did better. In seventh grade, I decided
Speaker 1: to try to figure out why I had so much
Speaker 1: trouble on a key test. So I did a project
Speaker 1: on development of the mental test, and I devised my
Speaker 1: own IQ test, the very famous Sturnberg Test of Mental agalities,
Speaker 1: the STMA, which I'm sure you've heard of, and it's
Speaker 1: so widely used. All you still have it? Do you
Speaker 1: still have it. No, it's a long gone along with
Speaker 1: everything else from when I was thirteen and I also
Speaker 1: found the Stanford Bene Intelligence test in the adult section
Speaker 1: of my town library and gave it to some of
Speaker 1: my classmates and didn't work out so well. It didn't
Speaker 1: make you too popular. Well, kids didn't mind it. The
Speaker 1: first one I tried was a girl in whom I
Speaker 1: was romantically interested, and it certainly proved to be an
Speaker 1: unsuccessful strategy for getting a girl romantically interested in me.
Speaker 1: And then the head school system psychologist got wind of
Speaker 1: it and called me down from social studies class and
Speaker 1: bowled me out for fifteen minutes, threatening had burned the
Speaker 1: book if I ever brought it into school again. Really off,
Speaker 1: you're yeah, yeah, so that was you know, for a teenager.
Speaker 1: You never do that. You never tell a teenager you
Speaker 1: can't do something, because that makes it really attractive. So
Speaker 1: I'm still still doing studying IQ and intelligence and things
Speaker 1: like that, not just to show him, of course, but
Speaker 1: because that's what I became really passionate about. Yeah, I know.
Speaker 1: And when did you start becoming passionate about studying scientifically?
Speaker 1: Because when you were in grad school and psychology that
Speaker 1: wasn't the topic of your dissertation. Was it was the
Speaker 1: componential theory part of your dissertation? Well, it actually was.
Speaker 1: It was okay, I proposed the theory. I started off
Speaker 1: studying a very exciting topic and graduate school. I mean,
Speaker 1: you know, you might have to hold on to your
Speaker 1: chair because it's so exciting. It was a negative transfer
Speaker 1: in part hall in hall, part free recall, which was
Speaker 1: just a mind bendingly great thing to study. But after
Speaker 1: I did that for a year and tried to stay
Speaker 1: a week, I knew that wasn't what I wanted to do.
Speaker 1: And at the end of my first year, my undergraduate advisor,
Speaker 1: guy named Daniel Tollvn, came around and invited me to
Speaker 1: meet some people at the Center for Advanced Studying the
Speaker 1: Behavioral Sciences, and I I told him I want to
Speaker 1: study intelligence, but I don't know I want to study it,
Speaker 1: and they looked at me like, well, it's really sad
Speaker 1: when a guy who's like twenty two years old is
Speaker 1: already run out of ideas. But that summer after my
Speaker 1: first year, I figured out how I was going to
Speaker 1: study intelligence, and that did become my dissertation. Some people
Speaker 1: would say, oh, you know that was the best work
Speaker 1: he ever didn't has been down hell ever since then.
Speaker 1: I don't think anyone would say that. But well, do
Speaker 1: you remember the moment then? What need that you decided
Speaker 1: you were you wanted to actually scientifically study intelligence? Like
Speaker 1: who were you reading in grad school along those lines
Speaker 1: where you ring like Charles Spearmant, like you know, because
Speaker 1: there wasn't like Howard Garner hadn't even had his theory
Speaker 1: yet right at that time. I started studying intelligence after
Speaker 1: my seventh grade project. I did a project in tenth
Speaker 1: grade on the effects of distractions on mental ability test performance.
Speaker 1: And I had people take mental ability to us that
Speaker 1: I created, and they either were in the control condition
Speaker 1: where they just took it, or they had a car
Speaker 1: headly I'm shining in their rise in a dark room,
Speaker 1: or they listened to a metronome ticking, or they had
Speaker 1: the Beatles in the background playing She's Got the Devil
Speaker 1: in Her Heart and Please mister Postman. And the only
Speaker 1: effect I got was that people did better listening to
Speaker 1: the Beatles music. And then in eleventh grade I took physics.
Speaker 1: When I was seventeen, I guess, and it started off okay,
Speaker 1: but every marking period, my grade was going down, so
Speaker 1: I tried to salvage my physics grade and I did
Speaker 1: a physics aptitude test, which was actually pretty good. The
Speaker 1: high school later adopted it, and it predicted physics grades.
Speaker 1: I still remember, with a politic coefficient of sixty four.
Speaker 1: So I did that. And then even in college, I
Speaker 1: just wasn't that I did a lot of reading. It's
Speaker 1: just I've always just I always study things I'm bay
Speaker 1: out at, you know, and so that's a lot of things.
Speaker 1: So I study a lot of things and study intelligence
Speaker 1: because I seem to have problems with her. That's so interesting.
Speaker 1: I mean just feel it just feels like you were
Speaker 1: like destined to study this topic and it just it
Speaker 1: showed up so early, these themes. Well you too, you
Speaker 1: I know, I feel that way too. Yeah, both doing
Speaker 1: some of the same stuff. You had this ungifted issue.
Speaker 1: So with me, it wasn't ungifted. It was like a
Speaker 1: total loser. And that's how I got interested. So interesting.
Speaker 1: So you're in college, you're at Yale UNDERGRADU is that right? Yeah? Yeah?
Speaker 1: And you did you know that you wanted to major
Speaker 1: in psychology? Like your freshman year, what were you like
Speaker 1: freshman year of college. What was Bob Stenberg like freshman
Speaker 1: year of college? Yeah, well I got there and I
Speaker 1: definitely wanted to major in psychology. That didn't go so
Speaker 1: well either. I took intro psych and the first test
Speaker 1: was graded on a ten point scale, and the professor
Speaker 1: handed out our papers. It was the first hand right
Speaker 1: before Thanksgiving vacation. He handed them out and descending order,
Speaker 1: so it was a ten point quiz, and he started
Speaker 1: handing out the tens, and then the nine and then
Speaker 1: the eights, and then when when you got your paper
Speaker 1: it could leave for Thanksgiving vacation. He did the sevens.
Speaker 1: When he got to the sixes, I thiged, well, he
Speaker 1: must have gotten mine at order, because there's no way
Speaker 1: I could have gotten blow a six. And he actually
Speaker 1: got to me and I had a three at the
Speaker 1: top of my paper, three out of ten, and he commented,
Speaker 1: you know, there's a famous Sternberg in psychology, and it
Speaker 1: looks like there won't be another one. I still remember.
Speaker 1: I have a photographic memory of his saying that. So
Speaker 1: I hear, well, that doesn't look so good for my
Speaker 1: psycholog occur. So I decided to switch to math, and
Speaker 1: then I took a course on real analysis, and I
Speaker 1: still remember, you know, I think I going to be
Speaker 1: a math major, and the real analysis course is really hard.
Speaker 1: And we took a midterm and I had no idea
Speaker 1: where the problems came from. And I got a thirty
Speaker 1: five on that, and I figured, well, that was just
Speaker 1: because it was such a hard test. And there was
Speaker 1: this reality scruffy, stupid looking guy sitting in front of me.
Speaker 1: I figure, well, you know, he must have done worse
Speaker 1: than I did. So I looked over his paper and
Speaker 1: he got in ninety eight and I realized, well, it
Speaker 1: looks like I'm not going to be majoring in math either.
Speaker 1: So I went back to psychology and that's what I've
Speaker 1: done since then. Now, when you got your professorship at
Speaker 1: Yale and you started to get acclaim, did you ever
Speaker 1: go back to that teacher, like, were you a professor
Speaker 1: at Yale at the same time that he was still teaching?
Speaker 1: Oh yeah, he was the head of the search committee
Speaker 1: that hired me. No, seriously, seriously, that's crazy. Yeah. I
Speaker 1: took another class from him as a junior, uh, and
Speaker 1: I got an A in that and he and I
Speaker 1: actually became I think, pretty good friends. He later got
Speaker 1: sick and when I was at Yale as a professor,
Speaker 1: and I went to visit him until he passed away.
Speaker 1: But he was he was a good guy. It's just
Speaker 1: that you know that I didn't his for his intro. Course,
Speaker 1: I got to see it at which and he told me, well,
Speaker 1: he gave it to me as a gift. But things
Speaker 1: got better with him. He was he was good. Who
Speaker 1: was it what was his name? Bob Crowder? Oh, Bob
Speaker 1: of course, yeah, yeah, yeah, I didn't know if you
Speaker 1: had one of those like how do you like them
Speaker 1: apples moments? You know from like Goodwill hunting. So that's
Speaker 1: why I asked if you ever went back to him,
Speaker 1: and like, you know, we got along this fine. I
Speaker 1: really admired him and we became pretty good friends too.
Speaker 1: That's great. That's great. Okay, so let's let's get into
Speaker 1: some of the meat and potatoes here. One question and
Speaker 1: I have is you know, what do you see as
Speaker 1: the uh what is the relationship between the componential theory
Speaker 1: and the triarchic theory? Like at what point did one
Speaker 1: morph into the other. Well, I started off with what
Speaker 1: I called a confidential theory, and what I was doing Uh.
Speaker 1: And starting in grad school is I'd take a problem
Speaker 1: from an IQ test. Uh, Like I started with analogies.
Speaker 1: Then what I'd do is I time you solve the analogies,
Speaker 1: and I decompose the reaction times into the underlying processes
Speaker 1: that you used to solve them. So, for example, when
Speaker 1: an analogy, you have to encode the terms and then
Speaker 1: you have to infer the relations between A and B,
Speaker 1: and then you have to apply it to see And
Speaker 1: I did that because I thought that, you know, the
Speaker 1: problem with a lot of the items on IQ test
Speaker 1: is they don't measure what they're supposed to measure. So,
Speaker 1: for example, a verbal analogy, which is very common men
Speaker 1: like you know you'd see this day on the Miller
Speaker 1: Analogies Test like mitigators to assuage as exacerbate as to
Speaker 1: what well that's supposed to measure verbal reason. But it's
Speaker 1: pretty much a straight vocabulary test. And the idea was
Speaker 1: that there were people who were really smart, but it
Speaker 1: would look like they're not because they didn't have the
Speaker 1: opportunities to gain the vocabulary or the mass skills or whatever.
Speaker 1: So that's what I started doing, and there was search
Speaker 1: worked out pretty well in terms of what I was
Speaker 1: looking for, But as time went on, I realized there
Speaker 1: was something wrong with it. That's been my whole career.
Speaker 1: I My whole career is coming up with theory and
Speaker 1: then realizing something wrong with it, and then I come
Speaker 1: up with a better but I always a better theory.
Speaker 1: And what was wrong with that I came to know
Speaker 1: was that it was all based on IQ tests. So
Speaker 1: although it was process models of IQ tests, it was
Speaker 1: still like you tests. And then what happened is when
Speaker 1: I was director of graduate studies in psychology at Yale I,
Speaker 1: there were some students who applied to her program, one
Speaker 1: of whom I have referred to as Alice, who was
Speaker 1: very smart, confidentially or analytically or high G or high IQ,
Speaker 1: you know, just real tests smart. I mean, she had
Speaker 1: really high scores and tests, but when it came to
Speaker 1: coming up with her own idea, she wasn't so great.
Speaker 1: And then in another student who have called Barbara, who
Speaker 1: was who actually when she applied didn't get in because
Speaker 1: she was her grades were okay, but her test scores
Speaker 1: were terrible, and even though she got great letters of recommendation,
Speaker 1: no one beside me wanted to admit her so I
Speaker 1: actually hired her, in had her as a research associate
Speaker 1: for a couple of years, and then she got in
Speaker 1: is the top pick. But she was really creative. It
Speaker 1: just didn't come out in gres and SATs and acts,
Speaker 1: and you know, I mean, those tests don't measure creative.
Speaker 1: If you're very creative in taking those tests, well you're screwed.
Speaker 1: You know, you can't you just fuss pick ABC theory.
Speaker 1: And then there was a third student I called Celia,
Speaker 1: who wasn't as good analytically as Alice. It wasn't as
Speaker 1: good creatively as Barbera. But when she went on the
Speaker 1: job market, you know, and she was she wasn't you know,
Speaker 1: she wasn't the greatest grad student in the whole world,
Speaker 1: but she got every job she applied for, so she
Speaker 1: knew how to do a job interview. I could say that.
Speaker 1: I mean, I never got every job I applied for.
Speaker 1: So what I came to realize is that I realized
Speaker 1: the mistake I was making. The mistake was that the
Speaker 1: reliance on IQ test that you know, Barbara was creatively
Speaker 1: intelligent and Celia was practically intelligent, but the IQ tests
Speaker 1: were only looking at alice smarts, which is how analytic
Speaker 1: smart you are. And so I expanded the theory to
Speaker 1: include creative and practical smarts as well as analytical smarts.
Speaker 1: I think the pride, if I can say this, the
Speaker 1: problem in the field of intelligence is that it never
Speaker 1: kind of moved beyond nineteen oh four, which is when
Speaker 1: Spearman wrote his first famous paper on general Intelligence Objectively
Speaker 1: Determined and Measured. And you know, now it's I think
Speaker 1: it's twenty twenty one or something like that. You may
Speaker 1: have the year wrong, but that's a long time, you know,
Speaker 1: like that's over a century and we're still doing nineteen
Speaker 1: oh four stuff. And so I think that it's not
Speaker 1: that general intelligence and IQ do matter. It's that there's
Speaker 1: more to intelligence than just that, and somehow we got
Speaker 1: stuck in this very academic notion of intelligence. So I
Speaker 1: expanded it to include these things. But the thing I
Speaker 1: would emphasize is that in science, I've tried not to
Speaker 1: do what the field of intelligence has done. I mean,
Speaker 1: you know, these theories are all wrong. I mean, you know, eventually,
Speaker 1: you hope you get closer to the truth, but it
Speaker 1: has to be a process where you say, look, you know,
Speaker 1: we've had this theory for a while. Is it really perfect?
Speaker 1: Or is there more we can do? And so that's
Speaker 1: when I came up with the triarchic theory, which eventually
Speaker 1: itself was replaced. What year was the triarchic theory? Like?
Speaker 1: Around what time was that created? Let's say it was
Speaker 1: seventeen sixty five, Now was it the seventies? It was? Now?
Speaker 1: The first I started, My dissertation was published in nineteen
Speaker 1: seventy seven, and the first big paper on the triarchic
Speaker 1: theory was in nineteen eighty four, and then my book
Speaker 1: was nineteen eighty five. Beyond that, you so amazing. So
Speaker 1: you're working on this completely independently of how A. Gardner's
Speaker 1: theory of multiptelligence. His book comes out, Frames of Mind
Speaker 1: comes out in nineteen eighty four, so I think so seventies. Yeah,
Speaker 1: so you're his book comes out and you look at
Speaker 1: his book and like, what do you make of what
Speaker 1: do you think of it? How does it relate to
Speaker 1: your multiple intelligences theory? I mean, I know the answers,
Speaker 1: but I want I want our listeners. I want our
Speaker 1: listeners to know, Oh God, do you know the answer?
Speaker 1: You can tell me. So my original impression was the
Speaker 1: same as that of many people in the field. Uh.
Speaker 1: And that is that they were competing modern theories. That
Speaker 1: they were sort of based is off put on a
Speaker 1: different metaphor of mind, and that is that these were
Speaker 1: more systems theories rather than just there is this psychometric
Speaker 1: fact or this kind of geographic thing, and it's over
Speaker 1: here in this factor. Today, I would say that we
Speaker 1: dealt with different aspects of intelligence. He was dealing with
Speaker 1: different domains, you know, the linguistic domain, the quantitative domain,
Speaker 1: the spatial domain, the musical domain. And at that point
Speaker 1: I was dealing with processes. And I actually just published
Speaker 1: recently paper on musical intelligence where I showed that you
Speaker 1: could actually cross his domains with the processes in my theory.
Speaker 1: He and I do disagree on some things, like some
Speaker 1: of his intelligences I probably wouldn't see as intelligences, and
Speaker 1: he probably has some problems with my theory. But I
Speaker 1: think what we were both trying to do in different
Speaker 1: ways is to expand the way people look at intelligence.
Speaker 1: I think that was a common go I mean, it
Speaker 1: seemed like something was in the air. Then you know
Speaker 1: that Michael L. Jackson era like there was something in
Speaker 1: that air. Then about you know, it's time to go
Speaker 1: beyond standard metrics of intelligence. I'm not relating that to
Speaker 1: Michael Jackson all that saying. I'm thinking about that time
Speaker 1: frame eighty four. Yeah, that there was you know, I
Speaker 1: was working I started working on this in the early eighties,
Speaker 1: and then he picked it up too. But a lot
Speaker 1: of people, you know, the times then became more conservative,
Speaker 1: I think, and a lot of people in the field
Speaker 1: went back to G and you know, it's I think
Speaker 1: it's really a mistake. And the reason I think it's
Speaker 1: really a mistake is you can see in the world
Speaker 1: today what G has bought us. If I can change
Speaker 1: the topic just a little, can you tell people what
Speaker 1: G is. I mean, our audience might not intelligence, right,
Speaker 1: It's what you know, it's it's a large portion of
Speaker 1: what you get out of an IQ test. You get
Speaker 1: a few other things out of an IQ test, but
Speaker 1: it's kind of related to what you measure. And the
Speaker 1: problem is that during the twentieth century G general intelligence
Speaker 1: actually went up. I mean, you know, they the slightly
Speaker 1: broader thing, IQs went up thirty points. It wasn't all G.
Speaker 1: It was a lot other things too, but IQs went
Speaker 1: up thirty points in the twentieth century, which is the
Speaker 1: so called Flint effect. And the only reason that average
Speaker 1: IQ didn't go up to one hundred thirty is the
Speaker 1: test publishers kept renorming the test to make the average
Speaker 1: one hundred, So an IQ of one hundred and two
Speaker 1: thousand meant a very different thing from what it meant
Speaker 1: in nineteen hundred, and IQ of one hundred and two
Speaker 1: thousand would have been about one hundred and thirty in
Speaker 1: nineteen hundred. Incredible difference. And what bothers me about our
Speaker 1: fixation on IQ is that if you look at the
Speaker 1: problems we face in the world today, wow, IQ sure
Speaker 1: is in solving them. I mean, you know, like we've
Speaker 1: got so many, many different kinds of problems in the world,
Speaker 1: and we have these high IQ people who go to
Speaker 1: prestigious colleges and universities and get very impressive degrees, and
Speaker 1: then when it comes to solving real will problems, they
Speaker 1: make a mess of them. So I really wish that
Speaker 1: the field would broaden their consideration of what intelligence is
Speaker 1: because you know, high IQ people are good at solving
Speaker 1: multiple choice problems and that are very well structured. You know,
Speaker 1: they have a beginning and middle and end. You you know,
Speaker 1: you read the problem. It contains all the information you need.
Speaker 1: The information is valid, it's not emotionally arousing, it is
Speaker 1: no real world consequence. It's just kind of like, this
Speaker 1: is very academic thing, and that's so different from solving
Speaker 1: problems in the real world. And we know that in
Speaker 1: problems solving, the fact that you're good at one kind
Speaker 1: of problem does I mean you're good at solving another
Speaker 1: kind of problem. I mean some people are good at
Speaker 1: work and they're terrible in their personal relationships. And some
Speaker 1: people are good in their personal relationships and they're terrible
Speaker 1: at work. And so we're asking for a level of
Speaker 1: generalization from IQ tests and acts and SATs and GI's
Speaker 1: and MCATs and so on that just doesn't exist. So
Speaker 1: we're picking the wrong people a lot of time. And
Speaker 1: we're getting people who are good as long as you
Speaker 1: give them five choices and an emotionally unarousing problem with
Speaker 1: no real work consequences. But they're not necessarily people are
Speaker 1: good at solving real problems. What do you make of
Speaker 1: like Linda Gofferinson's argument, she would disagree with that statement, right.
Speaker 1: She would say that that general intelligence shows a lot
Speaker 1: of strong correlations in everyday life, especially in the workplace,
Speaker 1: that the correlations are actually very strong. You know, what
Speaker 1: do you respond to that? Well, there are few things.
Speaker 1: One is I've never been someone who said that IQs
Speaker 1: were I know some people do, I'm not one of them.
Speaker 1: In fact, IQ tests mostly measure knowledge and analytical reasoning skills,
Speaker 1: and that's part of my own theory. So I am
Speaker 1: not anti IQ test. My problem is that is that
Speaker 1: that's not all there is doing. That's part of it,
Speaker 1: but it's not the all things. So you would expect
Speaker 1: IQ to show some correlation with lots of things in
Speaker 1: life because you need to do analytical reasoning in your life.
Speaker 1: So I don't have any disagreement with that. In terms
Speaker 1: of fairly strong correlations, I don't know if you'd say
Speaker 1: they're strong. A lot of the correlations you read about
Speaker 1: in the literature are corrected, which means that they're raised
Speaker 1: to account for unreliability of a test, the restriction of
Speaker 1: range of a test, that, whatever, else. So they're not
Speaker 1: the original correlation. Some people would say those are better,
Speaker 1: but they're not the actual correlations you get from the test.
Speaker 1: But the fact that there is a correlation of IQ
Speaker 1: with a lot of things I don't find surprising, and
Speaker 1: it's not contrary to my theory to the extent I
Speaker 1: have a complaint is that, you know, if you get
Speaker 1: a correlation, say a point four, you know, as you
Speaker 1: sometimes do, that seems like a fairly typical medium correlation.
Speaker 1: You're talking about accounting for sixteen percent of the variants
Speaker 1: in the criteria. So if you're predicting I don't know income,
Speaker 1: or you're predicting grades in school, or you're predicting how
Speaker 1: quickly you graduate, So what problem is you're accounting for
Speaker 1: sixteen percent of the variance. That still leaves eighty four
Speaker 1: percent left. That's not real high. Just a second problem,
Speaker 1: which is a bigger problem, And the bigger problem is
Speaker 1: that the correlations don't take into account that the fact
Speaker 1: that you did well on these tests gave you opportunities
Speaker 1: to succeed so that the correlation would go off. Let
Speaker 1: me explain what I mean this is important. Let's say
Speaker 1: we selected people in our society to go to college,
Speaker 1: not on the basis of SATs and grades. I mean,
Speaker 1: you know those are so subjective, but on something really
Speaker 1: objective height, because that you can measure objectively, everyone agrees,
Speaker 1: you know, you can take a tape measure. You don't
Speaker 1: have to argue about what test is. So now, to
Speaker 1: get into Harvard, you have to be six ' five
Speaker 1: six feet five inches. Talk get into Yale, maybe six ' four.
Speaker 1: To get into dipsy doodal State, maybe you have to
Speaker 1: be you know, three seven. Everything's done now in the
Speaker 1: basis of height, because it's so objective. So the guys
Speaker 1: and gals who go to the great schools are very tall.
Speaker 1: Ones who go to the crummy schools are very short.
Speaker 1: And then to get into grad school and law school
Speaker 1: and medical school and business school, you you have to
Speaker 1: be even taller, at least if you want to go
Speaker 1: to a prestigious school. So this goes on for years,
Speaker 1: and then over time you notice that the people who
Speaker 1: are succeeding are very tall. And then you do a
Speaker 1: correlational study, and what do you find. You find that
Speaker 1: there is a high correlation or moat correlation between your
Speaker 1: height and you're getting into you know, prestigious jobs and
Speaker 1: prestigious colleges and you're having you know, more money. And
Speaker 1: you say, well, this proves that height is causal of success. No,
Speaker 1: what it proves is that you actually societally created the correlation.
Speaker 1: So part of the correlation that we're told is so
Speaker 1: impressive is because society gives more opportunities to people who
Speaker 1: do better on these tests. And it can be test scores,
Speaker 1: it can be religion. In some societies all the people
Speaker 1: succeed or a certain religion and the others more a dress.
Speaker 1: It can be skin color, it can be your whether
Speaker 1: your male or female, and many opportunities. I mean, look
Speaker 1: at I used to be president of the American Psychological Association.
Speaker 1: If you look at the early years, it was almost
Speaker 1: all a man, and you could say, well that proves
Speaker 1: that being male makes you more saying well, women didn't
Speaker 1: have the chance. So yeah, So the correlations don't mean
Speaker 1: as much as they seem to. Very interesting thought experiment,
Speaker 1: and it makes me think of like the Libinski and
Speaker 1: benbo Fillowing findings, you know where they they say like,
Speaker 1: see you know those with highest AT scores at age twelve,
Speaker 1: Look they're getting patents, they're so creative as adults, et cetera,
Speaker 1: et cetera. So see this proves that giftedness at a
Speaker 1: young age predicts later thing. My I think that a
Speaker 1: lot of that research is interesting and important, but i've
Speaker 1: you know, had the criticism which I think you this
Speaker 1: is Dove tells. What you're saying is that where's the
Speaker 1: control group in that? So this begs the right, that's
Speaker 1: the question. So this begs the question for you. Can
Speaker 1: you tell us about this groundbreaking work you did at
Speaker 1: colleges where you brought in a control where you expanded
Speaker 1: our metrics of intelligence, and you asked the question, well,
Speaker 1: what would happen if we measured for creative and practical
Speaker 1: in addition out of local would we get crap students,
Speaker 1: you know? Or would we get even better students or
Speaker 1: just the same kind of students? So can you tell
Speaker 1: us about your findings? Sure? I just want to say
Speaker 1: with regard to the kind of work that Lubinski and
Speaker 1: Benbo went to some extent conference and do I don't
Speaker 1: question their findings. But if you're identified in the talent search,
Speaker 1: and you're given a lot of extra resources in the
Speaker 1: talent search, and then you as a result of that,
Speaker 1: partially as a result of that, you have all these
Speaker 1: additional opportunities, and you go to a better school, and
Speaker 1: then you have an advisor who's more connected who can
Speaker 1: get you into a better grad school. I mean, you know,
Speaker 1: to some extent, I'm not saying totally. We create those
Speaker 1: correlations and then we say, voillah, look this is nature.
Speaker 1: It's not nature. It's the same with the tall thing.
Speaker 1: It would be the same if we did it by religion,
Speaker 1: you know, honestly, if we decided there are some people
Speaker 1: in the society who would rather only give opportunities to
Speaker 1: members of certain religious groups. We all know that, and
Speaker 1: in some countries they do that. And what a coincidence
Speaker 1: it is that in those countries all the top people
Speaker 1: are of those religions. It's the same with race. If
Speaker 1: you were black in the eighteen sixties eighteen fifties, it
Speaker 1: didn't matter what your IQ was. You know, you're going
Speaker 1: to end up probably if you're in the South on
Speaker 1: a plantation. It didn't get you out of being a
Speaker 1: slave on the plantation. So we just have to we
Speaker 1: have to look at how the environment affects the corrolation. Okay.
Speaker 1: In terms of what we did colleges, so I was yeah,
Speaker 1: I was a professor for thirty years and it was
Speaker 1: a good run. And we did a project that was
Speaker 1: funded by a testing company, and it was called the
Speaker 1: Rainbow Project, and it was a national project where we
Speaker 1: had high school and college students all over the country,
Speaker 1: some of them in very selective schools, some are not
Speaker 1: so collective schools, and we gave them these tests of
Speaker 1: analytical abilities, which are like acts or sets, but also
Speaker 1: creative and practical abilities, and we collected the data. It
Speaker 1: had many collaborators and what we found, hey, hey, I
Speaker 1: was one of the collaborators summer two thousand and one,
Speaker 1: two thousand and one. Yeah, I was your intern in college. Yeah,
Speaker 1: thank you for thank you for being there when I
Speaker 1: needed you. I really appreciate that. And so we get
Speaker 1: there and the results were that if the analytical test,
Speaker 1: if you add the creative and practical test to the
Speaker 1: analytical test, you could more than double the prediction just
Speaker 1: the first to your college grades, not even looking at
Speaker 1: broader things just straight GPA. In other words, even for
Speaker 1: straight GPA, adding creative and practical tests matter. And not
Speaker 1: only did you double more than double prediction in terms
Speaker 1: of percentage of variance again, for you also substantially decreased
Speaker 1: ethnic and socially defined racial group differences. So that was
Speaker 1: a great finding because usually you don't get that. You
Speaker 1: don't usually get this kind of increase in prediction together
Speaker 1: with a decrease in racial ethnic group differences. And what
Speaker 1: that suggested is that the students have diverse, socially defined
Speaker 1: racial and ethnic groups brought to the table different skills
Speaker 1: that were performance relevant, but that the traditional test word measure.
Speaker 1: So when we got those results, they were published as
Speaker 1: the lead article and what I think is the top
Speaker 1: journal in the field, and they got some publicity. It
Speaker 1: looked really good, and then I should have known this,
Speaker 1: but I did see it coming. The organization, the testing
Speaker 1: organization that was funding us kind of fall our funding.
Speaker 1: And you know, I don't know why I didn't see
Speaker 1: it coming. Other people had told me, you know, you
Speaker 1: better watch it, and it's all I think. I mean,
Speaker 1: you know, this is in my opinion, but it's a
Speaker 1: little like drug companies. If your results support their drugs,
Speaker 1: they give you more funding, and if the results don't
Speaker 1: support their drugs, good luck to you. Or food companies.
Speaker 1: If your results say how healthy you know rotten ships
Speaker 1: are for you, then they keep funding you. And if
Speaker 1: they show the rotten ships cause health decreases or funding
Speaker 1: these guys, so now they of course, had a different interpretation.
Speaker 1: They said that our test couldn't be upscaled used on
Speaker 1: larger samples. So at that point I was in a
Speaker 1: career crisis because during my years at Stamford as a
Speaker 1: grass student and yeah I was a faculty, I always
Speaker 1: saw myself as a faculty member. I mean I never
Speaker 1: imagined doing anything else. And now I felt that it
Speaker 1: reached the data. No commercial company for testing was going
Speaker 1: to touch me because these results were not what they
Speaker 1: wanted to find, or at least that's the way it looked.
Speaker 1: So I made this decision to do a career change
Speaker 1: and go into administration, and I went to tough since
Speaker 1: Dean of Arts and Sciences, and we started a project
Speaker 1: called the Kaleidoscope Project, which was not just you know,
Speaker 1: like low stakes, let's do this project and see what happens.
Speaker 1: It was used for admitting for Arts and Sciences and
Speaker 1: engineering at the undergrad level, so all students applying to
Speaker 1: TUSS for undergraduate had the option. It wasn't required of
Speaker 1: doing essays that were motivated by what had become my
Speaker 1: theory of successful intelligence, which also included wisdom. So it
Speaker 1: add creative analytical practical based in wisdom bas abilities, the
Speaker 1: idea being that you need creative skills to come up
Speaker 1: with ideas, you need analytical skills to say if they're
Speaker 1: good ideas. You need practical skills to be able to
Speaker 1: apply your ideas and to sell them to other people
Speaker 1: who don't like them, and you need wisdom based skills
Speaker 1: to ensure that they help achieve some kind of common good.
Speaker 1: And so I spent a year sort of trying to
Speaker 1: pave the way to do this project. I add a
Speaker 1: great collaborator in the d of undergrad Admissions whose name
Speaker 1: was Kaufman. It was only but it was close to Kaufman.
Speaker 1: I just had to say that it was coffee. I mean,
Speaker 1: maybe there's something about that cough part. Anyway, Yeah, James
Speaker 1: Kaufman was another student of yours, Kauf. I know, I
Speaker 1: just and I was just reading a paper by Alan
Speaker 1: Kaufman this morning. So it just seems to be the
Speaker 1: right name to I mean, just imagine the heights I
Speaker 1: could have reached if my last name were Kaufman. Uh,
Speaker 1: and instead it's so and so I just I've been
Speaker 1: so limited by my I wonder if I could still
Speaker 1: change my last name anyway. So, so we uh use
Speaker 1: these items and they were not multiple choice at all.
Speaker 1: They were performance based. So they measure creative, analytical practice,
Speaker 1: and wisdom and say, so a creative item might be
Speaker 1: something like, uh, you know, write a short story such
Speaker 1: as the end of MTV or the Mysterious Lab or
Speaker 1: the Professor disappeared, or suppose that the Nazis had won
Speaker 1: World War two? What would the world be like today?
Speaker 1: Or you could have analytical questions like to analyze your
Speaker 1: favorite book, or you could have practical questions like solving
Speaker 1: a world problem, or how could you convince a friend
Speaker 1: of an idea that she or he didn't initially believe in?
Speaker 1: And then we had wisdom based problems, which might be
Speaker 1: something like, you know, how could you later in your
Speaker 1: life help make the world a better place? And we
Speaker 1: found again that we were able to expand the horizon
Speaker 1: to increase prediction and decrease quite substantially ethnic and socially
Speaker 1: defined racial group differences. And so during the time I
Speaker 1: was dean there, we continued with this project that was
Speaker 1: always optional, and it resulted in students being admitted to
Speaker 1: toughs who otherwise wouldn't have been admitted. And so the
Speaker 1: idea was that, you know, if you had a great record, fine,
Speaker 1: if you had a terrible record, you probably won't get in.
Speaker 1: But if you were kind of in the middle, showing
Speaker 1: that you excelled in creative or practical or wisdom based
Speaker 1: skills could make a difference. And then I published a
Speaker 1: book called College Admissions for the twenty first Century published
Speaker 1: by Harvard that was based on this org And then
Speaker 1: I went to Oklahoma State as provost and senior vice
Speaker 1: president and we did a project there and that was
Speaker 1: called Panorama, and we got really great results there too
Speaker 1: in changing the admissions procedures. So what we showed on
Speaker 1: contrary to what testing organization it said, we were able
Speaker 1: to upscale to very large numbers. Eventually tens, you know,
Speaker 1: tens of thousands of people were able to upscale, and
Speaker 1: it changed till we admitted and the people were successful.
Speaker 1: And the idea was that if colleges say, as I
Speaker 1: believe they should, that they want people who are going
Speaker 1: to make the world a better place, you're not going
Speaker 1: to find that out by looking at kids SAT scores.
Speaker 1: I mean, that is so not the way to find
Speaker 1: out who's going to make the world a better place.
Speaker 1: And what we're trying to do is introduce admissions devices
Speaker 1: that would address that question. It seems like the difference
Speaker 1: that what makes you unique in this space is that
Speaker 1: you're still into testing. You're still into testing, though, and
Speaker 1: it's a subtle difference because so many people right now
Speaker 1: are talking about you know, SAT optional, and they're all
Speaker 1: for it. They're saying down with a system, down, down down,
Speaker 1: But your tests are still tests. I mean you're creative
Speaker 1: and practical. I mean they expand the realm of what
Speaker 1: we're testing. But it doesn't sound like you're saying down
Speaker 1: with testing, am I right? Yeah, that's true. My argument
Speaker 1: has been that we should expand testing. And I'll tell
Speaker 1: you why. The people who started with testing, you know
Speaker 1: in the early twentieth century, people I can reach on
Speaker 1: Cy and Lindquist and Conan, they actually had a good goal.
Speaker 1: And the goal was the recognition that if you don't
Speaker 1: use tests, you risk creating a hierarchy based on things
Speaker 1: that maybe you don't want to create a hierarchy. Be
Speaker 1: sound like how much money your parents have, or what
Speaker 1: color your skin is, or what you know who your
Speaker 1: social group is. So the idea of testing was to
Speaker 1: go beyond that problem that they didn't recognize them probably
Speaker 1: couldn't have recognized, is that test scores on their tests
Speaker 1: would be fairly substantially correlated with the old stuff. That
Speaker 1: parents who were higher SES socioeconomic status could afford more
Speaker 1: opportunities for their kids. They lived in better school districts often,
Speaker 1: so the kids went to better schools. They could buy
Speaker 1: them test preparation books, they could buy them courses, they
Speaker 1: could buy them tutors, they could give them stuff to
Speaker 1: do at home because they were better educated. I came
Speaker 1: from an uneducated home pretty much. Neither of my parents
Speaker 1: graduated from high school. And so, you know, I know
Speaker 1: what it's like. You know, your parents don't do this
Speaker 1: kind of test preparation for you. They wouldn't even know
Speaker 1: what to do. It's minded. And so so what happened
Speaker 1: is that the traditional tests to some extent, ended up
Speaker 1: belongering socioeconomic status. It's sort of like, you know, wandering money,
Speaker 1: except it was SES. So now you've created this meritocracy
Speaker 1: that's supposed to be based on mental ability, but to
Speaker 1: a large extent, not totally, but to a large extent,
Speaker 1: is based on social opportunities. And then you get honestly,
Speaker 1: people in the testing field who mostly came from upper
Speaker 1: middle or middle socioeconomic statuses, who keep perpetuating the system.
Speaker 1: And you know, I mean, we all want the best
Speaker 1: for our kids, and the people in any society who
Speaker 1: are in power want the next generation of powerful people
Speaker 1: with high opportunities to be kind of like them because
Speaker 1: that's what their kids are going to be. So my
Speaker 1: arguin has been that, yeah, we we do want to
Speaker 1: create a system where people have opportunities based on their
Speaker 1: abilities and talents, but that the abilities and talent and
Speaker 1: so we've measured or to frigg and narrow, and the
Speaker 1: risk of getting rid of tests is that we'll start
Speaker 1: paying too much attention to did you go to a
Speaker 1: prestigious school? Do you have a college counselor create a
Speaker 1: list of extracurricular activities and so on, instead of looking
Speaker 1: at the kids' potentials. But if we're going to look
Speaker 1: at potentials, we always should have looked at broader potentials,
Speaker 1: not just narrow ones. And you think that psychometrics is
Speaker 1: still is important in this process, like we testing is
Speaker 1: still valuable. The kind of testing we do it doesn't
Speaker 1: look anything like the kind of testing that's traditionally because
Speaker 1: if you mean by testing giving kids trivial, inconsequential, unemotionally
Speaker 1: arousing artificial academic problems, we do I don't think as
Speaker 1: much to do with that. And you know I just
Speaker 1: published recently. I think you saw an article in the
Speaker 1: New Scientists of ar kinds of test items, but our
Speaker 1: kinds of you know, in our test we might, for example,
Speaker 1: have two countries that are competing for a water resource,
Speaker 1: like one is upstream on a river and the others downstream,
Speaker 1: and the one that's downstream on the river is claiming
Speaker 1: that the upstream one is taking too much of the
Speaker 1: water and leaving them with desert conditions, and the two
Speaker 1: countries are ready to go to war. And so you
Speaker 1: might be asked, how would you resolve a problem like that?
Speaker 1: How could you create a system to resolve it? Or
Speaker 1: you might get a problem where two friends of yours
Speaker 1: break up and they both text you and they want
Speaker 1: to talk to you, and you know that they're both
Speaker 1: going to tell you that you should take their side,
Speaker 1: and you don't really want to take sides. You do
Speaker 1: want to stay friends, So how would you negotiate that?
Speaker 1: Or you know, I gave an example of a future
Speaker 1: history of what would have happened if the Nazis one
Speaker 1: World War two, or what would have happened if the
Speaker 1: Americans loss of the American Revolution or whatever. But our
Speaker 1: tests are very different from say they're like. Tests of
Speaker 1: creativity are graded by rubrics for how novel and useful
Speaker 1: the responses are. Tests of wisdom are greater for the
Speaker 1: extent to which your answer helps to promote a common
Speaker 1: good by balancing your own, others some larger interests over
Speaker 1: the long and short terms through the use of positive
Speaker 1: ethical value. So we we Yeah, we do assess, but
Speaker 1: I think for things that matter in life, not stuff
Speaker 1: that's easy to assess just because it's cheap and easy
Speaker 1: to assess. Yeah enough, I do. I do ask the
Speaker 1: who creates these test items. I mean, are you are
Speaker 1: you like? Are you good at practical intelligence? Like you like?
Speaker 1: It's almost like the person who I wouldn't be surprised.
Speaker 1: I mean, I'm I'm not questioning and saying it doesn't
Speaker 1: it seems like you're not. That's not That's not my point.
Speaker 1: But I'm saying, you know, the test constructors themselves. There's
Speaker 1: kind of an interesting thing when you kind of have
Speaker 1: this assumption that like, well, how do you even know
Speaker 1: the answers to the questions? You know? Yeah, So in
Speaker 1: terms of be am I good at practical intelligence? I
Speaker 1: was describing my practical intelligence work to senior professor at
Speaker 1: Yale shortly after I got tenure there. His name was
Speaker 1: Wendell Gardner, and he said he interrupted me to say,
Speaker 1: you should know, Bob, that you got tenure here not
Speaker 1: because of your practical intelligence but despite it. So I
Speaker 1: don't think I'm a model of practical intelligence. But in
Speaker 1: terms of who creates the yeah, who creates it? When
Speaker 1: I have created, some staff have created. The problem is
Speaker 1: not so much I think creating items, it's how do
Speaker 1: you escore them? And so what we do is we
Speaker 1: create rubrics for what we're looking for, and we go
Speaker 1: through a fairly elaborate training process for raiders. So it's tough.
Speaker 1: That would have been for admissions officers a d L.
Speaker 1: It was for staff we hired for the Center Iran.
Speaker 1: But we teach them what what does it mean to
Speaker 1: be creative or analytical or practical. We then have them
Speaker 1: practice on actual essays individually, and then they get together
Speaker 1: as a group and they compare answers until we can
Speaker 1: get high interer radar reliability and some of the raiders,
Speaker 1: some of the raiders we have to let go because
Speaker 1: they either can't achieve reliability or they can't kind of
Speaker 1: get the idea of what we're looking for. Now. You
Speaker 1: might say, well, the advantage of multiple choice does is
Speaker 1: they have right and wrong answers. But my argument would
Speaker 1: be that there are very few serious problems in life
Speaker 1: that have just the right and the wrong answer. If
Speaker 1: you look at what you know, how should we how
Speaker 1: should we divide COVID nineteen resource you know, resources for
Speaker 1: vaccines or resources for testing, or how can we deal
Speaker 1: with the fact that global warming is out of control?
Speaker 1: Or how can we deal with increasing income disparities? Those
Speaker 1: are the real problems the world faces. Or what can
Speaker 1: I do when my kid is not I'm pretty sure
Speaker 1: he's not telling me what he's really doing when he
Speaker 1: goes out, And those are the problems we really face
Speaker 1: them like, they don't have ABCD answers. They're high stakes,
Speaker 1: they're emotionally involving, they're unstructured problems often and it's hard
Speaker 1: to figure out what the problem is. What we try
Speaker 1: to do is create problems that are like the problems
Speaker 1: we really face in life. And the reason that's important
Speaker 1: is you can get people who are very good at
Speaker 1: solving these highly structured academic problems, and that's what they're
Speaker 1: good at. You know, they join MENSA, you know, they
Speaker 1: go to a good school. And the emphasis of put
Speaker 1: in my most recent work on adaptive intelligence, which is
Speaker 1: like about the fifth iteration of theories and intelligence, is
Speaker 1: that intelligence has always been defined as the ability to
Speaker 1: adapt to the environment. It's like, you know, how well
Speaker 1: can you get along not on a standardized test, but
Speaker 1: in dealing with the world, and species that don't adapt disappear, right,
Speaker 1: I mean like they're gone, And somehow that got lost
Speaker 1: in the intelligence business. Said, what we need is people say,
Speaker 1: let's take the real challenges the world faces, Like look
Speaker 1: at the mess we made with COVID nineteen. I mean,
Speaker 1: you know, with all these thirty IQ points, the European
Speaker 1: unions still can't get the vaccine things straight. And the
Speaker 1: United States for about a year there was totally at
Speaker 1: sea and income disparities are totally like crazy out of hand.
Speaker 1: And so what's happened is people are you know, IQ
Speaker 1: isn't about doing something that helps the world. It's about honestly,
Speaker 1: it's about doing something that helps yourself. And we have
Speaker 1: an awful lot of politicians who went to very prestigious
Speaker 1: schools and all they seem to care about is themselves
Speaker 1: and getting re elected and how can they make more money.
Speaker 1: And it's not just in the United States. I mean
Speaker 1: across the world. We're seeing an increase in authoritarian leadership
Speaker 1: of authoritarians and people who want to be author Britarians.
Speaker 1: Some succeed, some don't, and once you get one of
Speaker 1: those in power long enough, it tends to be a
Speaker 1: one way straight And it's pretty clear that IQ hasn't
Speaker 1: helping very much. Some of the smart IQ people are
Speaker 1: the ones who are most contributing to it because they
Speaker 1: can profit from it. So my argument is we need
Speaker 1: a notion of intelligence that makes the world a better
Speaker 1: place that somehow chooses people we're going to make a positive, meaningful,
Speaker 1: and potentially enduring difference in the world, not people who
Speaker 1: are going to go into Congress and like it's one
Speaker 1: scandal after another, whatever their IQ may be. And I'm
Speaker 1: not talking about scandals just of sexual behavior. I'm talking
Speaker 1: about scandals where there's only one person they're looking out for.
Speaker 1: They're not representing a constituency other than themselves. So cool,
Speaker 1: it's so cool. I love that you're this idea of
Speaker 1: emphasizing that intelligence is not just about the individual. It's
Speaker 1: actually pretty novel. It should it shouldn't be, but it is.
Speaker 1: In my book Adaptive Intelligence, which just came out. What
Speaker 1: I point out is that we need to think of
Speaker 1: intelligence collectively because we're at risk if global warming continues
Speaker 1: the way it has been, they'll come a time when,
Speaker 1: you know, our IQs may continue to go. We may
Speaker 1: have sky IQs, but we won't be here. The only
Speaker 1: ones that are going to be here at the bacteria,
Speaker 1: the viruses, the cockroaches, and if someday beings from some
Speaker 1: other planet come here and they discover bacteria, viruses, and
Speaker 1: cockroaches and the pathetic remains of human civilization, Are they
Speaker 1: going to command human civilization for being so at the
Speaker 1: top of some kind of love, joy, great chain of
Speaker 1: being when it's the only species that in record time
Speaker 1: managed to just for itself. That's us. And if that's smart,
Speaker 1: then I don't know what stupid is. Well, that's a
Speaker 1: great quote. That's a great quote right there. Maybe I'll
Speaker 1: put that at the top of the show. Notes that
Speaker 1: quote right there, make a note of that. Okay, fifty
Speaker 1: two O get Yeah, So how does this relate to
Speaker 1: because I see a link here between that line of
Speaker 1: research and then you work on hate. I mean, there's
Speaker 1: so much heat in the world today, right, how can
Speaker 1: we apply our intelligence to transcend hate and have more
Speaker 1: love in the world. Yeah, well, that is a different
Speaker 1: line of research, but it is related. It's not that
Speaker 1: different where it's related. When I've been asked how do
Speaker 1: you combat hate, I've said, there, you know three things
Speaker 1: you really can do. One is just have people really
Speaker 1: get to know each other. You know, often to people
Speaker 1: we hate our people, we don't even know it all,
Speaker 1: you know, like there are people who hate Jews who
Speaker 1: have never met a Jew. There are people who hate
Speaker 1: Muslims who've never met I mean, it's you know, so
Speaker 1: just really engaging with you. A second solution is wisdom,
Speaker 1: which is if you serious, if you take seriously the
Speaker 1: notion of a common good, you can't just say it's
Speaker 1: about me and people like me my tribe. You can't
Speaker 1: do what the Nazis did in World War two, or
Speaker 1: some people are doing today and saying it's just people
Speaker 1: of my skin color, or my religion or the religion
Speaker 1: I claim I have, or people who live in my
Speaker 1: part of the country or my community. Common good means
Speaker 1: how are you helping other people beside yourself, because the
Speaker 1: kind of situation we have in the United States is
Speaker 1: utterly untenable where they're just it's become two countries. And
Speaker 1: that's smart. I mean, like, you know, having two groups
Speaker 1: of people at war with each other. That's what i
Speaker 1: Q is brought. So I think the second solution is wisdom,
Speaker 1: and the third, as you pointed out, is love. As
Speaker 1: you know, my wife Karen and I actually have a website,
Speaker 1: a love multiverse dot com, which is all about love.
Speaker 1: That's something I study. And the idea of love is
Speaker 1: that and it comes you know, for us, it comes
Speaker 1: out of science, but for other people it may come
Speaker 1: out of religious beliefs. That if you take a love seriously,
Speaker 1: then you realize that you know, the only person hate
Speaker 1: destroys is yourself in the end, that haters are, you know,
Speaker 1: eating away it themselves, and that if you take on
Speaker 1: the notion that instead of trying to destroy others, if
Speaker 1: we all believe that a rising tide raises all ships.
Speaker 1: If we all tried to embrace each other instead of
Speaker 1: stab each other in the back, we not only wouldn't
Speaker 1: have to deal with hate, would have so much of
Speaker 1: a better world. Ain't that the truth? I remember, I
Speaker 1: remember my first year in grad school Karen who who's
Speaker 1: now your wife, But I remember she was working on
Speaker 1: the theory of hate around that time. I think she
Speaker 1: came from Germany because she was interested in working on
Speaker 1: the hate work, if I remember correctly, Yes, and she
Speaker 1: did her dissertation on hate and yeah, which the book
Speaker 1: on hate and an edited book on hate. But I
Speaker 1: think that this shows this further shows the bankruptcy of
Speaker 1: her current notion of intelligence. That you know, as the
Speaker 1: world has become smarter, it's also we have growing authoritarianism,
Speaker 1: we have greater you know, I've never seen the country
Speaker 1: at odds like it is today. I mean, this is
Speaker 1: like getting close to civil war times. And people were
Speaker 1: using their IQs to foment dissension and hatred. And unfortunately,
Speaker 1: social media companies have been mostly focused on profit, and
Speaker 1: negative posts get spread around more, they're more diffused, and
Speaker 1: so what's happening is that our intelligence is actually working
Speaker 1: against us. It's you know, through social media. I mean,
Speaker 1: you know, very smart people put that together to maximize
Speaker 1: the profits of the social media company. But it's sure
Speaker 1: as hell isn't helping civilization as we know it. So
Speaker 1: we have to start getting wise. We have to be
Speaker 1: more creative, and we have to realize the importance of
Speaker 1: love instead of Hey amen, amen, I love what you're doing,
Speaker 1: and I'm so glad that you expanded your research to
Speaker 1: this realm. It's so important. But I have to ask
Speaker 1: a cheeky question, though, why do so many of your
Speaker 1: theories have three components to it? Do you have three
Speaker 1: reasons for that? Yeah? I would say that, you know,
Speaker 1: it has gotten ridiculous. I mean like, not only do
Speaker 1: I have three reasons, I have triplets. I mean like,
Speaker 1: this is really there's something about you and the number three.
Speaker 1: I did not choose to have triplets. That just kind
Speaker 1: of happened. Actually, though that's less true in current times.
Speaker 1: The theory of adaptive intelligence, the new Cambridge University press
Speaker 1: book isn't really about it if it has elements, it
Speaker 1: has creativity, analytical skills, practical skills, and wisdom. It has four.
Speaker 1: But I think that the important thing isn't the number,
Speaker 1: but rather what we need to be doing is, as
Speaker 1: I said, focusing on whether it's through love or wisdom
Speaker 1: or adaptive intelligence. We need to be focusing on making
Speaker 1: the world a better place, and we're not doing that.
Speaker 1: And we have a lot of people in the country
Speaker 1: today seem more intent on developing aggression and grudges, and
Speaker 1: whether it's regardless of what you're studying, that doesn't hold
Speaker 1: up a good future for humanity or for other species too.
Speaker 1: We're also killing off other species. So I think that
Speaker 1: you know, adaptation in a broad sense isn't just about
Speaker 1: changing yourself to fit the world. It's also about changing
Speaker 1: the world to be a better place. It's about shaping
Speaker 1: the world. And we're running out of time to shape
Speaker 1: the world. I mean, you know, at some point global
Speaker 1: warming will be so out of control that there's nothing
Speaker 1: that we can do with it. And the income disparities.
Speaker 1: At some point, when people feel totally ripped off, you
Speaker 1: begin to get violence, you get civil war, and at
Speaker 1: some point you begin to realize that your unwillingness to
Speaker 1: use your intelligence wisely is literally is destructive in the
Speaker 1: sense that sperm counts are like half of what they
Speaker 1: were in nineteen seventy. Uh you know why is it
Speaker 1: plastics or other chemicals in the environment? But is that smart?
Speaker 1: I mean, even if you look at this solely in
Speaker 1: terms of reproductive success, we're a species that is self destructive.
Speaker 1: And so if we keep thinking of it. You know,
Speaker 1: when the pandemic was at its height, what were people
Speaker 1: worried about their Well, how can I take the act
Speaker 1: or the sat I mean, like is that you know,
Speaker 1: like the rod and we're worried about them? Where is
Speaker 1: my testing center? This is the wrong way to go.
Speaker 1: This is just not where you want to be. Well,
Speaker 1: I'm so glad that you wrote this book, Adoptive Intelligence,
Speaker 1: and I really hope people read it. The subtitle is
Speaker 1: Surviving and Thriving in Times of Uncertainty. Boy, are we
Speaker 1: in times of uncertainty? So these are the times to
Speaker 1: buy the book. For sure. I have to end this
Speaker 1: by thanking you for You're a huge, huge part of
Speaker 1: the reason why I'm in this field, perhaps the biggest
Speaker 1: part of the reason. You know. When I'm sitting there
Speaker 1: sophomore year of college reading cognitive psychology textbook and got
Speaker 1: to intelligence chapter, I was like, who wrote this? I
Speaker 1: got it. This is amazing and I see Robert Sternberg Gyale.
Speaker 1: My whole dream in life was to work with Robert
Speaker 1: Stermer Yale and study intelligence, and I just have to
Speaker 1: thank you so much for what you've done to inspire
Speaker 1: me in my field. And I know a lot of
Speaker 1: other people in the field, so I must thank you.
Speaker 1: It's great to have students who have done better than
Speaker 1: you have, so I'm a very proud and honor to
Speaker 1: have had you as a student. And you know the
Speaker 1: best thing that can happen to you is your students
Speaker 1: do better than you, just like your kids. You know,
Speaker 1: you want your kids to do better than you have,
Speaker 1: and I'm delighted you have and I hope that you
Speaker 1: know you continue to have the terrific success that you've
Speaker 1: had up to you. Thanks Bob, and thanks for being
Speaker 1: on the Psychology Podcast. Thank you have a good day care.
Speaker 1: Thanks for listening to this episode of the Psychology Podcast.
Speaker 1: If you'd like to react in some way to something
Speaker 1: you heard, I encourage you to join in the discussion
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Speaker 1: and creativity.