Robert Sternberg || Adaptive Intelligence

including articles, book chapters, and books. And even that bio is a huge understatement of all that you've accomplished. Hey, Bob, so great to have you on the podcast today. Delighted Devier, thanks for rehabming me. Well, thanks for inspiring me to go into the field. So my pleasure. It seems fair. It seems fair. No that well, thank you, Thank you

so much. That means a lot to me. You know, in starting this conversation today, we could obviously talk about the research stuff, but I wanted to start more at your own childhood because I think it's I get a real kick out of every time I read that you created an intelligence test when you were in maybe even elementary school. Can you kind of like tell me about that story? Yeah? Sure, Well, when I was in elementary school, I didn't create it. I did poorly on IQ tests

as a young kid. In the late fifties or early sixties. They used to give IQ tests every year, or to group IQ tests, and I did very poorly on them. And you might ask how I know, since they didn't give us the scores. But when you get the test and you only finish one or two problems and everyone else's turned the page, it doesn't take a high IQ to realize that you bombed. So when I was in sixth grade, I was sent back to a fifth grade classroom to take an easier test that they thought would

be more suitable to my ability level. And because it was a fifth grade classroom, I was less afraid, and I think I did better. In seventh grade, I decided to try to figure out why I had so much trouble on a key test. So I did a project on development of the mental test, and I devised my own IQ test, the very famous Sturnberg Test of Mental agalities, the STMA, which I'm sure you've heard of, and it's so widely used. All you still have it? Do you

still have it. No, it's a long gone along with everything else from when I was thirteen and I also found the Stanford Bene Intelligence test in the adult section of my town library and gave it to some of my classmates and didn't work out so well. It didn't make you too popular. Well, kids didn't mind it. The first one I tried was a girl in whom I was romantically interested, and it certainly proved to be an unsuccessful strategy for getting a girl romantically interested in me.

And then the head school system psychologist got wind of it and called me down from social studies class and bowled me out for fifteen minutes, threatening had burned the book if I ever brought it into school again. Really off, you're yeah, yeah, so that was you know, for a teenager. You never do that. You never tell a teenager you

can't do something, because that makes it really attractive. So I'm still still doing studying IQ and intelligence and things like that, not just to show him, of course, but because that's what I became really passionate about. Yeah, I know. And when did you start becoming passionate about studying scientifically? Because when you were in grad school and psychology that wasn't the topic of your dissertation. Was it was the componential theory part of your dissertation? Well, it actually was.

It was okay, I proposed the theory. I started off studying a very exciting topic and graduate school. I mean, you know, you might have to hold on to your chair because it's so exciting. It was a negative transfer in part hall in hall, part free recall, which was just a mind bendingly great thing to study. But after I did that for a year and tried to stay a week, I knew that wasn't what I wanted to do.

And at the end of my first year, my undergraduate advisor, guy named Daniel Tollvn, came around and invited me to meet some people at the Center for Advanced Studying the Behavioral Sciences, and I I told him I want to study intelligence, but I don't know I want to study it, and they looked at me like, well, it's really sad when a guy who's like twenty two years old is already run out of ideas. But that summer after my first year, I figured out how I was going to

study intelligence, and that did become my dissertation. Some people would say, oh, you know that was the best work he ever didn't has been down hell ever since then. I don't think anyone would say that. But well, do you remember the moment then? What need that you decided

you were you wanted to actually scientifically study intelligence? Like who were you reading in grad school along those lines where you ring like Charles Spearmant, like you know, because there wasn't like Howard Garner hadn't even had his theory yet right at that time. I started studying intelligence after my seventh grade project. I did a project in tenth grade on the effects of distractions on mental ability test performance.

And I had people take mental ability to us that I created, and they either were in the control condition where they just took it, or they had a car headly I'm shining in their rise in a dark room, or they listened to a metronome ticking, or they had the Beatles in the background playing She's Got the Devil in Her Heart and Please mister Postman. And the only effect I got was that people did better listening to the Beatles music. And then in eleventh grade I took physics.

When I was seventeen, I guess, and it started off okay, but every marking period, my grade was going down, so I tried to salvage my physics grade and I did a physics aptitude test, which was actually pretty good. The high school later adopted it, and it predicted physics grades. I still remember, with a politic coefficient of sixty four. So I did that. And then even in college, I

just wasn't that I did a lot of reading. It's just I've always just I always study things I'm bay out at, you know, and so that's a lot of things. So I study a lot of things and study intelligence because I seem to have problems with her. That's so interesting. I mean just feel it just feels like you were like destined to study this topic and it just it showed up so early, these themes. Well you too, you I know, I feel that way too. Yeah, both doing

some of the same stuff. You had this ungifted issue. So with me, it wasn't ungifted. It was like a total loser. And that's how I got interested. So interesting. So you're in college, you're at Yale UNDERGRADU is that right? Yeah? Yeah? And you did you know that you wanted to major in psychology? Like your freshman year, what were you like freshman year of college. What was Bob Stenberg like freshman year of college? Yeah, well I got there and I

definitely wanted to major in psychology. That didn't go so well either. I took intro psych and the first test was graded on a ten point scale, and the professor handed out our papers. It was the first hand right before Thanksgiving vacation. He handed them out and descending order, so it was a ten point quiz, and he started handing out the tens, and then the nine and then the eights, and then when when you got your paper it could leave for Thanksgiving vacation. He did the sevens.

When he got to the sixes, I thiged, well, he must have gotten mine at order, because there's no way I could have gotten blow a six. And he actually got to me and I had a three at the top of my paper, three out of ten, and he commented, you know, there's a famous Sternberg in psychology, and it looks like there won't be another one. I still remember. I have a photographic memory of his saying that. So I hear, well, that doesn't look so good for my

psycholog occur. So I decided to switch to math, and then I took a course on real analysis, and I still remember, you know, I think I going to be a math major, and the real analysis course is really hard. And we took a midterm and I had no idea where the problems came from. And I got a thirty five on that, and I figured, well, that was just because it was such a hard test. And there was this reality scruffy, stupid looking guy sitting in front of me.

I figure, well, you know, he must have done worse than I did. So I looked over his paper and he got in ninety eight and I realized, well, it looks like I'm not going to be majoring in math either. So I went back to psychology and that's what I've done since then. Now, when you got your professorship at Yale and you started to get acclaim, did you ever go back to that teacher, like, were you a professor at Yale at the same time that he was still teaching?

Oh yeah, he was the head of the search committee that hired me. No, seriously, seriously, that's crazy. Yeah. I took another class from him as a junior, uh, and I got an A in that and he and I actually became I think, pretty good friends. He later got sick and when I was at Yale as a professor, and I went to visit him until he passed away. But he was he was a good guy. It's just that you know that I didn't his for his intro. Course, I got to see it at which and he told me, well,

he gave it to me as a gift. But things got better with him. He was he was good. Who was it what was his name? Bob Crowder? Oh, Bob of course, yeah, yeah, yeah, I didn't know if you had one of those like how do you like them apples moments? You know from like Goodwill hunting. So that's why I asked if you ever went back to him, and like, you know, we got along this fine. I really admired him and we became pretty good friends too. That's great. That's great. Okay, so let's let's get into

some of the meat and potatoes here. One question and I have is you know, what do you see as the uh what is the relationship between the componential theory and the triarchic theory? Like at what point did one morph into the other. Well, I started off with what I called a confidential theory, and what I was doing Uh. And starting in grad school is I'd take a problem from an IQ test. Uh, Like I started with analogies.

Then what I'd do is I time you solve the analogies, and I decompose the reaction times into the underlying processes that you used to solve them. So, for example, when an analogy, you have to encode the terms and then you have to infer the relations between A and B, and then you have to apply it to see And I did that because I thought that, you know, the problem with a lot of the items on IQ test

is they don't measure what they're supposed to measure. So, for example, a verbal analogy, which is very common men like you know you'd see this day on the Miller Analogies Test like mitigators to assuage as exacerbate as to what well that's supposed to measure verbal reason. But it's

pretty much a straight vocabulary test. And the idea was that there were people who were really smart, but it would look like they're not because they didn't have the opportunities to gain the vocabulary or the mass skills or whatever. So that's what I started doing, and there was search worked out pretty well in terms of what I was looking for, But as time went on, I realized there was something wrong with it. That's been my whole career.

I My whole career is coming up with theory and then realizing something wrong with it, and then I come up with a better but I always a better theory. And what was wrong with that I came to know was that it was all based on IQ tests. So although it was process models of IQ tests, it was

still like you tests. And then what happened is when I was director of graduate studies in psychology at Yale I, there were some students who applied to her program, one of whom I have referred to as Alice, who was very smart, confidentially or analytically or high G or high IQ, you know, just real tests smart. I mean, she had really high scores and tests, but when it came to coming up with her own idea, she wasn't so great.

And then in another student who have called Barbara, who was who actually when she applied didn't get in because she was her grades were okay, but her test scores were terrible, and even though she got great letters of recommendation, no one beside me wanted to admit her so I actually hired her, in had her as a research associate for a couple of years, and then she got in

is the top pick. But she was really creative. It just didn't come out in gres and SATs and acts, and you know, I mean, those tests don't measure creative. If you're very creative in taking those tests, well you're screwed. You know, you can't you just fuss pick ABC theory. And then there was a third student I called Celia, who wasn't as good analytically as Alice. It wasn't as

good creatively as Barbera. But when she went on the job market, you know, and she was she wasn't you know, she wasn't the greatest grad student in the whole world, but she got every job she applied for, so she knew how to do a job interview. I could say that. I mean, I never got every job I applied for. So what I came to realize is that I realized

the mistake I was making. The mistake was that the reliance on IQ test that you know, Barbara was creatively intelligent and Celia was practically intelligent, but the IQ tests were only looking at alice smarts, which is how analytic smart you are. And so I expanded the theory to include creative and practical smarts as well as analytical smarts.

I think the pride, if I can say this, the problem in the field of intelligence is that it never kind of moved beyond nineteen oh four, which is when Spearman wrote his first famous paper on general Intelligence Objectively Determined and Measured. And you know, now it's I think it's twenty twenty one or something like that. You may have the year wrong, but that's a long time, you know, like that's over a century and we're still doing nineteen oh four stuff. And so I think that it's not

that general intelligence and IQ do matter. It's that there's more to intelligence than just that, and somehow we got stuck in this very academic notion of intelligence. So I expanded it to include these things. But the thing I would emphasize is that in science, I've tried not to do what the field of intelligence has done. I mean, you know, these theories are all wrong. I mean, you know, eventually, you hope you get closer to the truth, but it has to be a process where you say, look, you know,

we've had this theory for a while. Is it really perfect? Or is there more we can do? And so that's when I came up with the triarchic theory, which eventually itself was replaced. What year was the triarchic theory? Like? Around what time was that created? Let's say it was seventeen sixty five, Now was it the seventies? It was? Now?

The first I started, My dissertation was published in nineteen seventy seven, and the first big paper on the triarchic theory was in nineteen eighty four, and then my book was nineteen eighty five. Beyond that, you so amazing. So you're working on this completely independently of how A. Gardner's theory of multiptelligence. His book comes out, Frames of Mind

comes out in nineteen eighty four, so I think so seventies. Yeah, so you're his book comes out and you look at his book and like, what do you make of what do you think of it? How does it relate to your multiple intelligences theory? I mean, I know the answers, but I want I want our listeners. I want our listeners to know, Oh God, do you know the answer? You can tell me. So my original impression was the same as that of many people in the field. Uh.

And that is that they were competing modern theories. That they were sort of based is off put on a different metaphor of mind, and that is that these were more systems theories rather than just there is this psychometric fact or this kind of geographic thing, and it's over here in this factor. Today, I would say that we dealt with different aspects of intelligence. He was dealing with different domains, you know, the linguistic domain, the quantitative domain,

the spatial domain, the musical domain. And at that point I was dealing with processes. And I actually just published recently paper on musical intelligence where I showed that you could actually cross his domains with the processes in my theory. He and I do disagree on some things, like some of his intelligences I probably wouldn't see as intelligences, and

he probably has some problems with my theory. But I think what we were both trying to do in different ways is to expand the way people look at intelligence. I think that was a common go I mean, it seemed like something was in the air. Then you know that Michael L. Jackson era like there was something in that air. Then about you know, it's time to go beyond standard metrics of intelligence. I'm not relating that to Michael Jackson all that saying. I'm thinking about that time

frame eighty four. Yeah, that there was you know, I was working I started working on this in the early eighties, and then he picked it up too. But a lot of people, you know, the times then became more conservative, I think, and a lot of people in the field went back to G and you know, it's I think it's really a mistake. And the reason I think it's really a mistake is you can see in the world today what G has bought us. If I can change the topic just a little, can you tell people what

G is. I mean, our audience might not intelligence, right, It's what you know, it's it's a large portion of what you get out of an IQ test. You get a few other things out of an IQ test, but it's kind of related to what you measure. And the problem is that during the twentieth century G general intelligence actually went up. I mean, you know, they the slightly

broader thing, IQs went up thirty points. It wasn't all G. It was a lot other things too, but IQs went up thirty points in the twentieth century, which is the

so called Flint effect. And the only reason that average IQ didn't go up to one hundred thirty is the test publishers kept renorming the test to make the average one hundred, So an IQ of one hundred and two thousand meant a very different thing from what it meant in nineteen hundred, and IQ of one hundred and two thousand would have been about one hundred and thirty in

nineteen hundred. Incredible difference. And what bothers me about our fixation on IQ is that if you look at the problems we face in the world today, wow, IQ sure is in solving them. I mean, you know, like we've got so many, many different kinds of problems in the world, and we have these high IQ people who go to prestigious colleges and universities and get very impressive degrees, and then when it comes to solving real will problems, they

make a mess of them. So I really wish that the field would broaden their consideration of what intelligence is because you know, high IQ people are good at solving multiple choice problems and that are very well structured. You know, they have a beginning and middle and end. You you know, you read the problem. It contains all the information you need. The information is valid, it's not emotionally arousing, it is

no real world consequence. It's just kind of like, this is very academic thing, and that's so different from solving problems in the real world. And we know that in problems solving, the fact that you're good at one kind of problem does I mean you're good at solving another kind of problem. I mean some people are good at work and they're terrible in their personal relationships. And some people are good in their personal relationships and they're terrible

at work. And so we're asking for a level of generalization from IQ tests and acts and SATs and GI's and MCATs and so on that just doesn't exist. So we're picking the wrong people a lot of time. And we're getting people who are good as long as you give them five choices and an emotionally unarousing problem with no real work consequences. But they're not necessarily people are

good at solving real problems. What do you make of like Linda Gofferinson's argument, she would disagree with that statement, right. She would say that that general intelligence shows a lot of strong correlations in everyday life, especially in the workplace, that the correlations are actually very strong. You know, what do you respond to that? Well, there are few things. One is I've never been someone who said that IQs were I know some people do, I'm not one of them.

In fact, IQ tests mostly measure knowledge and analytical reasoning skills, and that's part of my own theory. So I am not anti IQ test. My problem is that is that that's not all there is doing. That's part of it, but it's not the all things. So you would expect IQ to show some correlation with lots of things in life because you need to do analytical reasoning in your life. So I don't have any disagreement with that. In terms of fairly strong correlations, I don't know if you'd say

they're strong. A lot of the correlations you read about in the literature are corrected, which means that they're raised to account for unreliability of a test, the restriction of range of a test, that, whatever, else. So they're not the original correlation. Some people would say those are better, but they're not the actual correlations you get from the test.

But the fact that there is a correlation of IQ with a lot of things I don't find surprising, and it's not contrary to my theory to the extent I have a complaint is that, you know, if you get a correlation, say a point four, you know, as you sometimes do, that seems like a fairly typical medium correlation. You're talking about accounting for sixteen percent of the variants

in the criteria. So if you're predicting I don't know income, or you're predicting grades in school, or you're predicting how quickly you graduate, So what problem is you're accounting for sixteen percent of the variance. That still leaves eighty four percent left. That's not real high. Just a second problem, which is a bigger problem, And the bigger problem is that the correlations don't take into account that the fact that you did well on these tests gave you opportunities

to succeed so that the correlation would go off. Let me explain what I mean this is important. Let's say we selected people in our society to go to college, not on the basis of SATs and grades. I mean, you know those are so subjective, but on something really objective height, because that you can measure objectively, everyone agrees, you know, you can take a tape measure. You don't have to argue about what test is. So now, to get into Harvard, you have to be six ' five

six feet five inches. Talk get into Yale, maybe six ' four. To get into dipsy doodal State, maybe you have to be you know, three seven. Everything's done now in the basis of height, because it's so objective. So the guys and gals who go to the great schools are very tall. Ones who go to the crummy schools are very short. And then to get into grad school and law school and medical school and business school, you you have to be even taller, at least if you want to go

to a prestigious school. So this goes on for years, and then over time you notice that the people who are succeeding are very tall. And then you do a correlational study, and what do you find. You find that there is a high correlation or moat correlation between your height and you're getting into you know, prestigious jobs and prestigious colleges and you're having you know, more money. And

you say, well, this proves that height is causal of success. No, what it proves is that you actually societally created the correlation. So part of the correlation that we're told is so impressive is because society gives more opportunities to people who do better on these tests. And it can be test scores, it can be religion. In some societies all the people succeed or a certain religion and the others more a dress. It can be skin color, it can be your whether

your male or female, and many opportunities. I mean, look at I used to be president of the American Psychological Association. If you look at the early years, it was almost all a man, and you could say, well that proves that being male makes you more saying well, women didn't have the chance. So yeah, So the correlations don't mean

as much as they seem to. Very interesting thought experiment, and it makes me think of like the Libinski and benbo Fillowing findings, you know where they they say like, see you know those with highest AT scores at age twelve, Look they're getting patents, they're so creative as adults, et cetera, et cetera. So see this proves that giftedness at a

young age predicts later thing. My I think that a lot of that research is interesting and important, but i've you know, had the criticism which I think you this is Dove tells. What you're saying is that where's the control group in that? So this begs the right, that's

the question. So this begs the question for you. Can you tell us about this groundbreaking work you did at colleges where you brought in a control where you expanded our metrics of intelligence, and you asked the question, well, what would happen if we measured for creative and practical in addition out of local would we get crap students, you know? Or would we get even better students or just the same kind of students? So can you tell

us about your findings? Sure? I just want to say with regard to the kind of work that Lubinski and Benbo went to some extent conference and do I don't question their findings. But if you're identified in the talent search, and you're given a lot of extra resources in the talent search, and then you as a result of that, partially as a result of that, you have all these additional opportunities, and you go to a better school, and then you have an advisor who's more connected who can

get you into a better grad school. I mean, you know, to some extent, I'm not saying totally. We create those correlations and then we say, voillah, look this is nature. It's not nature. It's the same with the tall thing. It would be the same if we did it by religion, you know, honestly, if we decided there are some people in the society who would rather only give opportunities to members of certain religious groups. We all know that, and

in some countries they do that. And what a coincidence it is that in those countries all the top people are of those religions. It's the same with race. If you were black in the eighteen sixties eighteen fifties, it didn't matter what your IQ was. You know, you're going to end up probably if you're in the South on a plantation. It didn't get you out of being a slave on the plantation. So we just have to we have to look at how the environment affects the corrolation. Okay.

In terms of what we did colleges, so I was yeah, I was a professor for thirty years and it was a good run. And we did a project that was funded by a testing company, and it was called the Rainbow Project, and it was a national project where we had high school and college students all over the country, some of them in very selective schools, some are not so collective schools, and we gave them these tests of analytical abilities, which are like acts or sets, but also

creative and practical abilities, and we collected the data. It had many collaborators and what we found, hey, hey, I was one of the collaborators summer two thousand and one, two thousand and one. Yeah, I was your intern in college. Yeah, thank you for thank you for being there when I

needed you. I really appreciate that. And so we get there and the results were that if the analytical test, if you add the creative and practical test to the analytical test, you could more than double the prediction just the first to your college grades, not even looking at broader things just straight GPA. In other words, even for

straight GPA, adding creative and practical tests matter. And not only did you double more than double prediction in terms of percentage of variance again, for you also substantially decreased ethnic and socially defined racial group differences. So that was a great finding because usually you don't get that. You don't usually get this kind of increase in prediction together

with a decrease in racial ethnic group differences. And what that suggested is that the students have diverse, socially defined racial and ethnic groups brought to the table different skills that were performance relevant, but that the traditional test word measure. So when we got those results, they were published as the lead article and what I think is the top journal in the field, and they got some publicity. It looked really good, and then I should have known this,

but I did see it coming. The organization, the testing organization that was funding us kind of fall our funding. And you know, I don't know why I didn't see it coming. Other people had told me, you know, you better watch it, and it's all I think. I mean, you know, this is in my opinion, but it's a little like drug companies. If your results support their drugs, they give you more funding, and if the results don't support their drugs, good luck to you. Or food companies.

If your results say how healthy you know rotten ships are for you, then they keep funding you. And if they show the rotten ships cause health decreases or funding these guys, so now they of course, had a different interpretation. They said that our test couldn't be upscaled used on larger samples. So at that point I was in a career crisis because during my years at Stamford as a grass student and yeah I was a faculty, I always saw myself as a faculty member. I mean I never

imagined doing anything else. And now I felt that it reached the data. No commercial company for testing was going to touch me because these results were not what they wanted to find, or at least that's the way it looked. So I made this decision to do a career change and go into administration, and I went to tough since Dean of Arts and Sciences, and we started a project called the Kaleidoscope Project, which was not just you know, like low stakes, let's do this project and see what happens.

It was used for admitting for Arts and Sciences and engineering at the undergrad level, so all students applying to TUSS for undergraduate had the option. It wasn't required of doing essays that were motivated by what had become my theory of successful intelligence, which also included wisdom. So it add creative analytical practical based in wisdom bas abilities, the idea being that you need creative skills to come up with ideas, you need analytical skills to say if they're

good ideas. You need practical skills to be able to apply your ideas and to sell them to other people who don't like them, and you need wisdom based skills to ensure that they help achieve some kind of common good. And so I spent a year sort of trying to pave the way to do this project. I add a great collaborator in the d of undergrad Admissions whose name was Kaufman. It was only but it was close to Kaufman. I just had to say that it was coffee. I mean,

maybe there's something about that cough part. Anyway, Yeah, James Kaufman was another student of yours, Kauf. I know, I just and I was just reading a paper by Alan Kaufman this morning. So it just seems to be the right name to I mean, just imagine the heights I could have reached if my last name were Kaufman. Uh, and instead it's so and so I just I've been so limited by my I wonder if I could still

change my last name anyway. So, so we uh use these items and they were not multiple choice at all. They were performance based. So they measure creative, analytical practice, and wisdom and say, so a creative item might be something like, uh, you know, write a short story such as the end of MTV or the Mysterious Lab or the Professor disappeared, or suppose that the Nazis had won World War two? What would the world be like today?

Or you could have analytical questions like to analyze your favorite book, or you could have practical questions like solving a world problem, or how could you convince a friend of an idea that she or he didn't initially believe in? And then we had wisdom based problems, which might be something like, you know, how could you later in your

life help make the world a better place? And we found again that we were able to expand the horizon to increase prediction and decrease quite substantially ethnic and socially defined racial group differences. And so during the time I was dean there, we continued with this project that was always optional, and it resulted in students being admitted to

toughs who otherwise wouldn't have been admitted. And so the idea was that, you know, if you had a great record, fine, if you had a terrible record, you probably won't get in. But if you were kind of in the middle, showing that you excelled in creative or practical or wisdom based

skills could make a difference. And then I published a book called College Admissions for the twenty first Century published by Harvard that was based on this org And then I went to Oklahoma State as provost and senior vice president and we did a project there and that was called Panorama, and we got really great results there too in changing the admissions procedures. So what we showed on contrary to what testing organization it said, we were able

to upscale to very large numbers. Eventually tens, you know, tens of thousands of people were able to upscale, and it changed till we admitted and the people were successful. And the idea was that if colleges say, as I believe they should, that they want people who are going to make the world a better place, you're not going to find that out by looking at kids SAT scores. I mean, that is so not the way to find out who's going to make the world a better place.

And what we're trying to do is introduce admissions devices that would address that question. It seems like the difference that what makes you unique in this space is that you're still into testing. You're still into testing, though, and it's a subtle difference because so many people right now are talking about you know, SAT optional, and they're all for it. They're saying down with a system, down, down down, But your tests are still tests. I mean you're creative

and practical. I mean they expand the realm of what we're testing. But it doesn't sound like you're saying down with testing, am I right? Yeah, that's true. My argument has been that we should expand testing. And I'll tell you why. The people who started with testing, you know in the early twentieth century, people I can reach on Cy and Lindquist and Conan, they actually had a good goal. And the goal was the recognition that if you don't use tests, you risk creating a hierarchy based on things

that maybe you don't want to create a hierarchy. Be sound like how much money your parents have, or what color your skin is, or what you know who your social group is. So the idea of testing was to go beyond that problem that they didn't recognize them probably couldn't have recognized, is that test scores on their tests would be fairly substantially correlated with the old stuff. That parents who were higher SES socioeconomic status could afford more

opportunities for their kids. They lived in better school districts often, so the kids went to better schools. They could buy them test preparation books, they could buy them courses, they could buy them tutors, they could give them stuff to do at home because they were better educated. I came from an uneducated home pretty much. Neither of my parents graduated from high school. And so, you know, I know what it's like. You know, your parents don't do this

kind of test preparation for you. They wouldn't even know what to do. It's minded. And so so what happened is that the traditional tests to some extent, ended up belongering socioeconomic status. It's sort of like, you know, wandering money, except it was SES. So now you've created this meritocracy that's supposed to be based on mental ability, but to a large extent, not totally, but to a large extent,

is based on social opportunities. And then you get honestly, people in the testing field who mostly came from upper middle or middle socioeconomic statuses, who keep perpetuating the system. And you know, I mean, we all want the best for our kids, and the people in any society who are in power want the next generation of powerful people with high opportunities to be kind of like them because

that's what their kids are going to be. So my arguin has been that, yeah, we we do want to create a system where people have opportunities based on their abilities and talents, but that the abilities and talent and so we've measured or to frigg and narrow, and the risk of getting rid of tests is that we'll start paying too much attention to did you go to a prestigious school? Do you have a college counselor create a list of extracurricular activities and so on, instead of looking

at the kids' potentials. But if we're going to look at potentials, we always should have looked at broader potentials, not just narrow ones. And you think that psychometrics is still is important in this process, like we testing is still valuable. The kind of testing we do it doesn't look anything like the kind of testing that's traditionally because if you mean by testing giving kids trivial, inconsequential, unemotionally arousing artificial academic problems, we do I don't think as

much to do with that. And you know I just published recently. I think you saw an article in the New Scientists of ar kinds of test items, but our kinds of you know, in our test we might, for example, have two countries that are competing for a water resource, like one is upstream on a river and the others downstream, and the one that's downstream on the river is claiming that the upstream one is taking too much of the water and leaving them with desert conditions, and the two

countries are ready to go to war. And so you might be asked, how would you resolve a problem like that? How could you create a system to resolve it? Or you might get a problem where two friends of yours break up and they both text you and they want to talk to you, and you know that they're both going to tell you that you should take their side, and you don't really want to take sides. You do want to stay friends, So how would you negotiate that?

Or you know, I gave an example of a future history of what would have happened if the Nazis one World War two, or what would have happened if the Americans loss of the American Revolution or whatever. But our tests are very different from say they're like. Tests of creativity are graded by rubrics for how novel and useful

the responses are. Tests of wisdom are greater for the extent to which your answer helps to promote a common good by balancing your own, others some larger interests over the long and short terms through the use of positive ethical value. So we we Yeah, we do assess, but I think for things that matter in life, not stuff that's easy to assess just because it's cheap and easy to assess. Yeah enough, I do. I do ask the who creates these test items. I mean, are you are

you like? Are you good at practical intelligence? Like you like? It's almost like the person who I wouldn't be surprised. I mean, I'm I'm not questioning and saying it doesn't it seems like you're not. That's not That's not my point. But I'm saying, you know, the test constructors themselves. There's kind of an interesting thing when you kind of have this assumption that like, well, how do you even know the answers to the questions? You know? Yeah, So in

terms of be am I good at practical intelligence? I was describing my practical intelligence work to senior professor at Yale shortly after I got tenure there. His name was Wendell Gardner, and he said he interrupted me to say, you should know, Bob, that you got tenure here not because of your practical intelligence but despite it. So I don't think I'm a model of practical intelligence. But in terms of who creates the yeah, who creates it? When

I have created, some staff have created. The problem is not so much I think creating items, it's how do you escore them? And so what we do is we create rubrics for what we're looking for, and we go through a fairly elaborate training process for raiders. So it's tough. That would have been for admissions officers a d L. It was for staff we hired for the Center Iran. But we teach them what what does it mean to

be creative or analytical or practical. We then have them practice on actual essays individually, and then they get together as a group and they compare answers until we can get high interer radar reliability and some of the raiders, some of the raiders we have to let go because they either can't achieve reliability or they can't kind of get the idea of what we're looking for. Now. You might say, well, the advantage of multiple choice does is

they have right and wrong answers. But my argument would be that there are very few serious problems in life that have just the right and the wrong answer. If you look at what you know, how should we how should we divide COVID nineteen resource you know, resources for vaccines or resources for testing, or how can we deal with the fact that global warming is out of control? Or how can we deal with increasing income disparities? Those

are the real problems the world faces. Or what can I do when my kid is not I'm pretty sure he's not telling me what he's really doing when he goes out, And those are the problems we really face them like, they don't have ABCD answers. They're high stakes, they're emotionally involving, they're unstructured problems often and it's hard to figure out what the problem is. What we try to do is create problems that are like the problems

we really face in life. And the reason that's important is you can get people who are very good at solving these highly structured academic problems, and that's what they're good at. You know, they join MENSA, you know, they go to a good school. And the emphasis of put in my most recent work on adaptive intelligence, which is like about the fifth iteration of theories and intelligence, is that intelligence has always been defined as the ability to

adapt to the environment. It's like, you know, how well can you get along not on a standardized test, but in dealing with the world, and species that don't adapt disappear, right, I mean like they're gone, And somehow that got lost in the intelligence business. Said, what we need is people say, let's take the real challenges the world faces, Like look at the mess we made with COVID nineteen. I mean, you know, with all these thirty IQ points, the European

unions still can't get the vaccine things straight. And the United States for about a year there was totally at sea and income disparities are totally like crazy out of hand. And so what's happened is people are you know, IQ isn't about doing something that helps the world. It's about honestly,

it's about doing something that helps yourself. And we have an awful lot of politicians who went to very prestigious schools and all they seem to care about is themselves and getting re elected and how can they make more money. And it's not just in the United States. I mean across the world. We're seeing an increase in authoritarian leadership of authoritarians and people who want to be author Britarians.

Some succeed, some don't, and once you get one of those in power long enough, it tends to be a one way straight And it's pretty clear that IQ hasn't helping very much. Some of the smart IQ people are the ones who are most contributing to it because they

can profit from it. So my argument is we need a notion of intelligence that makes the world a better place that somehow chooses people we're going to make a positive, meaningful, and potentially enduring difference in the world, not people who are going to go into Congress and like it's one scandal after another, whatever their IQ may be. And I'm not talking about scandals just of sexual behavior. I'm talking about scandals where there's only one person they're looking out for.

They're not representing a constituency other than themselves. So cool, it's so cool. I love that you're this idea of emphasizing that intelligence is not just about the individual. It's actually pretty novel. It should it shouldn't be, but it is. In my book Adaptive Intelligence, which just came out. What I point out is that we need to think of intelligence collectively because we're at risk if global warming continues the way it has been, they'll come a time when,

you know, our IQs may continue to go. We may have sky IQs, but we won't be here. The only ones that are going to be here at the bacteria, the viruses, the cockroaches, and if someday beings from some other planet come here and they discover bacteria, viruses, and cockroaches and the pathetic remains of human civilization, Are they going to command human civilization for being so at the top of some kind of love, joy, great chain of being when it's the only species that in record time

managed to just for itself. That's us. And if that's smart, then I don't know what stupid is. Well, that's a great quote. That's a great quote right there. Maybe I'll put that at the top of the show. Notes that quote right there, make a note of that. Okay, fifty two O get Yeah, So how does this relate to because I see a link here between that line of

research and then you work on hate. I mean, there's so much heat in the world today, right, how can we apply our intelligence to transcend hate and have more love in the world. Yeah, well, that is a different line of research, but it is related. It's not that different where it's related. When I've been asked how do you combat hate, I've said, there, you know three things you really can do. One is just have people really

get to know each other. You know, often to people we hate our people, we don't even know it all, you know, like there are people who hate Jews who have never met a Jew. There are people who hate Muslims who've never met I mean, it's you know, so just really engaging with you. A second solution is wisdom, which is if you serious, if you take seriously the notion of a common good, you can't just say it's

about me and people like me my tribe. You can't do what the Nazis did in World War two, or some people are doing today and saying it's just people of my skin color, or my religion or the religion I claim I have, or people who live in my part of the country or my community. Common good means how are you helping other people beside yourself, because the kind of situation we have in the United States is utterly untenable where they're just it's become two countries. And

that's smart. I mean, like, you know, having two groups of people at war with each other. That's what i Q is brought. So I think the second solution is wisdom, and the third, as you pointed out, is love. As you know, my wife Karen and I actually have a website, a love multiverse dot com, which is all about love. That's something I study. And the idea of love is that and it comes you know, for us, it comes out of science, but for other people it may come

out of religious beliefs. That if you take a love seriously, then you realize that you know, the only person hate destroys is yourself in the end, that haters are, you know, eating away it themselves, and that if you take on the notion that instead of trying to destroy others, if we all believe that a rising tide raises all ships. If we all tried to embrace each other instead of stab each other in the back, we not only wouldn't have to deal with hate, would have so much of

a better world. Ain't that the truth? I remember, I remember my first year in grad school Karen who who's now your wife, But I remember she was working on the theory of hate around that time. I think she came from Germany because she was interested in working on the hate work, if I remember correctly, Yes, and she did her dissertation on hate and yeah, which the book on hate and an edited book on hate. But I think that this shows this further shows the bankruptcy of

her current notion of intelligence. That you know, as the world has become smarter, it's also we have growing authoritarianism, we have greater you know, I've never seen the country at odds like it is today. I mean, this is like getting close to civil war times. And people were

using their IQs to foment dissension and hatred. And unfortunately, social media companies have been mostly focused on profit, and negative posts get spread around more, they're more diffused, and so what's happening is that our intelligence is actually working against us. It's you know, through social media. I mean, you know, very smart people put that together to maximize the profits of the social media company. But it's sure as hell isn't helping civilization as we know it. So

we have to start getting wise. We have to be more creative, and we have to realize the importance of love instead of Hey amen, amen, I love what you're doing, and I'm so glad that you expanded your research to this realm. It's so important. But I have to ask a cheeky question, though, why do so many of your theories have three components to it? Do you have three reasons for that? Yeah? I would say that, you know, it has gotten ridiculous. I mean like, not only do

I have three reasons, I have triplets. I mean like, this is really there's something about you and the number three. I did not choose to have triplets. That just kind of happened. Actually, though that's less true in current times. The theory of adaptive intelligence, the new Cambridge University press book isn't really about it if it has elements, it has creativity, analytical skills, practical skills, and wisdom. It has four.

But I think that the important thing isn't the number, but rather what we need to be doing is, as I said, focusing on whether it's through love or wisdom or adaptive intelligence. We need to be focusing on making the world a better place, and we're not doing that. And we have a lot of people in the country today seem more intent on developing aggression and grudges, and whether it's regardless of what you're studying, that doesn't hold up a good future for humanity or for other species too.

We're also killing off other species. So I think that you know, adaptation in a broad sense isn't just about changing yourself to fit the world. It's also about changing the world to be a better place. It's about shaping the world. And we're running out of time to shape the world. I mean, you know, at some point global warming will be so out of control that there's nothing that we can do with it. And the income disparities.

At some point, when people feel totally ripped off, you begin to get violence, you get civil war, and at some point you begin to realize that your unwillingness to use your intelligence wisely is literally is destructive in the sense that sperm counts are like half of what they were in nineteen seventy. Uh you know why is it plastics or other chemicals in the environment? But is that smart?

I mean, even if you look at this solely in terms of reproductive success, we're a species that is self destructive. And so if we keep thinking of it. You know, when the pandemic was at its height, what were people worried about their Well, how can I take the act or the sat I mean, like is that you know, like the rod and we're worried about them? Where is my testing center? This is the wrong way to go.

This is just not where you want to be. Well, I'm so glad that you wrote this book, Adoptive Intelligence, and I really hope people read it. The subtitle is Surviving and Thriving in Times of Uncertainty. Boy, are we in times of uncertainty? So these are the times to buy the book. For sure. I have to end this by thanking you for You're a huge, huge part of the reason why I'm in this field, perhaps the biggest

part of the reason. You know. When I'm sitting there sophomore year of college reading cognitive psychology textbook and got to intelligence chapter, I was like, who wrote this? I got it. This is amazing and I see Robert Sternberg Gyale. My whole dream in life was to work with Robert Stermer Yale and study intelligence, and I just have to thank you so much for what you've done to inspire me in my field. And I know a lot of other people in the field, so I must thank you.

It's great to have students who have done better than you have, so I'm a very proud and honor to have had you as a student. And you know the best thing that can happen to you is your students do better than you, just like your kids. You know, you want your kids to do better than you have, and I'm delighted you have and I hope that you know you continue to have the terrific success that you've had up to you. Thanks Bob, and thanks for being

on the Psychology Podcast. Thank you have a good day care. Thanks for listening to this episode of the Psychology Podcast. If you'd like to react in some way to something you heard, I encourage you to join in the discussion at the Psychology podcast dot com. That's the Psychology Podcast dot com. Also, if you'd prefer a completely ad free experience,

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