Outsmarting IQ

The Emerging Science of Learnable Intelligence

David Perkins

• Publisher: Free Press
• Year: 1995
• Print ISBN: 9780029252123
• eBook ISBN: 9781439105610
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Education General

Since the turn of the century, the idea that intellectual capacity is fixed has been generally accepted. But increasingly, psychologists, educators, and others have come to challenge this premise. Outsmarting IQ reveals how earlier discoveries about IQ, together with recent research, show that intelligence is not genetically fixed. Intelligence can be taught.David Perkins, renowned for his research on thinking, learning, and education, identifies three distinct kinds of intelligence: the fixed neurological intelligence linked to IQ tests; the specialized knowledge and experience that individuals acquire over time; and reflective intelligence, the ability to become aware of one's mental habits and transcend limited patterns of thinking. Although all of these forms of intelligence function simultaneously, it is reflective intelligence, Perkins shows, that affords the best opportunity to amplify human intellect. This is the kind of intelligence that helps us to make wise personal decisions, solve challenging technical problems, find creative ideas, and learn complex topics in mathematics, the sciences, management, and other areas. It is the kind of intelligence most needed in an increasingly competitive and complicated world.Using his own pathbreaking research at Harvard and a rich array of other sources, Perkins paints a compelling picture of the skills and attitudes underlying learnable intelligence. He identifies typical pitfalls in multiple perspectives, and neglecting evidence. He reveals the underlying mechanisms of intelligent behavior. And he explores new frontiers in the development of intelligence in education, business, and other settings.This book will be of interest to people who have a personal or professional stake in increasing their intellectual skills, to those who look toward better education and a more thoughtful society, and not least to those who follow today's heated debates about the nature of intelligence.

In Search of Intelligence

Telescopes and Intelligence

When I was a child, my family lived in a large sprawling house in a small town in Maine, a former schoolhouse in fact, with a couple of the blackboards still in place. There was a flat roof over part of the house, where my mother hung the laundry to billow and dry on clear days. But the flat roof meant more to me during clear nights. I would sometimes go out with a pillow to rest my head, lie on the roof, and stargaze for an hour or so.

Later, I bought a cheap reflecting telescope. I picked out craters on the Moon, scrutinized the red sphere of Mars, located Saturn, marveling at the tiny image of the planet with its delicate rings. I was caught up by the magnitude of creation and our diminutive place in it, an experience innumerable human beings have had, albeit far fewer human beings than there are stars of which to stand in awe.

Although I was not very educated when I went stargazing on the laundry roof, I had the benefit of some knowledge. I knew that the earth circled around the sun, the moon around the earth. I knew that the other planets circled around the sun. I knew that the stars were way out there, our sun but one of countless hydrogen sparks wending their firefly ways through a vastness without compass. My father told me about such things, and I had read about some of them in books.

So, between 10 and 11 PM up there on the laundry roof, that’s how the universe looked to me. Scanning the sweep of the Milky Way, our own galaxy, I often felt I was no more than a speck of rust on the fragile spokes of gravity that made that awesome wheel go round.

I was harvesting the heritage of human intelligence. For thousands of years, priests and scientists, magicians and navigators, astrologers and philosophers had been looking at the sky and wondering, making up stories, proposing theories, building conceptions—a motley team of human intelligences at work, stirred by every concern from the most cosmic to the most pragmatic.

We think of the telescope as our instrument of inquiry for the heavens. Even more fundamental is the instrument behind the instrument, the resource of human intelligence. Every one of those stargazers drew upon it to make sense of what they were seeing.

An Apple Cart Waiting to Be Upset

Whatever I knew about astronomy at the time, there was another matter of which I knew nothing: how hard-won was that look of infinite reach in the sky, what a work of intelligence it was, what a revolution it took—a conceptual revolution that changed the universe, by changing what people took the universe to be.

Children, grandfathers, and everyone in between have been looking up at the stars for a long time—something like 2 million years, if one counts as human the tool-using hominids who once lived and hunted in the environs of the Olduvai Gorge of the Serengeti. It would be easy to assume that what we see today is not much different today than it has been for millennia.

Easy to assume, but quite false. While the physical pattern of the stars has not changed much, what we see has. The look of the stars depends not only the light that tickles our retinas but on our conceptions, on what we think things out there are really like. Five centuries before, a young ancestor of mine somewhere in the British Isles might have spent that same hour between 10 and 11 lying in a field to watch the heavenly pageant march around the earth. He would not have felt like a mote in an infinite universe. Believing something very different, he would see something quite different, the stars parading for his benefit.

The neat cosmology of Aristotle and the Catholic church had put the universe into a satisfying order and served it up in a form pleasing to most everyone concerned. The earth lay at the center of the universe. Around the earth circled the sun, the moon, the fixed stars, and the planets, all ordered on crystalline spheres at various distances from our planet.

Make no mistake: This was magnificently intelligent in its time. It solved the problems of its day. It certainly made my ancestor happy. He could be proud of his position on the reviewing stand, enjoying the parade of stars, because in the dogma of his day it was all there for him and his fellow human beings, lords of creation every one. But reviewing stand it actually was not. More of an apple cart, just waiting to be upset.

No one then knew that the planets were whole worlds in themselves, like the earth. They were just more lights in the sky like the stars, but with a difference. A half-dozen aberrant points of light wandered around against the background of the innumerable “fixed” stars over periods of months and years. They came to be called planets—wanderers—from the Greek verb planasthai, to wander.

The planets became a problem for an idealized earth-centered picture of the universe. As far back as the time of Christ, those who studied the stars had looked upward with better and better instrumentation. They saw the planets, night after night and season after season, tracing their paths against the backdrop of the fixed stars. They measured those paths with some precision. They tried to fit what they found to the theory that the planets were making circles around the earth, but the paths did not quite match. The circles did not quite work.

What to do? When a theory has a leak, patch it! The great patchmaker was the Egyptian astronomer Ptolemy, who lived from about 100 to 170 A.D. Ptolemy made his observations in Alexandria, Egypt, during the period 127-151 A.D. He wanted to preserve the notion that heavenly objects moved in circles, an idea precious to the philosophy of the times. So Ptolemy proposed that each planet not only made a great circle around the earth but also continuously made little circles within that big circle—epicycles, they were called. These epicycles accounted for the mismatch between a circle-around-the-earth theory and the data on the positions of the planets in the sky. And best of all, they kept the planets moving around the earth and things moving in circles generally.

Ptolemy rescued the whole notion of an earth-centered universe with his epicycles, a brilliant albeit mistaken act of intelligence. Aristotle before him was no fool either, nor the others of those times who looked at, pondered, and wrote about the sky. Intelligence does not make you right, but it helps you find patterns, right or not. It’s striking that we understand the optics of telescopes so much better than the true instrument of all inquiry, human intelligence.

Reconstructing the Universe

Ptolemy’s patch was clever, but sooner or later the flaws were bound to show up. Copernicus, a Polish astronomer in the years 1473-1543, devoted his life to the meticulous gathering of data about the motions of the stars and planets. He pored over his measurements, compared them with the epicycles theory, and could not make epicycles work, at least not in any reasonably straightforward version. Hoping to get rid of these errors, he reviewed the older literature of the subject and found that a minority opinion had been long neglected, the heliocentric concept that placed the sun at the center of the universe.

So Copernicus bit the cosmic bullet. He mustered his intelligence and his evidence. We had it all wrong, he argued. The planets do not circle around the earth. They make circles around the sun—and so does the earth. This was his proposal in his great work, On the Revolulions of the Celestial Spheres, not published until well after his death around 1543.

With Copernicus’s proposal began modern astronomy and cosmology, sciences that have grown tremendously over the five centuries since, sciences that, every step of the way, have expanded our conception of the scope and complexity of the universe. These same sciences have just as steadily shrunk our conception of our own importance in the scheme of things.

This was the original Copernican revolution, but not the one and only. Historians of science have borrowed the name of Copernicus for other equally fundamental shifts of theory. A Copernican revolution has come to mean any revolution in our scientific conception of things that upsets the apple cart, reverses old conceptions, remakes the fabric of our beliefs down to their warp and weft. There have been many such collective acts of intelligence in the rising spiral of science, for instance the dual revolutions of quantum mechanics and of relativity theory that marked the first decades of the twentieth century.

Goddard’s List

This book concerns a Copernican revolution in the making, one far from cosmological and about as close to home as you can get. It concerns what I called the instrument behind the instruments, that very instrument with which you are reading these words, that very instrument with which you walk, talk, find your way to work and home again. It concerns the nature of intelligence and especially the idea that intelligence is not fixed but learnable. It asks whether you or I or most anyone can learn to behave more intelligently.

Who would not want a sharper mental edge? Yet the classic view of human intelligence takes a grudging stance on that prospect. Just as Ptolemy’s epicycles gave the original Copernican revolution something to revolt against, so this classic view of intelligence does for the new Copernican revolution—it is a view to think with and think against, to test and critique, and perhaps even to come back to, if in the end the evidence insists. This severe picture of intelligence has rarely been as concisely and chillingly asserted as by H. H. Goddard in 1920.¹

Goddard was one of the three major pioneers of hereditarianism in America. He popularized the Binet scale and used the scores from these tests to measure intelligence as a single, inherited entity. As director of research at the Vineland Training School for Feeble-Minded Girls and Boys in New Jersey he claimed to localize the cause of feeble-mindedness in a single gene. It was Goddard who coined the phrase moron for high-grade defectives—all people with mental ages between eight and twelve—from a Greek word meaning foolish. Here is what he said:

Stated in its boldest form, our thesis is that the chief determiner of human conduct is a unitary mental process which we call intelligence: that this process is conditioned by a nervous mechanism which is inborn: that the degree of efficiency to be attained by that nervous mechanisms and the consequent grade of intellectual or mental level for each individual is determined by the kind of chromosomes that come together with the union of the germ cells: that it is but little affected by any later influences except such serious accidents as may destroy part of the mechanism.

We have good reason to resent Goddard’s list. It says that we are pretty much stuck with the intelligence we are born with. According to Goddard, and such contemporaries of Goddard as psychologist Lewis M. Terman and psychometrician Charles Spearman, people can learn particular bodies of knowledge and skill, but there is not much they can do to get more of this special stuff, intelligence. Your personal allotment determines limits of insight you must live with all your life.

Of course, how angry Goddard’s list makes us and how true it is are different matters. As a broad generalization, the universe has not been especially responsive to how human beings feel about things. For instance, we might have preferred that the earth stand still at the center of the universe, the mansion of humankind. However, it turned out to spin around a quite ordinary star spinning around the center of a quite ordinary galaxy adrift among billions of others. Preferences do not count for much in the face of facts. Whatever we prefer about intelligence, it simply might turn out another way.

For a long time, however, psychologists technically concerned with the nature of intelligence have found reason to challenge the claims in Goddard’s list. Here are some of their reservations:

Unitary. Although Goddard wrote of intelligence as a unitary mental process, several old and new views of intelligence argue that intelligence is multiple—there are different kinds of intelligence. Rather than measuring intelligence by a single yardstick, we might find that different people have different kinds of strengths.

Inborn. Although Goddard wrote of intelligence as inborn, research suggests that most people can learn to behave considerably more intelligently. Learnable intelligence might help us all to meet better a myriad of social and personal challenges.

Nervous. Although Goddard saw the nervous system as the seat of intelligence, current science argues that intelligent behavior is only partly attributable to an efficient nervous system. When people learn to conduct themselves more intelligently, they learn how to make the most of the nervous system with which they are endowed.

Process. Although Goddard treated intelligence as a process, contemporary investigations suggest that intelligent behavior has at least as much to do with knowledge and attitudes—what you know and understand about the way your mind works, what strategies you have at your fingertips, what attitudes you hold toward the potential of your mind and toward intellectual challenges.

Goddard’s list is in trouble. As in the original Copernican revolution, fundamental conceptions are at stake. What was once viewed as central—Goddard’s unitary inborn nervous process—is getting pushed toward the periphery as our inner cosmology of mind undergoes reconstruction. Conceptions of intelligence today are in radical flux, with new theories asserting their rights like African bees. It is to the Copernican revolution in our ideas about intelligence that this book is dedicated.

The Revolution We Need

As a cognitive psychologist, I have good reason to be interested in this Copernican revolution. However, as a parent, a citizen, a voter, a shopper, a boss, an employee, and a player of many other roles, why should I care? Why should any of us care?

Because how intelligence really works matters in a very concrete practical way—arguably it matters much more than whether the earth circles around the sun or vice versa. We could use more intelligence. Other people do not always behave as intelligently as we would like, and neither do we ourselves, as we realize when we stand back and reflect on our behavior. If intelligence is learnable, we can hope to do something about it directly. If intelligence is not, we just have to live with the fact and work around it.

Of many sources pointing to the need for more intelligence in the form of better thinking, I was recently struck by a report from the Rand Corporation, Global Preparedness and Human Resources: College and Corporate Perspectives. The report examined what people from the corporate and academic sectors felt was needed to meet the escalating challenges of the times. Their answer: General cognitive skills were rated more highly than knowledge in an academic major, social skills, and personal traits. Good thinking counts most; so say some of those who have thought about it.

Another compelling appeal for better thinking and learning appears in the recent book Thinking for a Living by Ray Marshall and Marc Tucker. These authors turn to the educational shortfalls of U. S. students in comparison with students in several other nations. They examine the economic roots and economic consequences of the education gap. Their conclusions are cautionary: As the title of their book suggests, economic productivity and competitiveness in the world today depend on workers who are skillful thinkers and learners. This is just what U.S. education is not producing, with certain minorities particularly suffering. Marshall and Tucker cite these statistics in illustration:

Fewer than four in ten young adults can summarize in writing the main argument from a lengthy news column—one in four whites, one in four blacks, and two in ten Hispanics. Only twenty-five out of 100 young adults can use a bus schedule to select the appropriate bus for a given departure or arrival—three in 100 blacks and seven in 100 Hispanics. Only 10 percent of the total group can select the least costly product from a list of grocery items on the basis of unit-pricing information—twelve in 100 whites, one in 100 blacks, and four in 100 Hispanics.

They sum up the reality this way:

These findings make it clear that only a tiny fraction of our workers can function effectively in an environment requiring strong communications skills and the application of sophisticated conceptual understanding to complex real-world problems.

Of course, one response to this concern might be that students need more back-to-basics education, more drill and practice, more reading, ’riting, and ’rithmetic in a classic regimen. However, in terms of routine competence—the kind built by drill and practice—U.S. students score reasonably well. It is tasks requiring a modicum of reasoning that floor many of them. Students need better thinking and learning skills. As I argued in my recent book Smart Schools, real learning is a consequence of thinking. People retain, understand, and make active use of knowledge through learning experiences that center on thinking both through and with what is learned. Good thinking and good learning are as closely tied as the hydrogen and oxygen in a molecule of water, and they make up the drink that students need.

Not-so-intelligent behavior is a stark reality of our own lives and the lives around us. While later chapters will turn to further evidence, let me offer three tales by way of illustration.

The populist senator. A while ago, a United States...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication Page
• Contents
• Acknowledgements
• Part 1
• Part 2
• Part 3
• Notes
• References
• Index