Extreme Intelligence

Development, Predicaments, Implications

Sonja Falck

• Editorial: Routledge
• Año: 2019
• ISBN:
  9780429875915
• Edición: 1
• Categoría: Psychology
• Categoría: History & Theory in Psychology

Extreme intelligence is strongly correlated with the highest of human achievement, but also, paradoxically, with higher relationship conflict, career difficulty, mental illness, and high-IQ crime. Increased intelligence does not necessarily increase success; it should be considered as a minority special need that requires nurturing.

This book explores the social development and predicaments of those who possess extreme intelligence, and the consequent personal and professional implications for them. It uniquely integrates insights and knowledge from the research fields of intelligence, giftedness, genius, and expertise with those from depth psychology, emphasising the importance of finding ways to talk effectively about extreme intelligence, and how it can better be supported and embraced. The author supports her arguments throughout, reviewing the academic literature alongside representations of genius in history, fiction, and the media, and draws on her own first-hand research interviews and consulting work with multinational high-IQ adults.

This book is essential reading for anyone supporting or working with the highly gifted, as well as those researching or interested by the field of intelligence.

PART I

Development

1

MEASURES AND METHODS

The identifying and quantifying of intelligence

Reflective Prompt 1: What has your personal history been in relation to intelligence and IQ? For example, how did you first come across these concepts? How old were you? In what context did this arise? Do you remember what your reaction to this was? What positive or negative associations do you have to these memories? Have your views on intelligence changed over time? How do you feel about the notion of IQ now? Why?

Intelligence is a readily attention-grabbing concept. In the world of advertising, intelligence sells nearly as well as sex: the word “smart” is prefixed as an endorsement to diverse products from sophisticated phones and fridges to investment portfolios and bottled water. But a person needs to be brave to dare to speak or write seriously about intelligence: it is the best studied psychological construct, and also the most controversial (Schneider et al. 2014) – it has even been described as “outrageously controversial” (Plucker & Esping 2014:ix), and “radioactive” (Haier 2017:44), and it has been asserted that “no other concept in science suffers from greater misunderstanding and is plagued with more misconceptions” than the concept of intelligence (Kanazawa 2012:37).

This chapter shows how intelligence as a concept and psychological construct has developed a history and field of enquiry. It introduces methods of measuring intelligence and explains why it is difficult to talk about and has come to be so controversial. The fact of its controversy influences how intelligence as a subject is treated, and how individuals who manifest extreme intelligence are treated. How such individuals are responded to and how this affects them and our wider society is this book’s main concern.

The difficulty of talking about intelligence

The Concise Oxford English Dictionary definition of intelligence is “the ability to acquire and apply knowledge and skills” (2011:738). An interest in this kind of ability is recorded from ancient times in several countries – for example, as far back as 2,200 BCE the emperor of China allegedly gave his officials triennial proficiency tests (Kaufman 2009:16). Identifying intelligence in a person is almost invariably presented as a positive, an asset. This is because the ability to acquire and apply knowledge and skills can generally enable a person to navigate whatever situation they might find themselves in as effectively as possible, which is beneficial for themselves and often for those around them. Historically people who became the most prominent contributors to society did so precisely through their acquiring and applying of knowledge and skills, and thereby typically gained rewards in status, influence, and wealth. This positive association extends to intelligence-affiliated terms such as “gifted” which connotes having an advantage, whether this is accurate or true or not. The term “gifted” is thought to derive from the concept of a person being given “gifts from the gods” (Silverman 2013:53).

One of the problems with intelligence being portrayed as a desirable gift rather than it being more neutrally acknowledged as simply one of the many general characteristics that make up an individual, is that it renders intelligence an attribute that a person cannot discuss their own experience of because right from the nursery we are taught not to speak of qualities of our own that could be perceived as positive. This is viewed as boasting – “blowing one’s own trumpet” – and frowned upon. And why is there this prohibition?

There is a cross-cultural superstition that an acknowledgment of something being good could make something bad happen. This possibly derives from anticipating, and seeking to avoid inviting, a feared envious attack. In Western society we are raised on fairy tales that early on transmit their warning: in Sleeping Beauty a newborn princess is having gifts bestowed upon her when a wicked fairy swoops in and sentences her to an inevitable wound that is meant to be terminal, but even in its ameliorated form will paralyse her for a century. Similarly, Snow White’s beauty attracts dogged attentions bent on nothing less than fatality. Such superstition is widespread in various Middle Eastern and Asian societies where it is encapsulated in the notion of “the evil eye”, an omniscient force based in jealousy that can cause serious harm and needs to be defended against. In Hindu society, for example, parents fear that if their newborn baby is admired it could attract the danger of the evil eye, so they protect against this by drawing a black spot or kala tikka on the face of the infant to mar its beauty and thereby ward off perilous praise. In Greek tragedy it is hubris that is always followed by nemesis.

When conducting my research interviews, several members of the high-IQ society Mensa spontaneously said that this was a topic one never usually speaks about, and communicated that they were encountering internal resistance against allowing themselves to try to put into words their experiences connected with intelligence. For example, interviewee Tracy made several references to being self-conscious about what she was saying about herself, expressing that she thought it sounded bad: “it sounds so big-headed”; “it sounds so conceited”; “that sounds terrible”. Or Helene: “It’s a weird thing to talk about, because you don’t talk about it often”. And Don: “Sorry I feel so arrogant saying I’m intelligent”. Although much contemporary advancement has been made in embracing diversity, giving voice to minority experiences, and forbidding discrimination, it is clear in the case of extreme intelligence that this is an area of human diversity that it is still taboo to openly acknowledge and explore even in private conversation.

But it is not only the above reasons that make it difficult to speak about intelligence. Ritchie (2015:2) writes that even mentioning intelligence in “polite company” is greeted as a transgression, because the concept has become associated with elitism, racism, and worse. Kanazawa (2012:1) makes the important point that intelligence is so contentious because it is “somehow” seen as “the most important trait that any human can have”, and that there is a tendency to equate intelligence with human worth. He insists strongly (although too simplistically) that intelligence is “just another quantitative trait of an individual like height or weight” (Kanazawa 2012:3). His stated main aim is to break the erroneous equating of intelligence with human worth (Kanazawa 2012:2). This is an aim I fully endorse, although I am critical of Kanazawa’s way of trying to achieve it (I say more about this towards the end of the next section). Kanazawa states, surprisingly, that it is “unfathomable” (2012:207) how an equating of intelligence with human worth could ever have come about in the first place. So, how did it come about?

Understanding the controversy

Intelligence being perceived as a quantitative trait means that it is viewed as existing in different levels in different individuals. The positive outcomes mentioned above are associated with higher levels of intelligence. In contrast, various social problems were historically blamed on lower levels of intelligence. We now know from extensive scientific research that higher levels of intelligence are indeed very reliably correlated with higher levels of educational attainment, career achievement, income, health, and longevity, and lower levels of criminality (Hunt 2011; Ritchie 2015; Warne et al. 2018). There are traces as far back as around 380 BCE (in Greek philosopher Plato’s Republic) (Plucker & Esping 2014:27) of the idea that it would be beneficial if a greater proportion of society could enjoy the positive outcomes associated with higher intelligence. Then in the late 19th and early 20th centuries specific attempts to bring this about started emerging and gathering momentum in ideas and practices that at the time were justified in the most idealistic of terms but which we now look back on as horrific.

It began with scientists and political theorists taking the English naturalist, geologist and biologist Charles Darwin’s (Darwin 1859/2012) groundbreaking theory of evolution by natural selection and applying it to people. They began pursuing an agenda of trying to deliberately improve the human species by – instead of leaving such processes to nature – taking it upon themselves to select which human traits they decided were preferable and should be propagated. Darwin’s cousin, polymath Francis Galton, in 1883 coined the term “eugenics” by putting together the Greek words eu (good) with genos (birth) (Plucker & Esping 2014:27). Galton espoused intelligence as a genetically inherited trait that should be promoted and declared its opposite – termed “feeble-mindedness” – as one to eradicate. This was widely accepted: even one of Britain’s most admired and cherished statesmen – Winston Churchill – wrote in 1910 in a memo to the prime minister that “[t]he multiplication of the feeble-minded is a very terrible danger to the race” (cited in Brignell 2010). How these traits were then to be identified and differentiated from each other obviously became a major endeavour.

Eugenics movements aimed to steer procreation by means of many practices designed to generate more of what was deemed by various criteria (not only intelligence) to constitute fitter life (termed “positive” eugenics), or to eliminate that which was judged unfit (“negative” eugenics) (Mackintosh 2011). Many countries globally – some much more infamously than others – practiced forms of eugenics. For example, unwanted aspects of humanity were denied entry (the USA’s harshest immigration law for over 40 years excluded nationalities that were considered inferior and used intelligence tests to turn thousands away at New York’s Ellis Island checkpoint); or segregated, disenfranchised, and oppressed (such as in Apartheid South Africa); or prevented from reproducing through forced sterilisation (widespread in the USA, Canada, Mexico, Japan, Scandinavia, and several East-Central European countries); or even – in Nazi Germany – annihilated through mass extermination (Bashford & Levine 2010; Turda 2017; Okren 2019). Being ruled unfit to live is the utmost accusation possible of having no human worth.

This grim history has spawned extensive backlash. A consequence is that aspects of humanity that were pointed to as reasons for deeming people inferior such as race, sexual orientation, and disability, are now unable to be treated as neutral individual differences. And in the case of intelligence there have even been concerted efforts to deny that individual differences exist at all. This is based on the belief, as Kanazawa (2012:207) puts it, that “everybody is or should be equally intelligent, because everybody is equally worthy as human beings”. He explains the logical fallacy in this statement, and he and other authors (Hunt 2011; Ritchie 2015; Haier 2017) argue cogently for the need to distinguish between facts that are discoverable through scientific research – such as individual differences in intelligence – which are in themselves entirely neutral objects of information, and what our reactions are to such facts. Our reactions might be emotional or ideological, such as attaching values to facts, disliking certain facts, or wishing they were instead what we would prefer them to be. Such reactions might provoke us to protest against, conceal, or misrepresent facts. In these ways the straightforward undertaking and disseminating of scientifically rigorous research on intelligence has met with considerable hindrance, including individual researchers being vilified and shunned (see Woodley of Menie et al. 2018). These complications have even resulted in educational institutions opting to cease teaching what has come to be seen as the too-risky subject of intelligence (Woodley of Menie et al. 2018). Warne et al. (2018) undertook an analysis of – where intelligence is still being taught in the USA – what it is that students are being exposed to, by analysing the content of 29 of “the most popular introductory psychology textbooks”. They found that 79% of these texts’ sections on intelligence research contained inaccurate statements and logical fallacies (which Warne et al. explicate). More about the trajectory of intelligence research is presented in Chapter 2.

The history of the injustices described above creates a pressure to try to rectify them, which can lead to something equally unjust but which is frequently succumbed to – that of practicing discrimination the opposite way around. Where intelligence is concerned, 21st-century discrimination against intelligence – or “anti-intellectualism” – can often be noticed. One quick example is that in the same book in which Kanazawa (2012) advocates strongly for sound logic and value-free scientific reasoning to prevail, he throughout insensitively pokes humorously framed insults at extremely intelligent individuals. He freely calls them “incompetent”, “stupid”, and “life’s ultimate losers”, in a manner that would almost certainly have been unpublishable had the individuals he was writing about been identified as having a disability rather than high ability. Kanazawa unfortunately goes about his aim of trying to break the equating of intelligence with human worth by mocking highly intelligent individuals as not really having much worth.

So far we have been working with a simple dictionary definition of what intelligence is, but the academic literature provides much greater complexity.

The academic literature’s definitions and theories of intelligence

Plucker & Esping (2014:16–20) fill five full pages with definitions of intelligence from 19 different learned sources. Something that all of these have in common is that intelligence is seen as an ability or skill, usually defined as a trait (a characteristic of the individual that is reasonably stable over time and that is revealed in many situations) (Hunt 2011:12) that is mental or cognitive in nature. With this, as explained in the Introduction, we run into the difference between observable performance (such as a person’s adeptness at processing information) and the underlying trait which is theorised to be powering this performance.

Figure 1.1 depicts – with the permission of Professor Jonathan Plucker, Johns Hopkins University –...