Intelligence

Paper Summary:

This paper explains that, from Robert Sternberg to Charles Spearman, psychologists over the last hundred years have attempted to shed light on the popular idea of intelligence and turn its nebulous concept into one of concrete measured understanding. The author points out that, by examining the cognitive process of young children, Piaget found that intelligence was an evolving process of a certain adaptation to the outside world. The paper relates that Charles Spearman was the first to develop techniques, which measured inter-correlations between different tests of intelligence, and postulated the existence of a general intellectual ability factor, which is tapped by all other mental abilities such as linguistic, mechanical and arithmetic abilities.

From the Paper:

"Robert Sternberg was the first of the set to research intelligence as something discernible by a definitive standard and comparable to its lay interpretation. Using supermarket shoppers, newspaper readers, commuters, students, and strangers, he asked nearly five hundred people to associate behaviors associated with ideas of "intelligence," "academic intelligence," "everyday intelligence, and "unintelligence." These associations led Sternberg to develop a list of characteristic behaviors each ideal which he then delivered to a group of 140 intelligence-psychologists for further analysis."

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