Triarchic Theory of Intelligence
Introduction
Robert Sternberg proposes the theory that describes three fundamental aspects of intelligence:
✿ Analytic Intelligence comprises the mental processes through which intelligence is expressed.
✿ Creative Intelligence is necessary when an individual is confronted with a challenge.
✿ Practical Intelligence is bound in a socio-cultural milieu and involves adaptation to, selection of, and shaping of the environment to maximize fit in the context.
Formulator of the Theory
Robert Sternberg (born 1949, presently age 66) is an American psychologist and psychometrician. He has held various positions in several US universities — as professor, as president, as provost (or senior administrative officer), and as dean of arts and science. He is a member of the editorial boards of numerous journals, including American Psychologist. He was the past president for the American Psychological Association. He holds thirteen honorary doctorates from all over the world.
Among Sternberg’s major contributions to psychology is the Triarchic theory of intelligence which is the subject of my report today. But in addition to this, he also contributed several influential theories related to creativity, wisdom, thinking styles, love and hate. Furthermore, he authored more than 1500 articles, book chapters, and books. A Review of General Psychology survey, published in 2002, ranked Sternberg as the 60th most cited psychologist of the 20th century.
A Brief Description of the Triarchic Theory of Inteligence
The triarchic theory of intelligence is based on a broader definition of intelligence than is typically used. In this theory, intelligence is defined in terms of the ability to achieve success in life based on one’s personal standards–and within one’s socio-cultural context. The ability to achieve success depends on the ability to capitalize on one’s strengths and to correct or compensate for one’s weaknesses. Success is attained through a balance of analytical, creative, and practical abilities–a balance that is achieved in order to adapt to, shape, and select environments.
Three Aspects of Intelligence
According to the triarchic theory, intelligence has three aspects: analytical, creative, and practical.
Analytical intelligence. Analytical intelligence is involved when the components of intelligence are applied to analyze, evaluate, judge, or compare and contrast. It typically is involved in dealing with relatively familiar kinds of problems where the judgments to be made are of a fairly abstract nature.
Research on the components of human intelligence has shown that although children generally become faster in information processing with age, not all components are executed more rapidly with age. The encoding component first shows a decrease in processing time with age, and then an increase. Apparently, older children realize that their best strategy is to spend more time in encoding the terms of a problem so that they later will be able to spend less time in making sense of these encodings.
Similarly, better reasoners tend to spend relatively more time than do poorer reasoners in global, up-front metacomponential planning when they solve difficult reasoning problems. Poorer reasoners, on the other hand, tend to spend relatively more time in detailed planning as they proceed through a problem. Presumably, the better reasoners recognize that it is better to invest more time up front so as to be able to process a problem more efficiently later on.
Creative intelligence. In work with creative intelligence problems, Robert Sternberg and Todd Lubart asked sixty-three people to create various kinds of products in the realms of writing, art, advertising, and science. For example, in writing, they would be asked to write very short stories, for which the investigators would give them a choice of titles, such as "Beyond the Edge" or "The Octopus's Sneakers." In art, the participants were asked to produce art compositions with titles such as "The Beginning of Time" or "Earth from an Insect's Point of View." Participants created two products in each domain.
Sternberg and Lubart found that creativity is relatively, although not wholly, domain-specific. In other words, people are frequently creative in some domains, but not in others. They also found that correlations with conventional ability tests were modest to moderate, demonstrating that tests of creative intelligence measure skills that are largely different from those measured by conventional intelligence tests.
Practical intelligence. Practical intelligence involves individuals applying their abilities to the kinds of problems that confront them in daily life, such as on the job or in the home. Much of the work of Sternberg and his colleagues on practical intelligence has centered on the concept of tacit knowledge. They have defined this construct as what one needs to know, which is often not even verbalized, in order to work effectively in an environment one has not been explicitly taught to work in–and that is often not even verbalized.
Sternberg and colleagues have measured tacit knowledge using work-related problems one might encounter in a variety of jobs. In a typical tacit-knowledge problem, people are asked to read a story about a problem someone faces, and to then rate, for each statement in a set of statements, how adequate a solution the statement represents. For example, in a measure of tacit knowledge of sales, one of the problems deals with sales of photocopy machines. A relatively inexpensive machine is not moving out of the showroom and has become overstocked. The examinee is asked to rate the quality of various solutions for moving the particular model out of the showroom.
Sternberg and his colleagues have found that practical intelligence, as embodied in tacit knowledge, increases with experience, but that it is how one profits, or learns, from experience, rather than experience per se, that results in increases in scores. Some people can work at a job for years and acquire relatively little tacit knowledge. Most importantly, although tests of tacit knowledge typically show no correlation with IQ tests, they predict job performance about as well as, and sometimes better than, IQ tests.
In a study in Usenge, Kenya, Sternberg and colleagues were interested in school-age children's ability to adapt to their indigenous environment. They devised a test of practical intelligence for adaptation to the environment that measured children's informal tacit knowledge of natural herbal medicines that the villagers used to fight various types of infections. The researchers found generally negative correlations between the test of practical intelligence and tests of academic intelligence and school achievement. In other words, people in this context often emphasize practical knowledge at the expense of academic skills in their children's development.
In another study, analytical, creative, and practical tests were used to predict mental and physical health among Russian adults. Mental health was measured by widely used paper-and-pencil tests of depression and anxiety, while physical health was measured by self-report. The best predictor of mental and physical health was the practical-intelligence measure, with analytical intelligence being the second-best measure and creative intelligence being the third.
Visual Aids
(NOTE TO OTHER PEOPLE: This is not an original work but a reproduction and summary from three main sources. Similarly, the five charts or photos are not mine but have been accessed through Google. This piece is not meant for public consumption. It was encoded here solely for convenience and easy access by a student researcher.)
