CHAPTER OUTLINE
I.
II.
BASIC FUNCTIONS OF THOUGHT
What good is thinking, anyway?
A. The Circle of Thought
1. The main functions of human thinking are to describe, elaborate, decide, plan,
and guide action. Each stage in the circle of thought is also influenced by
intention.
2. An information-processing system receives information, represents it with
symbols, and then manipulates those symbols. Thinking is defined as the
manipulation of mental representations.
3. Information is somewhat transformed as it passes through each stage of
processing and sometimes leads to new information.
MENTAL REPRESENTATIONS: THE INGREDIENTS OF THOUGHT
What are thoughts made of?
The ingredients of thought are called information. It can be mentally represented in many
forms, including concepts, propositions, concept schemas and event scripts, mental models,
images, and cognitive maps.
A. Concepts
1. Concepts are categories of objects, events, or ideas with common properties.
“To have a concept” is to recognize the properties, or features, that tend to be
shared by members of a category.
2. Concepts allow you to relate each object or event to a category that you already
know and make logical thinking possible.
3. Types of Concepts
a) Formal concepts clearly define objects or events by a set of rules and
properties, such that each member of the concept has all of the defining
properties and no nonmember does. For example, “squares” are defined as
“two-dimensional objects with four equal sides and four internal 90-degree
angles.” All squares fit this rule, and no nonsquares fit this rule.
b) Natural concepts have a set of typical or characteristic features, and
members don’t have to have all of them. For example, “home” is a concept
that often includes characteristics like “house,” “family lives there,” “nice
place,” “familiar,” and so on.
(1) Most of the concepts people use in thinking are natural rather than
formal concepts.
(2) Some members of a natural concept are better examples than others.
A member that possesses all or most of the concept’s characteristic
features is called a prototype. For example, a “robin” is a prototype
for “bird.”
B. Propositions
1. Propositions are mental representations that express relationships between
concepts. They can be true or false.
C. Schemas, Scripts, and Mental Models
1. Sets of propositions are often so closely associated that they form more complex
mental representations called schemas, generalizations we develop about
categories of objects, places, events, and people from experience with the world.
Schemas help us to understand the world and shape our expectations and
interpretation of events.
2.
Scripts are schemas about the sequences in which events and activities typically
occur. For example, consider this sentence: “He stormed out the door, leaving a
meager tip next to a plate of mostly untouched chili.” Your scripts of restaurants
allow you to predict a whole sequence of activities that probably just occurred—
a customer entered a restaurant, ordered chili, disliked the food or the service,
and so on.
3. A mental model clusters many propositions together to help you understand
how things work. When mental models are incorrect, people are likely to make
mistakes.
For example, your mental model of a car may include propositions such as “The
key goes in the ignition” and “Pushing the gas pedal makes the car move.”
D. Images and Cognitive Maps
1. Images are mental representations of visual information. Manipulations
performed on images of objects are very similar to those that would be
performed on the objects themselves. We create mental images that serve as
mental models of descriptions we hear or read.
2. As people move around an environment, they build cognitive maps, mental
models of familiar parts of their world. Visual experience is useful, but not
necessary, for building cognitive maps. Blind people can use cognitive maps.
The general experience of moving through space is enough to allow you to
represent information.
III. THINKING STRATEGIES
Do people always think logically?
Reasoning is the process through which we generate and evaluate arguments as well as
reach conclusions about them.
A. Formal Reasoning
Formal reasoning (also called logical reasoning) is the process of following a
set of rigorous steps for reaching valid, or correct, conclusions.
a) Algorithms are systematic methods that always reach a correct solution to
a problem, if a correct solution exists.
Example: If you lost your keys sometime between your first class and
lunch, an algorithmic approach might be to retrace your every step for the
entire morning.
b) Rules of logic are a set of statements that provide a formula for drawing
valid conclusions about the world.
(1) Deductive reasoning takes a general rule and applies it to deduce
conclusions about specific cases. It is often an “if-then” proposition.
(2) While most of us try to be logical, we often base our reasoning on
false assumptions or use faulty logic, which lead to errors in
reasoning.
B. Informal Reasoning
1. Informal reasoning occurs when we are trying to assess the believability of a
conclusion based on the evidence available to support it. It is also known as
inductive reasoning, because its goal is to induce a general conclusion to appear
on the basis of specific facts or examples. Jurors use this when weighing
evidence for the guilt or innocence of a defendant.
2. Heuristics are mental shortcuts or rules of thumb that are easy to use and
frequently work well. But they can bias thinking and cause errors.
Example: In the lost keys example, a heuristic approach might focus only on the
most likely places the keys could have been set down.
In the anchoring bias (anchoring heuristic), you estimate an event’s
likelihood not by starting from scratch but by adjusting an existing
estimate. Thus first impressions are not easily displaced by later evidence.
For example, you think that your chance of getting mugged in Los Angeles
is 90 percent, but then you see evidence that the chance is closer to 1
percent. You will adjust your estimate, but it is likely to be biased toward
your initial estimate.
b) The representativeness heuristic leads you to conclude that something
belongs to a certain class based on how similar it is to other items in that
class. For example, when you think of a kidnapper, your image is of a
stranger. In reality, over 90 percent of all kidnappers are parents who are
abducting their own children in defiance of court-decided custody
arrangements.
c) The availability heuristic is when you judge the likelihood of an event or
the correctness of a hypothesis by how easy it is to think of that event or
hypothesis. For example, if you have had trouble with your car battery,
when the car fails to start you may decide that the battery is the cause, even
though the electrical system is operating and your gas gauge points to E.
IV. PROBLEM SOLVING
What's the best way to solve a problem?
A. Strategies for Problem Solving
1. Incubation involves putting a difficult problem aside to come back to later.
Later, while engaged in unrelated activity, a solution may suddenly occur to you.
The solution occurs mainly because you forget incorrect ideas that had blocked
your progress.
2. Means-end analysis, also referred to as decomposition, is the strategy of
continuously asking where you are in relation to your final goal and then
deciding on the means by which you can get one step closer to that goal. In other
words, you break a large problem into smaller, more manageable subgoals. For
example, when writing a paper, the task can be broken into subgoals, such as
writing the outline, meeting the criteria, researching, writing a rough draft, and
so on.
3. Planning strategy by working backward from the end goal is often effective. This
helps avoid getting sidetracked with dead-end choices en route to a goal.
Example: To plan a surprise party, you may first think of where and when the
honoree will be arriving, then decide on where and when guests should arrive,
then think about whom to invite, and so on.
4. Analogies, or similarities, between current and past problems may help you find
solutions that have worked before. People are not very good at seeing the
similarities between new and old problems, because they focus on the surface
features.
B. Focus on Research: Problem-Solving Strategies in the Real World
It is difficult to know if the problem-solving strategies that subjects show in the
laboratory are typical of “real-world” problem solving. One way to address this issue
is to reconstruct problem-solving strategies associated with major inventions and
scientific discoveries.
1. What was the researcher's question?
How did the Wright brothers solve the problem of creating a heavier-than-air
flying machine when so many others had failed?
2. How did the researcher answer the question?
a)
3.
4.
C.
D.
Gary Bradshaw consulted records from all the teams or individuals who worked
on heavier-than-air flying machines and did a comparative case study.
What did the researcher find?
Bradshaw found several factors that might have contributed to the Wright
brothers’ success: lots of available time, familiarity with lightweight construction
methods, a good working relationship, and good manual dexterity. However, the
unsuccessful teams shared many of these features as well. The Wright brothers
had one feature that all the others lacked: They spent a lot of time testing the
components of their machines before field-testing a completed machine.
What do the results mean?
The problem-solving strategy of decomposition was the basis for the Wright
brothers’ success.
5. What do we still need to know?
We need to know if decomposition is used in other real-world settings.
Obstacles to Problem Solving
1. Multiple Hypotheses
Due to limited working memory, it is hard to consider multiple hypotheses at
once. Thus the correct hypothesis may be neglected if other hypotheses are easier
to think of (the availability heuristic). For example, several factors could explain
why you are failing chemistry—erratic attendance, poor note-taking, inadequate
reading, low motivation, or a bad teacher. You may choose one of those factors
and disregard the others (e.g., a bad teacher, thereby doing nothing about
attendance, reading, note-taking, or motivation).
2. Mental Sets
a) A mental set is the tendency for old problem-solving patterns to persist
rather than viewing each problem freshly (anchoring heuristic).
b) Functional fixedness is a tendency to use familiar objects in familiar rather
than creative ways. For example, if you run out of sugar for a cookie
recipe, you may not think of using honey to serve the same function as the
sugar.
3. Ignoring Negative Evidence
Ignoring negative evidence is the tendency to ignore the absence of supporting
evidence for your hypothesis. For example, you may attribute your abdominal
pain to appendicitis. A fever would help confirm the diagnosis, but you may
focus on the pain and ignore the fact that you actually lack a fever.
4. Confirmation Bias
The confirmation bias is the tendency to confirm rather than to refute your own
ideas, even if strong evidence argues against you. This bias is a kind of
anchoring heuristic—a reluctance to abandon an early hypothesis. For example,
you may decide your teacher is at fault for your failing chemistry grade, ignoring
the facts that you may also be failing other classes, your teacher has won
teaching awards, and your teacher sets up special times to help you.
Problem Solving by Computer
1. Artificial intelligence (AI) is a field seeking to develop computers that imitate
the processes of human perception and thought.
2. Symbolic Reasoning and Computer Logic
a) Computers excel at using logical, syllogistic reasoning. However, most AI
systems are successful only in narrowly defined fields.
b) Computers rely heavily on “if-then” rules. This is a problem because
computers have difficulty recognizing the “if” condition in the real world.
3.
V.
Neural Network Models
a) Recognizing the problems posed by the need to teach computers to form
natural concepts, many researchers in AI have moved toward the
connectionist, or neural network, approach.
(1) This approach uses computers to simulate the information processing
taking place at many different but interconnected locations in the
brain.
(2) Computerized expert systems can now perform as well as and
sometimes better than humans at solving complex problems in
medical diagnosis and business decision making.
(3) However, most computer models of neural networks still fall well
short of the capacities of the human perceptual system. Probably the
optimal approach will be to have humans and computers work
together in ways to achieve a better outcome than either could alone.
E. Creative Thinking
1. People demonstrate creativity by producing original but useful solutions to all
sorts of challenges.
2. One test of creativity measures divergent thinking, the ability to think along
many paths to generate multiple solutions to a problem.
3. To be productive, a creative person must be anchored in reality, understand
society’s needs, and learn from the experience and knowledge of others.
4. Three kinds of cognitive and personality characteristics are necessary for
creativity.
a) Expertise in the field of endeavor, which is directly tied to what a person
has learned.
b) A set of creative skills, including persistence at problem solving, capacity
for divergent thinking, ability to break out of old problem-solving habits
(mental sets), and willingness to take risks.
c) The motivation to pursue creative work for internal reasons, such as
satisfaction, rather than for external reasons, such as prize money.
5. Creativity is influenced by genetic, social, economic, and political factors.
6. The correlations between intelligence test scores and creativity are modest.
Scores on most intelligence tests require convergent thinking, using logic and
knowledge to narrow down the number of possible solutions to a problem.
7. Researchers have defined wisdom as the combination of intelligence and
creativity.
DECISION MAKING
How can I become a better decision maker?
Decisions made when the outcome is uncertain are termed risky decisions or decisions
under uncertainty.
A. Evaluating Options
1. Decision making often involves selecting from choices with several positive and
negative features. Utility is the subjective, personal positive or negative value of
a feature.
2. The best decision maximizes expected value, the average benefit predicted if
you could repeat the decision many times.
B. Biases and Flaws in Decision Making
1. Gains, Losses, and Probabilities
a) People feel worse about losing a certain amount than about gaining that
same amount, a phenomenon called loss aversion. For example, a person
who sells a stock just before its value falls might avoid a $200 loss, which
may be perceived more favorably than receiving a $200 gift from his or her
parents.
b) The utility of a specific gain depends on your starting point. For example, if
you already have $5,000, a summer job paying $1,000 will not seem as
positive as if you had started with $500.
c) People have problems estimating probability. People tend to overestimate
rare events and underestimate frequent ones. For example, lottery players
typically overestimate their chances of winning.
(1) The availability heuristic, vivid memories of successes at rare events,
explains the tendency to overestimate rare events.
(2) The gambler’s fallacy is the belief that the probability of future events
in a random process will change depending on past events. For
example, if you see “heads” on five straight coin tosses, the gambler’s
fallacy predicts that the sixth coin flip is more likely to be “tails.”
d) People tend to be unrealistically confident about the accuracy of their
predictions.
2. How Biased Are We?
a) It is often hard to assess how “good” or “bad” a decision is because such
outcomes depend on the personal and cultural values of the individual.
VI. LINKAGES: GROUP PROCESSES IN PROBLEM SOLVING AND DECISION
MAKING
Group discussions follow very typical patterns.
A. Views that are shared by the greatest number of group members will have the greatest
impact on the group’s final decision.
B. Group polarization occurs if the group’s decision ends up being more extreme than
the average group member would have chosen alone. Two mechanisms underlie this.
1. Most arguments in group discussions tend to favor the majority’s view, and most
criticisms tend to attack minority views. Thus those favoring majority views tend
to adopt even stronger versions of it.
2. As a group begins to agree on a “desirable” decision, members may try to
associate themselves with it, perhaps by suggesting even more extreme versions.
C. Are people better at problem solving and decision making when they work in groups
than when on their own?
1. When correct solutions can be easily demonstrated to everyone, groups usually
outperform individuals at solving problems.
2. When the solution is less clear-cut, groups may do no better than their most
talented member.
3. Because of social loafing and groupthink (see the social psychology chapter),
people working in a group are often less productive than people working alone.
4. Groups work best when individual members share their unique information and
expertise. But brainstorming may actually produce fewer ideas than those
generated by individuals working alone, because comments from other group
members may interfere with some members’ ability to think clearly and
creatively or to be open with their ideas. The anonymity of the Internet may
solve this problem. Electronic brainstorming groups may outperform groups that
meet face to face.
VII. LANGUAGE
How do babies learn to talk?
A language has two basic elements: symbols (e.g., words) and a set of rules, called
grammar, for combining the symbols.
A. Learning to Speak: Stages of Language Development
1.
B.
Children develop language with impressive speed and learn how words are
combined and how to produce and understand sentences. This development
follows some predictable steps.
2. The First Year
a) Exposure to sounds that will be important in acquiring their native
language is vital for infants’ language development.
b) Infant vocalizations, called babblings, the first speech-related sounds, are
meaningless syllable repetitions beginning at about four months. All infants
make the same babbling sounds, but by about nine months they start to lose
sounds not used in the languages that they hear.
c) By ten to twelve months, infants can understand some words, usually
proper names and object words. At twelve to eighteen months, infants
begin speaking these words in this one-word stage. They tend to
overextend words to cover more ground only because their vocabulary is
limited.
3. The Second Year
a) Around eighteen months vocabularies expand dramatically. By twentyfour months, children usually have a spoken vocabulary of over 100 words.
Their speech is telegraphic: brief and to the point (e.g., “Gimme dog,”
“Come here,” “Milk gone”).
b) Three-word sentences appear next but are still telegraphic (e.g., “Daddy
come here,” “Baby gone home”). Then children learn suffixes,
prepositions, plurals, adjectives, and past tenses. Again, they tend to
overgeneralize words and rules.
4. The Third Year and Beyond
a) By age three, children begin to use auxiliary verbs, to ask questions using
what, where, who, and why, and to form complex sentences.
b) By age five, children have acquired most of their native language’s
grammar.
How Is Language Acquired?
1. Conditioning, Imitation, and Rules
a) Parents are usually more concerned with what a child says than its form.
Observations suggest that explicit reinforcement alone cannot explain the
learning of grammar. Learning through modeling, or imitation, appears to
be more influential.
b) However, children tend to use forms of speech that neither imitation nor
reward can account for. Children discover for themselves the underlying
patterns in a language and learn the rules for those patterns.
2. Biological Bases for Language Acquisition
a) Noam Chomsky believes we are born with universal grammar, a
mechanism that allows us to identify the basic dimensions of language.
Language is developed as genetic predispositions interact with experience.
b) Others suggest that the development of children’s language reflects their
development of other cognitive skills.
c) Evidence for biological factors in language acquisition include unique
properties of the mouth and throat, language-related brain areas, and recent
genetic research.
d) There also seems to be a critical period for language learning, during
which experiences can lead to language development, but after which
language learning is very difficult.
3. Bilingualism
a)
Learning two languages, if it occurs before the end of the critical period,
seems to result in better performance in each language.
b) Balanced bilinguals, who are equally adept at two languages, seem
superior to other children in cognitive flexibility, concept formation, and
creativity.
VIII. TESTING INTELLIGENCE
How is intelligence measured?
Definitions of what intelligence is vary widely among psychologists. However, the vast
majority of them tend to agree that it includes three main characteristics: (1) abstract
thinking or reasoning abilities, (2) problem-solving abilities, and (3) the capacity to acquire
knowledge. Standard tests of intelligence measure some of these characteristics, but not all.
Some alternative tests have been proposed.
A. A Brief History of Intelligence Tests
1. In 1904 the French government hired Alfred Binet to identify schoolchildren in
need of special instruction.
a) Binet’s set of test items measured many reasoning, thinking, and problemsolving skills.
b) Binet assumed that intelligence increased with age, so his test used agegraded tasks to identify a child’s mental age. Children whose mental age
equaled their chronological age were considered to be of “regular”
intelligence.
2. Louis Terman wrote an English version of Binet’s test, the Stanford-Binet
Intelligence Scale. Terman added items to measure adult intelligence and
devised the IQ, or intelligence quotient: mental age divided by chronological
age, multiplied by 100. This led to the term IQ test, which now refers to any test
designed to measure intelligence on an objective, standardized scale.
a) Tests were used during World War I to guide recruits’ assignments to
appropriate jobs. These tests wrongly suggested that about half the
population had a mental age of thirteen or younger.
b) David Wechsler’s later tests were designed to correct some of the
weaknesses of the earlier ones.
B. Intelligence Tests Today
1. The Wechsler Adult Intelligence Scale (WAIS-III) includes fourteen subtests.
a) The verbal scale (seven subtests) includes remembering a list of digits,
doing math problems, defining vocabulary words, and answering general
knowledge questions.
b) The performance scale (seven subtests) includes understanding relations of
objects in space and manipulating materials (e.g., assembling blocks,
solving mazes, and completing pictures).
c) Testers can compute a verbal IQ, a performance IQ, an overall IQ, and
“index” scores that reflect a person’s mental processing speed, memory
ability, perceptual skills, and understanding of verbal information.
d) The Wechsler Intelligence Scale for Children (WISC-IV) is similarly
scored.
2. The latest edition of the Stanford-Binet (SF5) uses subtests to measure five
different abilities: fluid reasoning, knowledge, quantitative reasoning, visualspatial processing, and working memory.
C. Calculating IQ
1. IQ tests are now scored by comparing raw scores. The average raw score at each
age level is assigned an IQ score of 100. Other raw scores are given IQ values
based on how much they differ from the average score.
2.
Most people score near the middle of possible scores, so that a population shows
a bell-shaped curve. One’s intelligence quotient, or IQ score, shows a relative
standing within a population of your age.
IX. EVALUATING INTELLIGENCE TESTS
How good are IQ tests?
A. Any test is a systematic procedure for observing behavior in a standard situation and
describing it with the help of a numerical scale or system of categories.
1. Tests are standardized; they present the same tasks, under similar conditions, to
each person. To the extent that testers do not influence the results, the test is
objective.
2. Test scores can be used to calculate norms, or descriptions of the frequency of
different scores.
3. Statistical Reliability: Good tests must have statistical reliability; the results
must be repeatable or stable. Reliability of a test is obtained by correlating two
sets of scores on the same test from the same people. The higher the correlation,
the more reliable the test.
4. Statistical Validity: The statistical validity of a test is the degree to which it
measures what it is supposed to measure. It is the degree to which test scores are
interpreted appropriately and used properly. Correlations between the test score
and another measure of the attribute being tested provide the validity.
B. The Statistical Reliability and Statistical Validity of Intelligence Tests
1. Statistical Reliability
a) IQ scores before the age of seven are only moderately correlated with later
intelligence test scores. Test items used with young children are different
than those used with older children. Also, children’s cognitive abilities
change rapidly in the early years.
b) IQ scores are very reliable for teenagers and adults (generally above +.90).
2. Statistical Validity
a) It is hard to assess IQ test validity—whether or not the tests actually
measure intelligence—since psychologists do not even agree on exactly
what intelligence is. Validity can only be assessed for specific purposes.
b) IQ tests are most valid for assessing aspects of intelligence related to
schoolwork (e.g., abstract reasoning, verbal comprehension).
c) IQ tests can predict academic success and performance in the workplace.
3. IQ tests have good reliability and reasonably good validity for predicting certain
things, but an IQ score is not a perfect measure of how “smart” people are.
4. Many factors other than mental ability can influence test performance. Some
women or members of ethnic minorities may have test-related anxiety that stems
from stereotype threat. This is concern over negative stereotypes about the
cognitive abilities of the group to which they belong that impairs their
performance on tests.
C. IQ Scores as a Measure of Inherited Ability
Intelligence is a developed ability. Heredity and environment interact to influence
intelligence.
1. Genetic factors influence IQ scores. Identical twins who share identical genes
but were separated at birth and adopted by separate families have IQ scores
correlated at r = +.60.
2. Yet correlations between IQ scores are higher when any two people, no matter
their degree of genetic similarity, are raised in the same home.
3. Children from impoverished backgrounds who were adopted into homes with
more enriching intellectual environments show modest IQ score increases.
4.
D.
E.
A longitudinal study of children adopted soon after birth found higher IQs if the
biological parents were in higher socioeconomic (SES) groups (where high IQs
are most common) than if the biological parents came from lower-SES groups,
regardless of the SES of the adoptive homes. However, when children with
biological parents from low socioeconomic groups were adopted by parents who
provided academically enriched environments, their IQ scores rose by 12 to 15
points.
5. Early-intervention programs that enhance children’s school readiness and
academic ability may be associated with improved scores on intelligence tests.
6. Estimates of the relative contributions of heredity and environment to
intelligence apply only to groups, not to individuals.
Group Differences in IQ Scores
1. The average scores of Asian Americans are typically the highest among various
ethnic groups, followed in order by European Americans, Hispanic Americans,
and African Americans. Also, the average IQ scores of people from high-income
areas are consistently higher than those of people from low-income areas with
the same ethnic makeup.
2. To understand these differences, we have to remember two things:
a) Group scores do not describe or predict any one individual’s score.
b) Inherited traits are not always fixed. The environment can improve or
impair the development of cognitive skills.
3. Socioeconomic Differences
A child’s IQ and family income are positively correlated, mainly due to four
factors:
a) Parents’ jobs and status are affected by their IQs, the genetic bases of
which may affect a child’s IQ.
b) Parents’ education and income shape a child’s environment.
c) Upper- and middle-income families provide more support for children’s
motivation to succeed and excel academically.
d) Since colleges and businesses usually select people with higher scores on
IQ tests, those with higher IQs may have greater opportunities to earn more
money.
4. Ethnic Differences
a) Differences within any group are much larger than differences between any
groups.
b) There are large differences among the environments in which the average
African American, Hispanic American, and European American grows up
and lives.
Thinking Critically: Are IQ Tests Unfairly Biased Against Certain Groups?
1. What am I being asked to believe or accept?
Many people in certain ethnic and cultural groups receive low IQ scores for
reasons unrelated to intelligence, job potential, or other criteria that the tests
claim to be measuring. They argue that this unfairly deprives members of certain
groups of equal employment and educational opportunities.
2. Is there evidence available to support the claim?
Factors such as motivation and trust may selectively disadvantage some groups.
Also, many test items require vocabulary and experience from the dominant
middle-class culture, so test items may just measure achievement in acquiring
knowledge of this culture. Not all cultures value the same things, and thus poor
performance on a culture-specific test is most likely due more to unfamiliarity
X.
with culture-based concepts than to intelligence. Finally, IQ tests may reward
interpreting items according to the test writer’s expectations.
3. Can that evidence be interpreted another way?
IQ tests do in fact predict success in school and on the job more than do “culturefair” tests. Familiarity with the culture reflected in IQ tests might be important
for success in that culture. The tests may be biased, but perhaps not in a way that
unfairly discriminates among groups.
4. What evidence would help to evaluate the alternatives?
Enhancing the skill development opportunities of traditionally disadvantaged
groups should lead to smaller differences in test scores. Alternative tests are
needed, especially ones based on problem-solving skills and other abilities not
measured by most IQ tests.
5. What conclusions are most reasonable?
Intelligence is defined in terms of the behaviors that a culture values and that are
developed through experience in that culture. It is important for people to have
the information and skills that are valued by the culture in which they live and
work. When conditions, such as poverty, poor schools, and improper nutrition
and health care, which result in lower IQ scores, are addressed, many of the
complaints about test bias should be eliminated.
DIVERSITY IN INTELLIGENCE
Is there more than one type of intelligence?
A. Practical and Creative Intelligence
1. According to Robert Sternberg’s triarchic theory, there are three types of
intelligence:
a) Analytical intelligence is the kind measured by standard IQ tests.
b) Creative intelligence is what you would use to compose music.
c) Practical intelligence is how you would figure out what to do if you were
stranded on a lonely road during a storm.
2. Practical intelligence is unrelated to IQ scores, and new tests of analytic,
practical, and creative intelligence may predict success at some jobs at least as
well as standard IQ tests.
B. Multiple Intelligences
1. Howard Gardner proposed the multiple intelligences theory, that everyone
possesses a number of intellectual potentials, or “intelligences,” each involving a
different set of skills. The various intelligences normally interact, but some
individuals may develop certain intelligences more than others.
2. The specific intelligences proposed include: linguistic, logical-mathematical,
spatial, musical, bodily-kinesthetic (physical skills and hand-eye coordination),
intrapersonal (self-understanding), interpersonal (understanding and interacting
with others), and naturalistic (ability to see patterns in nature). Some have
suggested that people possess emotional intelligence, the capacity to perceive
emotions and to link them to one’s thinking.
3. Gardner says that only the first three are measured by standard IQ tests and that
measures of the other intelligences are needed.
4. Critics argue that including athletic or musical skills as part of intelligence
dilutes the usefulness of the concept, especially as it is applied to school and
work.
C. Unusual Intelligence
1. Giftedness
a) Gifted people show remarkably high levels of accomplishment in particular
areas. This is usually measured by intelligence tests.
b)
2.
Although high IQ generally predicts life successes, it does not guarantee
special distinction. Generally, people with high IQs are not fundamentally
different from others; they simply have “more” of the same mental abilities
or perhaps more intense motivation to master certain areas of intellectual
endeavor.
Mental Retardation
a) The label mental retardation is used when IQ is below 70 and a person has
problems with age-appropriate communication skills and daily living skills.
They are now often referred to as developmentally disabled,
developmentally delayed, or mentally challenged.
b) Down syndrome is due to an extra copy of chromosome 21. Those with
Down syndrome generally have IQs in the 40-to-55 range. The inherited
condition fragile X syndrome is a defect on chromosome 23. Retardation
can also result from environmental causes.
c) Cultural-familial mental retardation (also called psychosocial mental
retardation) refers to the 30 to 40 percent of cases of mental retardation in
which there is no obvious genetic or environmental cause.
d) Mildly retarded people differ from others in three ways: (1) they perform
certain mental operations more slowly, (2) they know fewer facts about the
world, and (3) they make poor use of mental strategies for learning and
problem solving.
e) The intellectual abilities of mentally retarded people can be raised.
Learning does not depend on cognitive skills alone, but also on social and
emotional factors.
(1) Mainstreaming is the policy of teaching disabled children, including
those who are mentally retarded, in regular classrooms with those
who are not disabled. Students at higher ability levels may gain more
from being mainstreamed than their less mentally able peers.
KEY TERMS
An activity based on the key terms could be used to introduce students to search engines like
PsycINFO or PsycARTICLES. This could be done as an in-class demonstration or as an
assignment.
algorithms (pp. 255-256)
anchoring bias (anchoring heuristic) (pp. 256 and 263)
artificial intelligence (AI) (p. 264)
availability heuristic (pp. 256-257, 262-263, and 267)
babblings (p. 271)
cognitive map (pp. 253-254)
concepts (pp. 251-254 and 264)
confirmation bias (pp. 262-263 and 269)
convergent thinking (p. 266)
creativity (pp. 265-266)
cultural-familial mental retardation, (p. 289)
divergent thinking (pp. 265-266)
expected value (pp. 267-268)
formal reasoning (pp. 255-256)
functional fixedness (pp. 261-262)
grammar (pp. 270 and 273)
heuristics (pp. 256-257 and 261)
images (pp. 251 and 253-254)
infant vocalizations (p. 271)
informal reasoning (p. 256)
information-processing system (pp. 249-250 and 255)
intelligence (p. 275)
intelligence quotient (IQ) (p. 276)
language (pp. 270-275)
logic (pp. 255-256 and 264-266)
mental models (pp. 252-254)
mental set (pp. 261-263)
norms (p. 278)
one-word stage (p. 272)
propositions (pp. 252-255)
prototype (p. 252)
reasoning (pp. 255-256 and 277)
representativeness heuristic (pp. 257 and 261)
schemas (pp. 252-254)
scripts (pp. 252-254)
Stanford-Binet Intelligence Scale (pp. 275-277)
statistical reliability (pp. 278-279)
statistical validity (p. 279)
test (p. 278)
thinking (p. 249)
utility (p. 266)