Intelligences
Popular science writers face a dilemma. Laypeople come to science with their own systematic ideas often far removed from scientific ones. To explain science effectively, we need to start from these everyday intuitions and move readers towards the scientific concepts. Yet we often end up simply reinforcing the initial intuitions rather than overturning them. No matter how carefully we report and interpret, the reader’s final picture will often be quite different from the one we set out to paint.
Popular science may even create fabulous intellectual monsters: chimeras of scientific and everyday ideas that take on a life of their own. One example is the way research on the lateralisation of brain function has been hugely oversimplified into the idea that right and left brain control different skills.
The real problem arises when it comes to the human sciences of biology, psychology or neurology. Everyone has beliefs about human nature, and often those beliefs have deep social and political roots and implications. Scientific psychologists need both to engage with those beliefs and revise them.
All of the above is a preamble to thinking about two books that exemplify the science writer’s dilemma: Daniel Goleman’s Social Intelligence and Howard Gardner’s Multiple Intelligences. For me they are simultaneously attractive and troubling because they come to challenge popular intuitions about “intelligence” but may end up reinforcing them.
The attractions first. Both writers are effective popularisers of science, and both books are clear, informative and readable in different ways. Goleman’s is anecdotal and journalistic, covering a very wide range of research, while Gardner is elegant and magisterial about his own earlier research.
Now for the troublesome bit – and the dilemma. What’s intelligence got to do with it? There seems to be a popular fascination, not to say obsession, with the idea of intelligence. But outside of a narrow subfield within psychometrics, “intelligence” simply does not play a role in current scientific views of the mind.
The lay concept of “intelligence” is of a kind of substance, of “stuff”, that different people have in different degrees, like cholesterol or blood sugar. By contrast, the scientific concept of “cognition” involves complex interactions between many varied computational and neurological mechanisms with long developmental histories. Ultimately, these complex interactions allow people to make their way in the world. The popular concept of “intelligence” is much like the popular biological concepts of “energy” or “vitality”: it sees a complicated set of functional relations as a single force.
Most developmental or cognitive psychologists simply do not talk about intelligence at all, singular or plural. They talk, rather, about “intuitive systems” of knowledge, such as “folk” theories of psychology or physics or number systems or grammars that allow us to make both predications and generalisations. Or they talk about computational capacities such as causal inference, or statistical induction, which enable us to learn these intuitive systems. However, none of these mechanisms divides neatly into “types” of intelligence.
Goleman and Gardner recognise this divide between intuitive and scientific ideas. In fact, it was clearly the motivation for Gardner’s original work. And yet, as Gardner himself sometimes ruefully remarks, the very success of the “multiple intelligences” idea suggests that the audience really does not get it. Rather than seeing that intelligence is not a substance at all, people now seem to think it is several substances – social, emotional and logico-mathematical.
No wonder people are glad to hear that there is more intelligence around than they thought. Talking about “emotional intelligence” or “social intelligence” is like talking about “the nobility of labour” or “being a gentleman”. It is a way of softening the brutal realities of an arbitrary scholastic pecking order. This is a more attractive and humane picture of intelligence than the genetic scarcity picture painted earlier, for example in The Bell Curve, by psychologist Richard J. Herrnstein and political scientist Charles Murray from 1994, but it may be just as removed from what Goleman and Gardner intended.
Alison Gopnik, New Scientist