‘The Triarchic Mind’ : Yale Psychologist Defines Three Types of Intelligence

Remember sitting in class and noticing how Alice up front always raised her hand, always knew the right answer? Remember thinking that in some undefined way you were better than she was: maybe more human, maybe more street-smart, or at least better at knock hockey?

You may have been right, says Robert S. Sternberg, a Yale University psychologist whose recent book, “The Triarchic Mind: A New Theory of Human Intelligence” (Viking, $19.95), explains why. The book defines and analyzes three kinds of intelligence--internal (such as Alice’s), the creative experiential type and the street-smart contextual variety--saying that Alice’s kind is only part of the story and doesn’t mean a lot for her future success.

Sternberg’s field is cognitive science, a discipline made up of researchers in psychology, artificial intelligence, philosophy, anthropology, linguistics and the neurosciences. These people, he says, “are trying to figure out what goes on in our heads when we bring our intelligence to bear on a problem.” Sternberg, 39, has been fascinated by intelligence tests since his childhood, when he did terribly on them.

IQ Tests Criticized

Since the 1960s people have criticized IQ tests as being too bound by white Western culture and as neglecting certain kinds of achievement. But that wasn’t enough for Sternberg, who seems to revel in turning experience into an analyzed quantity.

Sternberg’s early frustration with intelligence tests led him to a seventh-grade science project on intelligence testing. In graduate school in the 1970s, he wrote a Barron’s guide, “How To Prepare for the Miller Analogy Test,” which kept him thinking about the steps people go through in using their minds.

Analogy tests ask for the answer to problems such as “stubborn is to mule as fickle is to: (a) chameleon (b) salamander (c) tadpole (d) frog.” Whether you answer the question quickly or slowly, the way you answer it is complex.

First, you translate the problem into a mental representation: Stubbornness is a quality; a mule and the reptiles and amphibians listed are animals with various characteristics. Then you think about the relationship between the first term and the second--mules are often considered stubborn, so much so that they are metaphors for stubbornness.

You relate the two halves of the analogy: If mules are metaphors for stubbornness, what is a metaphor for fickleness? Finally, you must apply the relationships and give an answer: Fickleness is constant change. Tadpoles change into frogs, but both “tadpoles” and “frogs” are answers, so they can’t be right; anyway, a tadpole changes only once. But chameleons change color all the time. And you probably know that they have been used as a metaphor for fickleness. There’s the answer.

Thinking Components

Sternberg eventually broke down the components of such question-answering and gave the parts names:

There are “metacomponents”--the executive functions that boss the other intelligence functions around. Examples of these are recognizing the existence of a problem, defining its nature and generating the set of steps necessary to solve it.

There are the “performance components” that take those steps, using such processes as inference, the discovery of relationships between objects and events.

And along the way, you might have had to pick up some new knowledge--such as what a chameleon is--and had to use “knowledge-acquisition components.”

As his career as a professor progressed, he got to know many graduate students in psychology. He got together with them to do studies and tests of their achievements as related to their test scores, and learned surprising things.

Near-Perfect Record

First, your old classmate Alice ended up in his classes. She had fulfilled the obvious promise she had shown in the days when you envied her. She had a near-perfect record and had no trouble getting into Yale. Her grades were high for the first 2 years of graduate school, but then something happened. They slipped, around the time she had to start putting things together herself--to do some creative original research.

Then there was Barbara, an admissions officer’s long shot. She didn’t have the kind of grades or test scores that made Yale salivate--but she did have some glowing recommendations and some unusual original research. When grad school became less academic and more improvisational, she excelled.

Then there was Celia, somewhere in between the first two academically. But Celia was good at scoping out what was expected of her and using it. She could take her new surroundings and know whether to adapt to them, change them or quit, and she probably had no trouble writing grant applications after graduating.

Sternberg uses the three graduate students--real people to whom he gave fake names--as analogies of what he means by a triarchic theory of intelligence.

Alice’s intelligence he calls “internal” and is the kind usually measured by intelligence tests. He calls Barbara’s creative powers “experiential” intelligence. Celia’s street smarts represent “contextual” intelligence.

In dozens of papers, articles in professional and popular journals, and seminars, Sternberg is trying to influence the world of testing to take the second two kinds of intelligence into account. He is working with the Psychological Corp. to develop a Sternberg Multidimensional Abilities Test--a test measuring all three kinds of intelligence--by 1992. He believes strongly that all three kinds of intelligence can be taught--that it is possible to, as he says, “get smart.”

To Pascal Forgione, the chief of the Office of Research and Evaluation at the Connecticut Department of Education, Sternberg’s theory is in the democratic spirit. Forgione’s office studies ways to improve the tests given schoolchildren in the state. Much of the debate has regarded intelligence itself as a cast-in-concrete, given quantity, and debated such issues as whether it is dependent on heredity or environment.

Traditional ways of looking at intelligence “didn’t get at the process of learning,” Forgione says. “IQ tests were bad indicators of later success. Sternberg’s idea is that the components of intelligence are teachable--that if a student doesn’t do well, it’s not genetically going to be that way . . . Sternberg takes us beyond.”

But not everyone is enthralled with Sternberg’s theories. The book, touting “mental self-management,” contains injunctions such as “turn crisis into opportunities” that bother a British cognitive scientist, Philip N. Johnson-Laird. “Some of his advice is merely an elegant variation on the vacuous exhortation: Be intelligent,” Johnson-Laird wrote in a New York Times book review of “The Triarchic Mind.”