Robert J. Sternberg | |
---|---|
Born | Newark, New Jersey, U.S. | December 8, 1949
Nationality | American |
Alma mater | Yale University (BA) Stanford University (PhD) |
Known for | Triarchic theory of intelligence Triangular theory of love The Three-Process View |
Awards | James McKeen Cattell Fellow Award (1999) E. L. Thorndike Award (2003) |
Scientific career | |
Fields | Cognitive psychology |
Institutions | Oklahoma State University, Yale University, Tufts University, University of Wyoming, Cornell University |
Doctoral advisor | Gordon Bower |
Robert J. Sternberg (born December 8, 1949) [1] is an American psychologist and psychometrician. He is a Professor of Human Development at Cornell University. [2]
Sternberg has a BA from Yale University and a PhD from Stanford University, under advisor Gordon Bower. He holds thirteen honorary doctorates from two North American, one South American, one Asian, and nine European universities, and additionally holds an honorary professorship at the University of Heidelberg, in Germany. He is a Distinguished Associate of the Psychometrics Centre at the University of Cambridge.
Among his major contributions to psychology, the most notable are the triarchic theory of intelligence and several influential theories related to creativity, wisdom, thinking styles, love, hate, and leadership. A Review of General Psychology survey, published in 2002, ranked Sternberg as the 60th most cited psychologist of the 20th century. [3]
Sternberg was born on December 8, 1949, to a Jewish family, in New Jersey. Sternberg suffered from test anxiety as a child. As a result, he became an inadequate test taker. This upset him and he reasoned that a test was not an adequate measurement of his true knowledge and academic abilities. When he later retook a test in a room that consisted of younger students, he felt more comfortable and his scores increased dramatically. Sternberg later constructed the Test of Mental Ability (STOMA), his first intelligence test.[ citation needed ] This problem of test-taking is what sparked Sternberg's interest in psychology.
Sternberg was an undergraduate student at Yale University. Neither of Sternberg's parents finished high school, and he attended Yale only by achieving a National Merit Scholarship and receiving financial aid. [4] He did so poorly in his introductory psychology class that his professor insisted that he pursue another major. Determined to succeed, Sternberg earned a BA summa cum laude, and was elected to Phi Beta Kappa, gaining honors and exceptional distinction in psychology. Sternberg continued his academic career at Stanford University, where he earned his PhD, in 1975.
Sternberg returned to Yale as an assistant professor of Psychology in 1975, and would work at Yale for three decades, eventually becoming the IBM Professor of Psychology and Education, as well as the founder and director of the Center for the Psychology of Abilities, Competencies and Expertise. [2]
He left Yale in 2005 to assume the position of Dean of the College of Arts and Sciences at Tufts University, where he quickly began his job search for a promotion to a Provost position. [4] After multiple unsuccessful high-profile attempts to gain other academic leadership positions within a few years of arriving at Tufts, including at the University of Colorado [5] and the University of Iowa, [6] Sternberg was offered a position at Oklahoma State University in 2010, where he remained as provost for three years. In early 2013, Sternberg was named the new president of the University of Wyoming. [7] After resigning from the University of Wyoming in late 2013, Sternberg joined the Human Development faculty of Cornell University. [2]
Sternberg took office in July 2013 as the University of Wyoming's 24th president. His major aim was to push the "development of ethical leadership in students, faculty and staff". [8] Therefore, Sternberg wanted to change the University of Wyoming's test-based selection process of applicants towards an ethics-based admission process: "The set of analytical skills evaluated in the ACT [American College Testing] is only a small sliver of what you need to be an ethical leader." [9]
After arriving at the University of Wyoming, Sternberg's term was marked by tumult in the faculty. Three weeks after taking in office as Wyoming's new president, the provost and vice president for academic affairs was asked to resign and stepped down. [10] In the next four months, three associate provosts and four deans were asked to resign or resigned voluntarily—many explicitly citing disagreements with President Sternberg's approach. [11] In the Chronicle of Higher Education, November 15, 2013 ("President of U of Wyoming Abruptly Resigns" by Lindsay Ellis), Sternberg's tenure was described as "a period that saw rapid turnover among senior administrators and unsettled the campus."
The last dean who stepped down, the Dean of the College of Law, Stephen Easton, accused Sternberg at a university meeting of unethical treatment of staff, professors, and schools. "You have not treated this law school ethically." [12] Sternberg refused to discuss the case at the meeting. The Casper Star Tribune portrayed the situation at the university as "chaos in the college". [13] Additionally, other provosts blamed a lack of respect for and interest in human capital. According to Peter Shive, a professor emeritus, Sternberg asked everyone to wear the school colors, brown and gold, on Fridays. Shive said the farther away from the administrative building he went, the fewer people were wearing brown and gold. [14]
Ray Hunkins, a UW Law College graduate, former counsel to the UW trustees, a member of the board of directors of the UW Foundation, and the Republican nominee for governor of Wyoming in 2006, questioned Sternberg's policies that had led to the dismissal or resignation of the administrators. "I think there's chaos in the university," Hunkins said. [15]
On November 14, 2013, only 137 days after Sternberg had taken the helm of UW, it was announced at a press conference following a trustees meeting in William Robertson Coe Library that Sternberg had tendered his resignation to the board. In a public statement read by the trustee president, David Bostrom, Sternberg said that despite his care for the university, "It may not be the best fit for me as president." Laughter arose immediately upon the reading of Sternberg's statement. [16] In accordance to university regulations, vice president for academic affairs Dr. Dick McGinity took the office as interim president. His resignation was neither asked for, nor forced by the Board of Trustees. [17]
According to the Wyoming News, Sternberg's four-month presidency produced more than $1.25 million in administration-related costs equivalent to the costs of 31 faculty staff positions for one year. [18] That includes $377,000 for Sternberg's severance pay, including $325,000 that he will be paid 2014; $37,500 in deferred compensation Sternberg is due by December 31; about $89,000 for the next presidential search; $330,000 for search firms to find replacements for administrators and deans who resigned; $265,000 for renovations to the house and garage that Sternberg was allowed to continue to rent at a price of $1,100 a month until May 31.
Sternberg holds thirteen honorary doctorates, including some from universities outside the United States. The list of foreign universities that awarded the degrees includes Complutense University of Madrid (Spain), University of Durham (UK), University of Leuven (Belgium), Tilburg University (the Netherlands), University of Cyprus, University of Paris V (France), and St. Petersburg State University (Russia).
Sternberg began serving as editor of the journal Perspectives on Psychological Science in 2015. As editor he published eight commentaries in his own journal between 2016 and 2018 without peer review. [19] In response to one of these pieces, a letter of concern was drafted, [20] which over 100 psychologists endorsed. In addition to the concerns about the lack of peer review, the letter of concern also mentioned that these articles feature extreme levels of self-citation, ranging from 42% to 65%. [20] In response to the letter and from pressure on social media, Sternberg resigned in late April 2018 from his position of editor of Perspectives on Psychological Science, over a year and a half before his term was scheduled to end. [19]
Sternberg's awards include the Cattell Award from the Association for Psychological Science (APS), Sir Francis Galton Award from the International Association of Empirical Aesthetics, the Arthur W. Staats Award from the American Psychological Foundation and the Society for General Psychology, the E. L. Thorndike Award for Career Achievement in Educational Psychology Award from the Society for Educational Psychology of the American Psychological Association (APA) and the Grawemeyer Award for Psychology in 2018. [21] In the APA Monitor on Psychology, Sternberg has been rated as one of the top 100 psychologists of the twentieth century. The ISI has rated Sternberg as one of the most highly cited authors in psychology and psychiatry (top .5 percent). Sternberg is a fellow of the National Academy of Education, the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, the American Association for the Advancement of Science, and other organizations. He is past-president of the American Psychological Association and the Eastern Psychological Association, and currently is President of the Federation of Associations in the Behavioral and Brain Sciences.
Sternberg's main research include the following interests:
Sternberg has proposed a triarchic theory of intelligence and a triangular theory of love. He is the creator (with Todd Lubart [22] ) of the investment theory of creativity, which states that creative people buy low and sell high in the world of ideas, and a propulsion theory of creative contributions, which states that creativity is a form of leadership.
He spearheaded an experimental admissions process at Tufts to quantify and test the creativity, practical skills, and wisdom-based skills of an applicant. [23] He used similar techniques when he was provost at Oklahoma State.
Sternberg has criticized IQ tests, saying they are "convenient partial operationalizations of the construct of intelligence, and nothing more. They do not provide the kind of measurement of intelligence that tape measures provide of height." [24]
In 1995, he was on an American Psychological Association task force writing a consensus statement on the state of intelligence research in response to the claims being advanced amid the Bell Curve controversy, titled "Intelligence: Knowns and Unknowns."
Many descriptions of intelligence focus on mental abilities such as vocabulary, comprehension, memory and problem-solving that can be measured through intelligence tests. This reflects the tendency of psychologists to develop their understanding of intelligence by observing behavior believed to be associated with intelligence.
Sternberg believes that this focus on specific types of measurable mental abilities is too narrow. He believes that studying intelligence in this way leads to an understanding of only one part of intelligence and that this part is only seen in people who are "school smart" or "book smart".
There are, for example, many individuals who score poorly on intelligence tests, but are creative or are "street smart" and therefore have a very good ability to adapt and shape their environment. According to Sternberg (2003), giftedness should be examined in a broader way incorporating other parts of intelligence.
Sternberg (2003) categorizes intelligence into three parts, which are central in his theory:
Sternberg (2003) discusses experience and its role in intelligence. Creative or synthetic intelligence helps individuals to transfer information from one problem to another. Sternberg calls the application of ideas from one problem to a new type of problem relative novelty. In contrast to the skills of relative novelty there is relative familiarity which enables an individual to become so familiar with a process that it becomes automatized. This can free up brain resources for coping with new ideas.
Context, or how one adapts, selects and shapes their environment is another area that is not represented by traditional measures of giftedness. Practically intelligent people are good at picking up tacit information and utilizing that information. They tend to shape their environment around them. (Sternberg, 2003)
Sternberg (2003) developed a testing instrument to identify people who are gifted in ways that other tests don't identify. The Sternberg Triarchic Abilities Test measures not only traditional intelligence abilities but analytic, synthetic, automatization and practical abilities as well. There are four ways in which this test is different from conventional intelligence tests.
Sternberg added experimental criteria to the application process for undergraduates to Tufts University, where he was Dean of Arts and Sciences, to test "creativity and other non-academic factors." Calling it the "first major university to try such a departure from the norm," Inside Higher Ed noted that Tufts continues to consider the SAT and other traditional criteria. [23] [26]
Sternberg proposed a theory of cognitive styles in 1988.
Sternberg's basic idea is that the forms of government we have in the world are external reflections of the way different people view and act in the world, that is, different ways of organizing and thinking. Cognitive styles should not be confused with abilities, they are the way we prefer to use these abilities. Indeed, a good fit between a person's preferred cognitive profile and his abilities can create a powerful synergy that outweighs the sum of its parts.
The main three branches of government are the executive branch, legislative branch and judicial branch. People also need to perform these functions in their own thinking and working. Legislative people like to build new structures, creating their own rules along the way. Executive people are rule followers, they like to be given a predetermined structure in which to work. Judicial people like to evaluate rules and procedures, to analyze a given structure.
The four forms of mental self-government are hierarchical, monarchic, oligarchic, and anarchic. The hierarchic style holds multiple goals simultaneously and prioritizes them. The oligarchic style is similar but differs in involving difficulty prioritizing. The monarchic style, in comparison, focuses on a single activity until completion. The anarchic style resists conformity to "systems, rules, or particular approaches to problems."
The two levels of mental self-government are local and global. The local style focuses on more specific and concrete problems, in extreme case they "can't see the forest for the trees". The global style, in comparison, focuses on more abstract and global problems, in extreme cases they "can't see the trees for the forest".
The two scopes of mental self-government are internal and external. The internal style focuses inwards and prefers to work independently. The external style focuses outwards and prefers to work in collaboration.
The two leanings of mental self-government are the liberal and conservative. These styles have nothing to do with politics. The liberal individual likes change, to go beyond existing rules and procedures. The conservative individual dislikes change and ambiguity, he will be happiest in a familiar and predictable environment.
All people have different profiles of thinking styles which can change over situations and time of life. Moreover, a person can, and often does, have a secondary preferred thinking style.
An intelligence quotient (IQ) is a total score derived from a set of standardised tests or subtests designed to assess human intelligence. The abbreviation "IQ" was coined by the psychologist William Stern for the German term Intelligenzquotient, his term for a scoring method for intelligence tests at University of Breslau he advocated in a 1912 book. Many of the proponents of intelligence tests and IQ scores were eugenicists who used pseudoscience to push now-debunked views of racial hierarchy.
The theory of multiple intelligences (MI) proposes the differentiation of human intelligence into specific distinguishable multiple intelligences, rather than defining it as a single general ability. Since 1983, the theory has been popular among educators around the world. In the influential book Frames of Mind: The Theory of Multiple Intelligences (1983) and its sequels, Howard Gardner identifies at least eight distinct intelligences that humans use to survive, thrive and build civilization. The theory describes intelligence as the "brain's toolkit" for creating symbolic thought that is mobilized within one’s specific culture.
Creativity is the ability to form novel and valuable ideas or works using the imagination. Products of creativity may be intangible or a physical object. Creativity may also describe the ability to find new solutions to problems, or new methods of performing a task or reaching a goal. Creativity therefore enables people to solve problems in new or innovative ways.
Human intelligence is the intellectual capability of humans, which is marked by complex cognitive feats and high levels of motivation and self-awareness. Using their intelligence, humans are able to learn, form concepts, understand, and apply logic and reason. Human intelligence is also thought to encompass their capacities to recognize patterns, plan, innovate, solve problems, make decisions, retain information, and use language to communicate.
The g factor is a construct developed in psychometric investigations of cognitive abilities and human intelligence. It is a variable that summarizes positive correlations among different cognitive tasks, reflecting the fact that an individual's performance on one type of cognitive task tends to be comparable to that person's performance on other kinds of cognitive tasks. The g factor typically accounts for 40 to 50 percent of the between-individual performance differences on a given cognitive test, and composite scores based on many tests are frequently regarded as estimates of individuals' standing on the g factor. The terms IQ, general intelligence, general cognitive ability, general mental ability, and simply intelligence are often used interchangeably to refer to this common core shared by cognitive tests. However, the g factor itself is a mathematical construct indicating the level of observed correlation between cognitive tasks. The measured value of this construct depends on the cognitive tasks that are used, and little is known about the underlying causes of the observed correlations.
Intellectual giftedness is an intellectual ability significantly higher than average. It is a characteristic of children, variously defined, that motivates differences in school programming. It is thought to persist as a trait into adult life, with various consequences studied in longitudinal studies of giftedness over the last century. These consequences sometimes include stigmatizing and social exclusion. There is no generally agreed definition of giftedness for either children or adults, but most school placement decisions and most longitudinal studies over the course of individual lives have followed people with IQs in the top 2.5 percent of the population—that is, IQs above 130. Definitions of giftedness also vary across cultures.
Intelligence has been defined in many ways: the capacity for abstraction, logic, understanding, self-awareness, learning, emotional knowledge, reasoning, planning, creativity, critical thinking, and problem-solving. It can be described as the ability to perceive or infer information; and to retain it as knowledge to be applied to adaptive behaviors within an environment or context.
The Triarchic Theory of Intelligence or Three Forms of Intelligence, formulated by psychologist Robert Sternberg, aims to go against the psychometric approach to intelligence and take a more cognitive approach, which leaves it to the category of the cognitive-contextual theories. The three meta components are also called triarchic components.
Philip Ewart Vernon was a British-born Canadian psychologist and author. He studied intellectual ability with a focus on race and intelligence.
James C. Kaufman is an American psychologist known for his research on creativity. He is a Professor of Educational Psychology at the University of Connecticut in Storrs, Connecticut. Previously, he taught at the California State University, San Bernardino, where he directed the Learning Research Institute. He received his Ph.D. from Yale University in Cognitive Psychology, where he worked with Robert J. Sternberg.
Evolutionary educational psychology is the study of the relation between inherent folk knowledge and abilities and accompanying inferential and attributional biases as these influence academic learning in evolutionarily novel cultural contexts, such as schools and the industrial workplace. The fundamental premises and principles of this discipline are presented below.
The Culture Fair Intelligence Test (CFIT) was created by Raymond Cattell in 1949 as an attempt to measure cognitive abilities devoid of sociocultural and environmental influences. Scholars have subsequently concluded that the attempt to construct measures of cognitive abilities devoid of the influences of experiential and cultural conditioning is a challenging one. Cattell proposed that general intelligence (g) comprises both fluid intelligence (Gf) and crystallized intelligence (Gc). Whereas Gf is biologically and constitutionally based, Gc is the actual level of a person's cognitive functioning, based on the augmentation of Gf through sociocultural and experiential learning.
K. Anders Ericsson was a Swedish psychologist and Conradi Eminent Scholar and Professor of Psychology at Florida State University who was internationally recognized as a researcher in the psychological nature of expertise and human performance.
The Cattell–Horn–Carroll theory, is a psychological theory on the structure of human cognitive abilities. Based on the work of three psychologists, Raymond B. Cattell, John L. Horn and John B. Carroll, the Cattell–Horn–Carroll theory is regarded as an important theory in the study of human intelligence. Based on a large body of research, spanning over 70 years, Carroll's Three Stratum theory was developed using the psychometric approach, the objective measurement of individual differences in abilities, and the application of factor analysis, a statistical technique which uncovers relationships between variables and the underlying structure of concepts such as 'intelligence'. The psychometric approach has consistently facilitated the development of reliable and valid measurement tools and continues to dominate the field of intelligence research.
IQ classification is the practice of categorizing human intelligence, as measured by intelligence quotient (IQ) tests, into categories such as "superior" and "average".
Mary Nacol Meeker (1921–2003), was an American educational psychologist and entrepreneur. She is best known for her applying J. P. Guilford's Structure of Intellect theory of human intelligence to the field of education.
The Cognitive Abilities Test (CogAT) is a group-administered K–12 assessment published by Riverside Insights and intended to estimate students' learned reasoning and problem solving abilities through a battery of verbal, quantitative, and nonverbal test items. The test purports to assess students' acquired reasoning abilities while also predicting achievement scores when administered with the co-normed Iowa Tests. The test was originally published in 1954 as the Lorge-Thorndike Intelligence Test, after the psychologists who authored the first version of it, Irving Lorge and Robert L. Thorndike. The CogAT is one of several tests used in the United States to help teachers or other school staff make student placement decisions for gifted education programs, and is accepted for admission to Intertel, a high IQ society for those who score at or above the 99th percentile on a test of intelligence.
Scott Barry Kaufman is an American cognitive scientist, author, podcaster, coach, and popular science writer. His writing and research focuses on intelligence, creativity, and human potential. Most media attention has focused on Kaufman's attempt to redefine intelligence. Kaufman is founder and director of the Center for Human Potential and has taught courses at Columbia, NYU, the University of Pennsylvania, and elsewhere.
The following outline is provided as an overview of and topical guide to human intelligence:
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