smarty pants, egg head, brainiac. you've heardterms like these before, maybe you've even been on the receiving end of one of them.but actually, defining intelligence is a lot trickier than just coming up with new namesfor smart people. i mean, intelligence isn't like height orweight; you can't just toss them on a scale and give it an exact measurement. it has differentmeanings for different cultures and ages and
crash diets crossword, skill sets. so what is intelligence? it's a question thatdoesn't give us a lot of answers, but it does open a bunch of other equally important andinteresting questions. like, what influences it? and how can it beassessed?
is it a single, general ability, or does itcover a range of aptitudes and skills and talents?how do things like creativity and innovation factor in? or genetics or environment, oreducation? and what about emotional intelligence? most agree that it's best to think of intelligencenot of a concrete thing so much as a concept, the ability to learn from experience, solveproblems, and use knowledge to adapt to new experiences.we've often used intelligence tests, to assess and compare mental aptitude, but these testshave a long, complex and dark history. i mean there are nazis involved so, yeah.
so as you'll see, there are reasons that intelligenceis one of the most hotly debated subjects in psychology. it's complicated and controversial. [intro] what if i'm the world's greatest rubik's cubesolver but a terrible speller? or a truly gifted artist who's barely mastered long division?could anyone say i was intelligent or not based on those different aptitudes, or wouldit be more accurate to measure my brainpower on several different scales? around the turn of the twentieth century,british psychologist charles spearman suggested that yes, we do have one comprehensive generalintelligence that underlies all of specific
mental abilities. he called it the g-factor. spearman conceded that while people may havespecial talents like basket weaving or saxophone solos or doing crossword puzzles, those thingsstill fell under "g". and he helped develop a statistical procedure called factor analysisto try to determine how certain clusters of skills might correlate with another one. like,say someone who tests well in spatial skills might be good with numbers. we might then refer to that cluster of skills,that factor, as spatial-numeric reasoning. but to spearman, the g-factor was somethingof an uber-factor connected to all intelligent behavior from architecture to healing to survivalskills, and it's why people who do well on
one kind of cognitive test tend to do wellon others. but as you can imagine, reducing intelligence to a single numerical test scorewas and is problematic. l.l. thurstone, an american pioneer of psychometricsand one of spearman's first challengers, was not into ranking people on a single scale.thurstone administered 56 different tests to his subjects then used them to identifyseven clusters of mental abilities. by this system, you might turn out to be great atlike verbal comprehension but less stellar at something like numerical ability. sounds fair. but when researchers followedup on his findings, they actually did see that high scores in one aptitude usually meantgood scores in the others, essentially backing
up some evidence for some kind of g-factor.even though their ideas did not often align, spearman and thurstone together paved theway for more contemporary theories on intelligence. for example, american psychologist howardgardner views intelligence as multiple abilities that come in different forms. he referencesinstances of brain damage where one ability may be destroyed while others stay perfectlyintact. savants usually have some limited metal abilities but one exceptional abilitywhen it comes to like, computing figures or memorizing the complete works of shakespeare. to gardner, this suggests that we have multipleintelligences beyond the g-factor. in fact, he believes that we have eight intelligences,ranging from our skills with numbers and words
to our ability to understand physical spaceand the natural world. american psychologist robert sternberg tends to agree with gardner,though he boils them down into three intelligences: analytical, or problem-solving intelligence,creative intelligence, or the ability to adapt to new situations, and practical intelligencefor everyday tasks. both of these models seem reasonable, too,and gardner and sternberg's work has helped teachers appreciate students' variety of talents.but research has suggested that even these different ways to be smart are also linkedby some underlying general intelligence factor. so what about other less tangible forms ofintelligence, like creativity, our ability to produce ideas that are both novel and valuable?how can a test that demands one correct answer
account for more creative solutions, so-called"divergent thinking". well, traditional intelligence tests can't,and so far, while we do have some tests that look at creative potential, we don't havea standardized system for quantifying creativity. but sternberg and his colleagues have identifiedfive main components of creativity, which are useful for framing our understanding ofwhat creative intelligence is and how it works. if you go through the list, you know who ithink is really great at almost all of them? sherlock holmes. hear me out. first we've got expertise, or a well-developedbase of knowledge. this just means knowing a lot about a lot. whether it's arcane poisons,jellyfish behavior, or how to recognize a
secret passage behind a book shelf, expertiseprovides the mind with all sorts of data to work with and combine in new ways. obviously sherlock has incredible imaginativethinking skills, too, which provide him with the ability to see things in new ways, recognizepatterns and make connections. he loves nothing more than rehashing these breadcrumb trailsfor the dopey constables at the end of the case. sternberg also thought a venturesome personalitycontributes to creativity. by hanging around opium dens and chasing thugs and generallycourting danger, sherlock routinely seeks new experiences, tolerates risk, and perseveresin overcoming obstacles.
and everyone knows he's driven by intrinsicmotivation. i mean, he wants to help the widow discover the thief and everything, but really,sherlock is driven by his own interest and sense of challenge. he gets pleasure fromthe work itself. and finally, sherlock benefits from a creativeenvironment which sparks, supports, and refines his ideas. for so affectionately maintainingthis environment on sherlock's behalf, we largely have dr. watson to thank. sherlock was obviously an academic and creativegenius, but he was pretty weak in another form of intelligence: the emotional kind.emotional intelligence, defined in 1997 by psychologist peter salovey and john mayer-- no, not, not that one-- is the ability
to perceive, understand, manage, and use emotions.i don't know about you, but i know plenty of smart people who have a hard time processingsocial information. the most brilliant mathematician may struggle to communicate with colleagues,neighbors, or staff at the local deli. likewise, sherlock often annoys, offends, or even bafflesthose around him. perceiving emotions means being able to recognizethem in faces, and even in music, film, and stories. understanding emotions relates tobeing able to predict them and how they might change. and managing emotions comes down toknowing how to appropriately express yourself in various situations. and finally, emotionalintelligence also means using emotions to enable adaptive or creative thinking; likeknowing how to manage conflict or comfort
a grieving friend or work well with others. much like creative intelligence, emotionalintelligence can be measured to some degree through testing, but there's no standardizedway to, like, assign a numerical value. so if we can't perfectly quantify things likecreativity or emotional smarts, how did we come up with a way to measure intelligence? well, as i mentioned earlier, it's a sordidstory. the first attempts to do it in the western world began with english scientistfrancis galton in the 1800s. taking a page from his famous cousin charles darwin's theorieson natural selection, galton wondered how that premise might extend to humans' naturalability when it came to intelligence. he suggested
that our smarts have a lot to do with heredity,so if we encouraged smart people to breed with each other, we could essentially createa master race of geniuses. if that sounds a little sketchy, it's becauseit was, like, really, really sketchy!! this study of how to selectively and supposedlyimprove the human population, especially by encouraging breeding in some people and discouragingit in others, is called "eugenics". a term galton himself coined, and i'll get back to,in a minute. but around the turn of the twentieth century when eugenics was taking off, thefrench government mandated that all children must attend school. many of these kids hadnever been in a classroom and teachers wanted to figure out how they could identify kidswho needed extra help. enter alfred binet
and theodore simon, two french psychologistswho were commissioned to develop a test to measure a child's so-called mental age. the concept of a kid's mental age is essentiallythe level of performance associated with a certain chronological age. so if six yearold bruno tests as well as the average six year old, he'd have a mental age of six. binet believed that his tests could measurea child's current mental abilities, but that intelligence wasn't a fixed, inborn thing.he believed a person's capabilities could be raised with proper attention, self-disciplineand practice. in other words, he was no eugenicist. he was hoping that his tests would improvechildren's education by identifying those
who needed extra attention. but binet alsofeared that these tests would, in the wrong hands, be used to do just the opposite: labelingchildren as "lost causes", limiting their opportunities. and wow, was he on to somethingbecause that is pretty much exactly what happened. german psychologist william stern used revisionsof binet and simon's work to create the famous intelligence quotient, or iq measurement.at the time, your iq was simply your mental age, divided by your chronological age, multipliedby a hundred. so for example bruno is six, and so is his mental age, so his iq ranksat a hundred, but his little sister betty is a four year-old with a mental age of five,so her iq would be 125. that formula works pretty well for measuringkids, but it falls apart when it comes to
adults who don't hit measurable developmentalsteps like kids do. i mean there's no real difference between a mental age of 34 and35. but stanford professor lewis terman startedpromoting the widespread use of intelligence tests in the early 1900s, and with his helpthe us government began the world's first massive ministration of intelligence tests,when it assessed world war i army recruits and immigrants fresh off the boat. unlike binet, terman did use these numericalfindings as a kind of label, and he thought his tests could, as he put it: "ultimatelyresult in curtailing the reproduction of feeble-mindedness". this kind of testing played right into eugenicists'sensibilities, and soon the eugenics movement
in the us had a pretty good fanclub, raisingmoney from the carnegie's and rockafeller's and with proponents working at harvard andcolumbia and cornell. in the first half of the 21st century, intelligencetests were used to enforce the sterilization of about 60,000 people, around a third ofwhom were in california. most were poor white women, often unwed mothers or prostitutes.other eugenics efforts persisted later into the century, and there is evidence of poorafrican american, native american, or latina women being forcibly or covertly sterilizedin large numbers as recently as the 1970s. but do you know who really loved their eugenics?the nazis. hitler and his cronies took the idea of intelligencetesting to even darker conclusions. the nazis
were all about selecting against so-called"feeble-mindedness" and other undesirable traits as they sought to strengthen what theysaw as their aryan nation. they sterilized or simply executed hundreds of thousands ofvictims based of their answers to iq test questions that were really more abut adheringto social norms than measuring actual intelligence. questions like: "who was bismarck?" and "whatdoes christmas signify?" so you can see how this terrifying history still makes some peopleleery of how such tests are administered, interpreted, and weighted. today we understand that intelligence, asdefined by all the people we've talked about here, does appear to be a real and measurablephenomenon. but no one can say that they've
disentangled all of the would-be genetic,environmental, educational, and socio-economic components of it. in the end, it's best tothink of intelligence as something about which we've still got a lot to learn. and next week,we'll talk about how we test intelligence today and the problems we still face in doingit. today, your intelligent mind learned aboutthe history of how we think about and define different types of intelligence, what theg-factor is, and how sherlock holmes is incredibly intelligent but emotionally unintelligent.you also learned about the history and methods of intelligence testing, iq scores, and howeugenics turned to the dark side, and has since made even talking about intelligencekind of controversial.
thank you for watching, especially fto oursubbable subscribers who make crash course possible. to find out how you can become asupporter, just go to subbable.com/crashcourse. this episode was written by kathleen yale,edited by blake de pastino, and our consultant is dr. ranjit bhagwat. our director and editoris nicholas jenkins, the script supervisor is michael aranda, who is also our sound designer,and the graphics team is thought cafe.
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