Expert answer:Write two discussion questions from article about
Answer & Explanation:Write two discussion questions from article. Discussion questions should
neither be too specific (“What does the fourth word on p. 27 mean?”)
nor too general (“Was this a good article? Why or why not?”). Try to
strike a balance between the specific and general. Be sure to point the
reader to the specific content of the article that your question
addresses. Avoid questions with “yes/no” or “either/or” answers; good
discussion questions are open-ended. Also avoid leading questions. See
below for examples of good discussion questions. Example Discussion
Questions: 1. What negative consequences could result if parents followed Bem’s
suggestion to raise androgynous boys and girls? How might peers respond
to boys with stereotypically feminine characteristics and girls with
stereotypically masculine characteristics? What are the positive
consequences of raising androgynous boys and girls? Where does one draw
the line between a healthy de-emphasis on gender and a healthy
acknowledgment of gender in raising children? 2. Josephs, Markus, and Tafarodi argue that individuation
(distinguishing the self from others on the basis of talents or
accomplishments) does not serve as a significant source of esteem for
American women (because of gender-role socialization). How accurately
does their argument describe women in the U.S.? Explain your response.
How do women in the U.S. compare, in terms of how individualistic they
are, to men and women in Asian cultures? How does the pressure that
women feel in our society to be appropriately “feminine” interact with
the individualistic norms that all Americans experience?4_sternberg_grigorenko_2006.pdf
4_sternberg_grigorenko_2006.pdf
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Group & Organization Management
http://gom.sagepub.com
Cultural Intelligence and Successful Intelligence
Robert J. Sternberg and Elena L. Grigorenko
Group Organization Management 2006; 31; 27
DOI: 10.1177/1059601105275255
The online version of this article can be found at:
http://gom.sagepub.com/cgi/content/abstract/31/1/27
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Citations http://gom.sagepub.com/cgi/content/refs/31/1/27
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GROUP &Grigorenko
10.1177/1059601105275255
Sternberg,
ORGANIZATION
/ CULTURAL
MANAGEMENT
AND SUCCESSFUL INTELLIGENCE
Cultural Intelligence
and Successful Intelligence
ROBERT J. STERNBERG
ELENA L. GRIGORENKO
Yale University
Intelligence cannot be fully or even meaningfully understood outside its cultural context. Work
that seeks to study intelligence acontextually risks the imposition of an investigator’s view of the
world on the rest of the world. Moreover, work on intelligence within a single culture may fail to
do justice to the range of skills and knowledge that may constitute intelligence broadly defined
and risks drawing false and hasty generalizations. In this article, we consider the relevance of
culture to intelligence and its investigation, assessment, and development. We describe studies
from diverse continents, based on the theory of successful intelligence, that show the importance
of understanding intelligence in its cultural context and conclude that intelligence must be understood in such context.
Keywords: culture; intelligence; successful intelligence; cultural intelligence
Howard Dean is currently a candidate for nomination by the Democratic
Party for president of the United States. The startling success of this erstwhile
little known candidate derives, in part, from his willingness—unique among
the Democratic candidates—to criticize the current government of President
Bush, a Republican. His behavior is intelligent in the sense that it is moving
him toward his stated goal of getting elected. In another country, the same
behavior might get a candidate assassinated. It would not move the candidate
toward election but, rather, toward an early death.
What is considered intelligent clearly differs from one place to the next. Is
it smart or fatally stupid to criticize the existing regime publicly, for example? Yet researchers often do their research as though culture does not matter.
This research continues despite pervasive evidence that people in different
cultures think and act differently (e.g., Greenfield, 1997; Laboratory of
Comparative Human Cognition, 1982; Nisbett, 2003; Serpell, 2000; Super &
Harkness, 1986). Earley and Ang (2003) proposed a distinct cultural intelliThe research in this article was supported primarily by the Partnership for Child Development.
Group & Organization Management, Vol. 31 No. 1, February 2006 27-39
DOI: 10.1177/1059601105275255
© 2006 Sage Publications
27
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GROUP & ORGANIZATION MANAGEMENT
gence to account for differences across cultures. We seek to account for these
differences in terms of a theory of “successful intelligence” (Sternberg,
1997). Successful intelligence is the ability to achieve what one seeks in life,
within one’s sociocultural context, through a combination of adapting to,
shaping, and selecting environments, by a mix of analytical, creative, and
practical abilities. Successful intelligence is relevant across cultures because
in any cultural environment one has to figure out to adapt, shape (or select
out), and figure out how to achieve one’s goals within the sociocultural context. Successful intelligence is typically defined within a culture. Cultural
intelligence, in turn, applies more across cultures. Someone could be successfully intelligent within a culture but not across cultures. Someone could
be relatively successful across cultures but not highly successfully intelligence within any one of those cultures. Indeed, as Berry (1974) pointed out,
what is intelligent in one culture may be very different from what is intelligent in another.
The theory of successful intelligence considers implicit and explicit theories of intelligence.
LAY IMPLICIT THEORIES OF
INTELLIGENCE AROUND THE WORLD
In some cases, Western notions about intelligence are not shared by other
cultures. For example, at the mental level, the Western emphasis on speed of
mental processing (Sternberg, Conway, Ketron, & Bernstein, 1981) is not
shared in many cultures. Other cultures may even be suspicious of the quality
of work that is done very quickly.
Yang and Sternberg (1997a) reviewed Chinese philosophical conceptions
of intelligence. The Confucian perspective emphasizes the characteristic of
benevolence and of doing what is right. As in the Western notion, the intelligent person spends a great deal of effort in learning, enjoys learning, and persists in life-long learning with a great deal of enthusiasm. The Taoist tradition, in contrast, emphasizes the importance of humility, freedom from
conventional standards of judgment, and full knowledge of oneself as well as
of external conditions.
The difference between Eastern and Western conceptions of intelligence
may persist even in the present day. Yang and Sternberg (1997b) studied
contemporary Taiwanese Chinese conceptions of intelligence and found five
factors underlying these conceptions: (a) a general cognitive factor, much
like the g factor in conventional Western tests; (b) interpersonal intelligence
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Sternberg, Grigorenko / CULTURAL AND SUCCESSFUL INTELLIGENCE
29
(i.e., social competence); (c) intrapersonal intelligence; (d) intellectual selfassertion; and (d) intellectual self-effacement.
The factors uncovered in Taiwan differ substantially from those identified
in U.S. people’s conceptions of intelligence by Sternberg et al. (1981)—(a)
practical problem solving, (b) verbal ability, and (c) social competence—
although in both cases, people’s implicit theories of intelligence seem to go
quite far beyond what conventional psychometric intelligence tests measure.
Of course, comparing the Chen (1994) to the Sternberg et al. (1981) study
simultaneously varies in language and culture.
Studies in Africa, in fact, provide yet another window on the substantial
differences. Ruzgis and Grigorenko (1994) argued that, in Africa, conceptions of intelligence revolve largely around skills that help to facilitate and
maintain harmonious and stable intergroup relations; intragroup relations are
probably equally important and at times more important. It is difficult to separate linguistic differences from conceptual differences in cross-cultural
notions of intelligence. In our own research, we use converging operations to
achieve some separation; that is, we use different and diverse empirical operations to ascertain notions of intelligence. So we may ask in one study that
people identify aspects of competence, in another study, that they identify
competent people, and in a third study, that they characterize the meaning of
“intelligence,” and so on.
The emphasis on the social aspects of intelligence is not limited to African
cultures. Notions of intelligence in many Asian cultures also emphasize the
social aspect of intelligence more than does the conventional Western or IQbased notion (Azuma & Kashiwagi, 1987; Lutz, 1985; Poole, 1985; White,
1985).
It should be noted that neither African nor Asian notions emphasize exclusively social notions of intelligence. These conceptions of intelligence
much more emphasize social skills than do conventional U.S. conceptions of
intelligence, at the same time that they recognize the importance of cognitive
aspects of intelligence. In a study of Kenyan conceptions of intelligence
(Grigorenko et al., 2001), it was found that there are four distinct terms constituting conceptions of intelligence among rural Kenyans—rieko (knowledge and skills), luoro (respect), winjo (comprehension of how to handle
real-life problems), paro (initiative)—with only the first directly referring to
knowledge-based skills (including but not limited to the academic).
It is important to realize, again, that there is no one overall U.S. conception of intelligence. Indeed, Okagaki and Sternberg (1993) found that different ethnic groups in San Jose, California, had rather different conceptions of
what it means to be intelligent. For example, Latino parents of schoolchil-
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dren tended to emphasize the importance of social-competence skills in their
conceptions of intelligence, whereas Asian parents tended rather heavily to
emphasize the importance of cognitive skills. White parents also emphasized
cognitive skills. Teachers, representing the dominant culture, emphasized
cognitive- more than they did social-competence skills. The rank order of
children of various groups’ performance (including subgroups within the
Latino and Asian groups) could be perfectly predicted by the extent to which
their parents shared the teachers’ conception of intelligence. In other words,
teachers tended to reward those children who were socialized into a view of
intelligence that happened to correspond to the teachers’ own. Yet, as we
argue later, social aspects of intelligence, broadly defined, may be as important as or even more important than cognitive aspects of intelligence in later
life. Some, however, prefer to study intelligence not in its social aspect but in
its cognitive one.
EXPLICIT-THEORETICAL INVESTIGATIONS OF
INTELLIGENCE AROUND THE WORLD
Many times, investigations of intelligence conducted in settings outside
the developed world can yield a picture of intelligence that is quite at variance with the picture one would obtain from studies conducted only in the
developed world. In a study in Usenge, Kenya, near the town of Kisumu,
Sternberg and his colleagues were interested in schoolage children’s ability
to adapt to their indigenous environment. We devised a test of practical intelligence for adaptation to the environment (see Sternberg & Grigorenko,
1997; Sternberg et al., 2001). The test of practical intelligence measured children’s informal tacit knowledge for natural herbal medicines that the villagers believe can be used to fight various types of infections. At least some of
these medicines appear to be effective (F. Okatcha, personal communication,
1999), and most villagers certainly believe in their efficacy, as shown by the
fact that children in the villages use their knowledge of these medicines an
average of once a week in medicating themselves and others. Thus, tests of
how to use these medicines constitute effective measures of one aspect of
practical intelligence as defined by the villagers as well as their life circumstances in their environmental contexts. Middle-class Westerners might find
it quite a challenge to thrive or even survive in these contexts, or, for that
matter, in the contexts of urban ghettos often not distant from their
comfortable homes.
We measured the Kenyan children’s ability to identify the medicines,
where they come from, what they are used for, and how they are dosed. Based
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31
on work we had done elsewhere, we expected that scores on this test would
not correlate with scores on conventional tests of intelligence. To test this
hypothesis, we also administered to the 85 children the Raven Coloured Progressive Matrices Test (Raven, Court, & Raven, 1992), which is a measure of
fluid or abstract-reasoning-based abilities, as well as the Mill Hill Vocabulary Scale (Raven et al., 1992), which is a measure of crystallized or formalknowledge-based abilities. In addition, we gave the children a comparable
test of vocabulary in their own Dholuo language. The Dholuo language is
spoken in the home, English in the schools.
We did indeed find no correlation between the test of indigenous tacit
knowledge and scores on the fluid-ability tests. However, to our surprise, we
found statistically significant correlations of the tacit-knowledge tests with
the tests of crystallized abilities. The correlations, however, were negative.
In other words, the higher the children scored on the test of tacit knowledge,
the lower they scored, on average, on the tests of crystallized abilities. This
surprising result can be interpreted in various ways; however, based on the
ethnographic observations of the anthropologists on the team, Geissler and
Prince, we concluded that a plausible scenario takes into account the expectations of families for their children.
Many children drop out of school before graduation, for financial or other
reasons, and many families in the village do not particularly value formal
Western schooling. There is no reason they should, as the children of many
families will for the most part spend their lives farming or engaged in other
occupations that make little or no use of Western schooling. These families
emphasize teaching their children the indigenous informal knowledge that
will lead to successful adaptation in the environments in which they will
really live. Children who spend their time learning the indigenous practical
knowledge of the community generally do not invest themselves heavily in
doing well in school, whereas children who do well in school generally do
not invest themselves as heavily in learning the indigenous knowledge—
hence the negative correlations.
The Kenya study suggests that the identification of a general factor of
human intelligence may tell us more about how abilities interact with patterns of schooling and especially Western patterns of schooling than it does
about the structure of human abilities. In Western schooling, children typically study a variety of subject matters from an early age and thus develop
skills in a variety of skill areas. This kind of schooling prepares the children
to take a test of intelligence, which typically measures skills in a variety of
areas. Often intelligence tests measure skills that children were expected to
acquire a few years before taking the intelligence test. However, as Rogoff
(1990) and others have noted, this pattern of schooling is not universal and
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GROUP & ORGANIZATION MANAGEMENT
has not even been common for much of the history of humankind. Throughout history and in many places still, schooling, especially for boys, takes the
form of apprenticeships in which children learn a craft from an early age.
We have found related although certainly not identical results in a study
we did among Yup’ik Eskimo children in southwestern Alaska (Grigorenko
et al., 2004). We assessed the importance of academic and practical intelligence in rural and urban Alaskan communities. A total of 261 children were
rated for practical skills by adults or peers in the study: 69 in Grade 9, 69 in
Grade 10, 45 in Grade 11, and 37 in Grade 12. Of these children, 145 were
girls and 116 were boys, and they were from seven different communities,
six rural and one relatively urban. We measured academic intelligence with
conventional measures of fluid and crystallized intelligence. We measured
practical intelligence with a test of tacit knowledge as acquired in rural Alaskan Yup’ik communities. The urban children generally outperformed the
rural children on a measure of crystallized intelligence; however, the rural
children generally outperformed the urban children on the measure of
Yup’ik tacit knowledge. The test of tacit knowledge was superior to the tests
of academic intelligence in predicting practical skills of the rural children
(for whom the test was created), but not of the urban ones.
The test of practical intelligence developed for use in Kenya, as well as
some of the other practically based tests described in this article, may seem
more like tests of achievement or of developing expertise (see Ericsson,
1996) than of intelligence. However, it can be argued that intelligence is itself
a form of developing expertise—that there is no clear-cut distinction between the two constructs (Sternberg, 1998, 1999). Indeed, all measures of
intelligence, one might argue, measure a form of developing expertise.
An example of how tests of intelligence measure developing expertise
rather than some fixed quantity emanates from work Sternberg, Grigorenko,
and their colleagues have done in Tanzania. A study in Tanzania (see
Sternberg & Grigorenko, 1997, 2002; Sternberg et al., 2002) points out the
risks of giving tests, scoring them, and interpreting the results as measures of
some latent intellectual ability or abilities. We administered to 358 schoolchildren between ages 11 and 13 years near Bagamoyo, Tanzania, tests
including a form-board classification test, a linear syllogisms test, and a
Twenty Questions Test, which measure the kinds of skills required on conventional tests of intelligence. Of course, we obtained scores that they could
analyze and evaluate, ranking the children in terms of their supposed general
or other abilities. However, we administered the tests dynamically rather
than statically (Brown & Ferrara, 1985; Grigorenko & Sternberg, 1998;
Sternberg & Grigorenko, 2002; Tzuriel, 1995; Vygotsky, 1978). Dynamic
testing is similar to conventional static testing in that individuals are tested
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33
and inferences about their abilities made. However, dynamic tests differ in
that children are given some kind of feedback to help them improve their
scores. Vygotsky (1978) suggested that the children’s ability to profit from
the guided instruction the children received during the testing session could
serve as a measure of children’s zone of proximal development (ZPD), or the
difference between their developed abilities and their latent capacities. In
other words, testing and instruction are treated as being of one piece rather
than as being distinct processes. This integration makes sense in terms of traditional definitions of intelligence as the ability to learn (“Intelligence and Its
Measurement,” 1921; Sternberg & Detterman, 1986). What a dynamic test
does is directly measure processes of learning in the context of testing rather
than measuring these processes indirectly as the product of past learning.
Such measurement is especially important when not all children have had
equal opportunities to learn in the past.
In the assessments, children were first given the ability tests. Then they
were given a brief period of instruction in which they were able to learn skills
that would potentially enable them to improve their scores. Then they were
tested again. Because the instruction for each test lasted only about 5 to 10
min, one would not expect dramatic gains. Yet, on average, the gains were
statistically significant. More important, scores on the pretest showed only
weak although significant correlations with scores on the post-test. These
correlations, at about the 0.3 level, suggested that when tests are administered statically to children in developing countries, they may be rather unstable and easily subject to influences of training. The reason could be that the
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