Problem Solving

Problem solving is thinking that is directed toward the solving of a specific problem that
involves both the formation of responses and the selection among possible responses. We
encounter an untold number of problems in our daily lives that cause us to form response
strategies, to select potential responses, and to test responses in solving a problem. For example,
try to solve this problem: A dog has a 6-foot rope tied to its neck, and a pan of water is 10 feet
away. How would the dog reach the pan? The solution to this problem involves the generation of
possible responses (of which there are few), the selection and trial of them, and perhaps the
discovery of the trick in the problem.
Gestalt psychology and Problem Solving
Although Gestalt psychology is particularly known for its theories of perceptual organization, it
is also known for insight into problem solving. Gestalt is roughly translatable as “configuration”
or “organized whole.” The perspective of Gestalt psychologists is consistent with the word, in
that they view behavior in terms of an organized system. According to the gestaltists, problems,
especially perceptual problems, exist when tension or stress occurs as a result of some interaction
between perception and memory. By thinking about a problem, or by examining it from different
angles, the “correct” view can emerge in a moment of insight. The early Gestalt psychologists
(Max Wertheimer, Kurt Kofka, Wolfgang Kohler) demonstrated the perceptional reorganization
viewpoint in problem-solving activity. Out of their work emerged the concept of functional
fixedness, originated by Karl Duncker (1945). This concept, which was to have considerable
impact on problem-solving research, held that there is a tendency to perceive things in terms of
their familiar uses and that tendency often makes it difficult to use them in an unfamiliar way
(e.g., using a brick as a measuring device). In effect, objects or ideas become set in their
functions and, when they are part of a problem-solving task that requires that they serve a
different function, the subject must overcome that “set.”
Although we usually associate the term set with the state of mind (habit or attitude) a person
brings to a problem-solving task, the original definition of the term includes the idea of any
preparatory cognitive activity that precedes thinking and perception. In the context of the latter
definition, set may enhance the quality of perception or thought through more active
participation in the meaning of a stimulus (as in the case of an ambiguous word, the next move in
a chess game, or the next response in a social situation). Alternatively, it may inhibit perception
or thought (as in a problem in which a participant repeatedly tries a certain nonproductive
solution that is related to an earlier experience).
For example, Duncker (1945) gave participants three cardboard boxes, matches, thumbtacks, and
candles and asked them to devise a plan whereby the candle could be mounted on a screen to
serve as a lamp. One group of participants was given the screen; the candles, the tacks, and the
matches were each presented in their own box. Another group of participants was given these
objects along with the three boxes—that is, the objects were not in the boxes. The solution to this
puzzle was to use the matches to light the candles, drip some wax on a box, stick the candle on it,
and thumbtack the box to the screen. When the boxes were modeled ahead of time as containers,
participants had much more difficulty in solving this problem than when the boxes were not (see
Figure 1). Later experimenters (Glucksberg & Danks, 1969) demonstrated that simply labeling
an object with a name fixed in the participant’s mind a certain set that could either facilitate or
impede the solving of a problem.
The types of problems used in the early experiments were of a wide variety, from mechanical to
logic problems. The protocols (records of the thought processes as “thought aloud” by the
participants) revealed that the problem-solving process had several well-ordered stages.
Participants normally seem to begin with what is expected of them. Then hypotheses about
possible solutions arise, are tested, and confirmed; if they are not confirmed, new hypotheses
emerge (see Figure 2). The process, then, seems to be one of trial and error, with a new
hypothesis replacing an unsuccessful one. These early experiments said little about how
hypotheses originated and made no credible postulates as to the cognitive structures involved in
the process.
Representation of the Problem
The work of the Gestalt psychologists focused on the nature of a task and its influence on a
person’s ability to solve it. Recent scholars have attacked the question of problem solving from
several different perspectives, including what modern cognitive psychologists call the process of
representation, or how a problem is depicted in the mind. Throughout this book, the topic of
internal representation has been a central theme. Material that has already been presented is not
repeated here, except to note that the way information is represented in a problem-solving task is
important in finding its solution. The way information is represented in solving a problem seems
to follow a well-ordered pattern. For example, let’s look at the problem of entering the real world
after graduation from college. The stereotypical sequence of problem solving, as suggested by
Hayes (1989), takes the following form:
Perhaps, if you think of the way you have solved problems in your own life, you will find that
you have used a sequence similar to the one shown here. The process is almost always
unconscious. That is, you do not deliberately say to yourself, “Now, I am in phase three,
‘planning the solution,’ which means that I . . .”; nevertheless, it is likely that these stages are
lurking in the background as you solve daily problems. Consider any problem—either real or
imaginary (such as fixing a broken toaster, solving a difficult interpersonal problem, or deciding
whether or not to have children) and work through it following the steps of the sequence. You
will find through this process that well-defined problems (“I’m unhappy in my current job”) are
easier to solve than ill-defined problems (“I hate my life”). Although all stages are important, the
representation of a problem appears to be very important, especially the way information is
represented in terms of visual imagery. Suppose you are asked to multiply 43 by 3. No big deal,
you might say, as you produce the answer easily with few mental operations. However, if I ask
you to multiply 563 by 26 mentally, how do you perform the task? If you are like many others,
you “see” the problem; that is, you represent it visually and begin the process by multiplying 3 6,
“see” the 8, carry the 1, then multiply 6 6, add the 1, and so on. All of these operations are done
with the information being represented in imagery. Vision is the dominant sensory modality. So
much of our information about the world comes through our visual system.
Internal Representation and Problem Solving
Cognitive psychologists seem to focus their greatest efforts on defining the cognitive processes
involved in internal representation. Only very recently has there been any systematic search for
definite cognitive structures that are engaged during problem-solving activity. The models that
have emerged draw heavily on the existing knowledge of memory structure and semantic
networks—and for good reasons: the literature in botis extensive, and problem solving is
certainly related to memory factors as well as to many of those of semantic networks.
Creativity
It is reasonable to assume that most people are creative to some degree. The creativity of, for
example, Georgia O’Keeffe, Buckminster Fuller, Wolfgang Mozart, or Thomas Jefferson not
only is a manifestation of great talent but also is well known. Other creative geniuses surely exist
but go unrecognized. Creativity is a cognitive activity that results in a new or novel way of
viewing a problem or situation. This definition does not restrict creative processes to utilitarian
acts, although the examples of creative people are almost always drawn from some useful
invention, writing, or theory they have created. Creative Process It is ironic that no dominant
theory has emerged during the past twenty years that might unify the disparate and sometimes
conflicting studies of creativity. The absence of a unified theory points out both the inherent
difficulty of the topic and the lack of widespread scientific attention. Nevertheless, creativity is
widely heralded as an important part of everyday life and education
A long time ago in the history of cognitive psychology, Wallas (1926) described the creative
process as having four sequential stages:
1. Preparation. Formulating the problem and making initial attempts to solve it.
2. Incubation. Leaving the problem while considering other things.
3. Illumination. Achieving insight to the problem.
4. Verification. Testing and/or carrying out the solution.
Although there is little empirical support for Wallas’s four stages, the psychological literature
abounds with reports from people who have given birth to a creative thought. The most
celebrated of these accounts is by Poincaré (1913), a French mathematician who discovered the
properties of Fuchsian functions. After working on the equations for a time and after making
some important discoveries (the preparation stage), he decided to go on a geologic excursion.
While traveling he “forgot” his mathematical work (incubation stage). Poincaré then writes about
the dramatic moment of insight. “Having reached Coutances, we entered an omnibus to go
someplace or other. At the moment when I put my foot on the step the idea came to me, without
anything in my former thoughts seeming to have paved the way for it, that the transformations I
had used to define the Fuchsian functions were identical with those of non-Euclidian geometry.”
The author continues to tell us that when he returned to his home, he verified the results at his
leisure.
Wallas’s four-stage model of the creative process has given us a conceptual framework to
analyze creativity. Here we briefly consider each of the stages.
Stage 1: Preparation Poincaré mentioned in his notes that he had been working intensively on
the problem for fifteen days. During that period he seemed to have thought of several tentative
solutions, which he tried out and, for one reason or another, discarded. However, to suggest that
the period of preparation was fifteen days is, of course, wrong. All of his professional life as a
mathematician and probably a good portion of his childhood could be considered part of the
preparation stage.
A common theme in biographies of famous men and women is the notion that even during their
early childhood, ideas were being developed, knowledge was being acquired, and tentative
thoughts in a specified direction were being tried out. These early ideas frequently shape the
ultimate destiny of the creative person. What remains one of the many mysteries of the process is
why other individuals who share similar environmental stimulation (or, in many cases,
deprivation) fail to be recognized for their creative talent. Maybe more attention should be given
to the genetic bases of creativity.
Stage 2: Incubation Why is it that a creative breakthrough frequently follows a period in which
the problem is allowed to lie fallow? Perhaps the most pragmatic answer is that more of our life
is devoted to recreation, watching television, skin diving, playing Texas Hold ‘em, traveling, or
lying in the sun watching the clouds drift by than in concentrated thinking about a problem that
needs a creative solution. So creative acts are more likely to follow dormant periods simply
because those periods occupy more of our time.
Posner (1973) offers several hypotheses about the incubation phase. One suggestion is that the
incubation period allows us to recover from the fatigue associated with problem solving. Also,
interruption of an arduous task may allow us to forget inappropriate approaches to a problem.
We have already seen that functional fixedness can impede problem solving, and it is possible
that during incubation people forget old, unsuccessful solutions to problems. Another reason
incubation may help in the creative process is that during this period we may actually work on
the problem unconsciously. Such a notion is similar to William James’s famous dictum, “We
learn to swim in the winter and ice-skate in the summer.” Finally, interruption of the problem-
solving process may allow for reorganization of material.
Stage 3: Illumination Incubation does not always lead to illumination. When it does, however,
the sensation is unmistakable. Suddenly, the lightbulb is turned on. The creative person may feel
a rush of excitement as all the bits and pieces of ideas fall into place. All of the pertinent ideas
complement each other, and irrelevant thoughts are discarded. The history of creative
breakthroughs is replete with examples of the illumination stage. The discovery of the structure
of the DNA molecule, the composition of the benzene ring, the invention of the telephone, the
conclusion of a symphony, and the plot of a novel are all examples of how a moment of
illumination has flooded the mind with a creative solution to a vexing old problem.
Stage 4: Verification following the euphoria that sometimes accompanies an insightful
discovery, the idea is tested. This is the mopping up stage of the creative process in which the
creative product is examined to verify its legitimacy. Often a solution first thought to be creative
is only an intellectual fool’s gold when examined carefully. This stage may be rather brief, as in
the case of rechecking one’s calculations or seeing whether an invention works; however, in
some cases verification may require a lifetime of study, testing, and retesting.
Creativity and Functional Fixedness
Earlier in this chapter we saw how functional fixedness could impede problem solving.
Functional fixedness also may obstruct creativity (which points out the similarity between the
concepts of problem solving and creativity). People who do the same old thing over and over
again or who think the same thoughts are considered to be rather unimaginative, not to mention
being socially boring. On the other hand, creative people see novel relationships or unusual
connections among seemingly unrelated things, such as the person who slipped an oversized tire
over a small tree so when the tree grew it would have a built-in ring seat.
Investment Theory of Creativity
In science, art, literature, music, and most other fields, creative people “buy low and sell high.”
That is, they get in on the ground floor in which the initial stages of their endeavor are frequently
thought by others to be foolish, ill-advised, or worse. If the idea has merit, then others may join
in, but we do not judge those joiners’ actions as particularly creative. It’s the person or people
who first dared to try something new that we consider creative. Many times the creative person
will “sell high,” which means that when the idea is more in vogue, he or she will move on to
another problem.
Sternberg and Lubart (1996) have developed a theory of creativity based on a multivariate
approach to the topic, which is built around six attributes. These six facets of creativity are:
• Processes of intelligence
• Intellectual style
• Knowledge
• Personality
• Motivation
• Environmental context
Truly creative performance is rare, not because people are lacking in any one attribute but
because it is difficult to get all six attributes working together. These attributes are seen much as
an investment portfolio might be seen in a business enterprise. Our creativity portfolio is the
basis of creative acts. These six facets of the portfolio can combine to yield creative
performances at any stage of life, and the intellectual environment, such as school or home life,
has an important early influence on creativity.
The importance of the work of Sternberg and Lubart is that it provides a general theory of
creativity specifying particular attributes that can be studied analytically and longitudinally. It is
clear that creativity is not a single trait, skill, or ability but a combination of several factors that
can be identified and analyzed. Furthermore, assessing human creativity is not a simple matter of
identifying the amount of each attribute and adding them together to find a kind of creativity
index. Rather, it is a matter of identifying and assessing the strengths of the interactions among
attributes. The combination of strengths of attributes and the number of interactions possible
poses a complex network that might befuddle some scientists. In fact, the whole idea may appear
foolishly complex. It may be that the authors of this theory are investing in what others might
call a risky venture. To others, it appears that Sternberg and Lubart have bought low.
The Adaptive Function of Creativity
Creativity and the appreciation for the creative arts is thought to have evolved, but there is debate
about whether creativity serves an adaptive function (Tooby & Cosmides, 2000, 2001), or is
merely a by-product of other functional traits (like understanding language or interpreting visual
scenes) (Pinker, 1997). There is a large body of logical evidence to support the by-product
hypothesis; however, Cosmides and Tooby provide a compelling argument for the adaptive
function of creativity, which rests on the idea that creating, viewing, and reading pretend worlds
(via art, literature, film, etc.) actually serves to help the human “practice” for real events that it
may encounter, and that, in turn, the desire to create and view creations assists us in carrying out
other functional behaviors.
Judging Creativity
Whether or not we label it, Americans are fond of judging creative acts and individuals.
Everything from the latest Italian sports car to the recent Steven Spielberg film, to the
performance of ice-skating champions is rated for its originality and creative merit. In most cases
judging creative acts is a highly subjective affair. Sometimes the standards are set by an authority
in the field, such as a noted professor of design, a film critic, a former Olympic skater, or a very
discerning person. This approach to psychology sounds more like art than science, and,
understandably, many scientifically obsessed psychologists would rather put on a white coat, go
to their laboratory, and measure blips on an oscilloscope made by a cat looking at a vertical line
than try to evaluate a creative act or person. Yet some bold individuals have rushed in where
their angelic colleagues fear to tread.
Psychologists thought it might be possible to assess creative ability by measuring how well
people see novel connections between seemingly unrelated words. One of these tests, invented
by Mednick (1967), was called the Remote Associations Test (RAT); it asked people to generate
a single word that would be logically associated with three words. Consider the following two
groups of three words: RED, BRIDGE, ANGRY, and HEAD, SICK, PORT. If you said “cross”
for the first group, you would be right. What is the common word for the second group?
The RAT measures at least one component of creativity, but it probably measures other things
too. Additionally, some very creative people might bomb on the test, which illustrates the
slippery concept of creativity. Could it be that we are unconsciously creative, by which we mean
that we have many associates to stimuli, such as a word or a visual scene or a musical piece, but
are not consciously aware of them? The remote associate’s idea was expanded by Bowers and
his colleagues (1990) in a task called the dyads of triads. One part of the task is like the RAT in
that the words are part of a coherent triad, as are those just presented or those in the threesome
GOAT, PASS, GREEN, all of which constellate around the coherent word MOUNTAIN.
However, the triad BIRD, PIPE, ROAD is considered incoherent in that no (likely) common
element is apparent. In this study subjects were given sets of coherent and incoherent triads and
asked to find the common elements, if they could. Also, they were asked to judge which of the
triads were coherent. The results showed that they were able to identify the coherent triads even
if they were unable to come up with the solution. It was as if the participants knew that there was
a common element but could not quite name it. Possibly, people activate part of a solution to a
remote associate task, and that may be one phase of a creative solution to a task. Such an idea
might be related to the concept of intuition (which is defined by the Oxford English Dictionary
as “the immediate apprehension of an object by the mind without the intervention of any
reasoning process”), a frequently defamed term in scientific literature. Human intuition may
indeed be an important part of the discovery phase of creative acts.
Divergence Production Test J. P. Guilford (1967) has spent most of his long and celebrated
professional career developing theories and tests of mental ability that includes creativity. He has
distinguished between two types of thinking: convergent thinking and divergent thinking.
Convergent thinking moves in a straightforward manner to a particular conclusion. Much of
pedagogy emphasizes convergent thinking, in which students are asked to recall factual
information, such as
What is the capital of Bulgaria?
Divergent thinking requires a person to generate many different answers to a question, the
“correctness” of the answers being somewhat subjective. For example: For how many different
things can you use a brick? The convergent answer may be “to make a building or a chimney.” A
slightly more divergent answer may be “to make a bookcase” or “to serve as a candleholder,”
while a more off-the-wall divergent answer may be “to serve as emergency rouge,” or “to serve
as a bon voyage gift—shoes for people who are going to the moon for the first time.” Simple
productivity of responses is not creative thinking. One could use a brick to make a candy shop, a
bakery, a factory, a shoe factory, a shop that sells hand-carved wooden things, a filling station,
and so on. Divergent or more creative answers may utilize objects or ideas in more abstract
terms. The divergent thinker is more flexible in his or her thinking.
If productivity were a valid measure of creativity, then quantitative assessment of that trait could
be achieved by counting the number of responses to brick-type questions. Since it is not, as
illustrated in the previous example, subjective evaluations must be used. Most people would
agree, we suspect, that bricks as moonshoes is a more creative answer than listing the types of
buildings one could make with bricks. The latter answer is, however, more practical.
Cognitive Theories of Intelligence
If the processing of information follows a sequence of stages in which at each stage a unique
operation is performed, then human intelligence is thought to be a component of human intellect
that interacts with the processing of information. Essentially, this is the way intelligence is
conceptualized by cognitive psychologists who subscribe to the information-processing theory of
cognition. Enthusiasm for the model seemed to start with cognitive psychologists fascinated with
computer intelligence. The analogy between human and artificial intelligence is inescapable;
information from the external world is perceived or input, it is stored in memory, transformation
of the information is performed, and an output is made. Additionally, the processing of
information is analogous to programs in computers and intellectual functions, including
intelligence, in humans.
Information Processing Speed As an example of the type of studies of intelligence done by
cognitive psychologists, we first consider the work of Hunt (1978), Hunt, Lunneborg, and Lewis
(1975), and Hunt and Lansman (1982). One question asked by Hunt and his colleagues was, “In
what way(s) does the processing of information differ in high- and low-ability subjects?” Two
groups—one with high-ability students and one with low-ability students—selected on the basis
of standardized college entrance examinations such as the Scholastic Aptitude Test (SAT), were
asked questions that required searching for common information in their long-term memories.
Speed of retrieval was used as the dependent variable.
The test Hunt used to measure reaction times was the letter-matching task developed by Posner,
Boies, Eichelman, and Taylor (1969). The task required subjects to decide whether two letters
(e.g., A-A or A-a) matched. In some instances the letters matched physically and in other cases
the match was made on the basis of the name of the letters. From the perspective of information
processing, the physical match condition required only that the subject get the letters in short-
term memory and make a decision. In the namematching condition, the subject, in addition to
getting both terms in STM, had to retrieve the name of the letter (ostensibly stored in LTM),
make a decision, and then press a reaction-time key. Hunt assumed that physical matches reflect
only structural processes dealing with the encoding and comparison of visual patterns, while
name matching reflects the efficiency of encoding information to a level that requires that the
physical representation of a letter make contact with the name of that letter in LTM. Crudely put,
the speed with which people could retrieve information from LTM was hypothesized to be a
measure of verbal ability. In the first condition, involving the physical match (A-A), the low- and
high-ability groups did about equally well in the name-matching condition (A-a), the low-ability
group, on average, took more time to make a correct decision than the high-ability group. The
difference between the groups was in the range of 25 to 50 milliseconds, which may seem to be
very brief indeed; however, when we consider the decoding of countless thousands of letters and
words in the process of normal reading (such as reading a textbook), the impact of these brief
times adds up quickly. These results hold for different participant groups such as university
students, 10-year-old children, elderly adults, and mentally retarded persons.
In another study Hunt (1978) used a modified form of the Brown-Peterson task to study
differences between those with high verbal ability and those with low verbal ability. This task, as
you may recall, requires participants to recall a three-letter syllable after they have counted
backward by threes for a certain length of time. (Hunt used four-letter syllables and had the
participants read the digits.) In this experiment the two groups differed significantly in recall of
letters. In addition, the retention curves between the two groups were parallel, which suggests
that the high-verbal group may be more efficient in encoding verbal information (rather than
simply maintaining more information) than the low-verbal group. Finally, Hunt used the
Sternberg paradigm to identify differences between participants with high-verbal ability and
those with low-verbal ability. As might be expected by now, he found that the former group
performed better than the latter group on this task.
The studies by Hunt and others are significant for two reasons. First, they indicate that the
information-processing paradigm provides many useful procedures for the study of human
intelligence. It is feasible that, in addition to verbal ability, other measures of intelligence—such
as mathematical ability, spatial ability, or perhaps even general intelligence—may yield some of
their enigmatic secrets in terms of reasonably simple cognitive processes and mechanisms.
Second, STM is related to verbal components of intelligence, not necessarily because the number
of items retained in STM is critically related to intelligence but because simple cognitive
processes and operations, such as identification of the name of a letter or the retention of a
trigram, that depend on LTM and STM are sensitive to individual intellectual differences.
General Knowledge
General knowledge has, since the development of the earliest tests of intelligence, been
considered an integral part of human intelligence, and to this day questions designed to tap an
individual’s understanding of the world are part of most standard tests. Apparently, knowing that
Baghdad is the capital of Iraq, or that hydrogen is lighter than helium, or that the Kirov Ballet
performs in Saint Petersburg, or that Tutankhamen’s mostly unmolested tomb was discovered by
Howard Carter (all of which are examples of passive knowledge—the type of information a
computer could store) is presumed by test makers to be related to intelligence. However,
embarrassingly little attention has been given, either theoretically or pragmatically, to the reason
general knowledge is considered a correlate of intelligence. As Siegler and Richards (1982) point
out:
For the same reasons that fish will be the last to discover water, developmental
psychologists until recently devoted almost no attention to changes in children’s knowledge of
specific content. Such changes are so omnipresent that they seemed uninviting as targets for
study. Instead of being investigated, improved content knowledge was implicitly dismissed as a
by-product of more basic changes in capacities and strategies.
Tests of general information may provide important data on a person’s current state of
knowledge and ability to retrieve information. This in turn could provide a useful clue to the past
intellectual history and predict future performance. Yet, of the many cognitive attributes recently
discovered, only a few have been related to human intelligence. It seems that semantic
organization is a topic that could be of special interest to people interested in intelligence. It
would seem that the ability to store semantic information in an organized schema and to access
that information efficiently is characteristic of at least one type of intelligence. Perhaps some
enterprising student of cognitive psychology will pursue this valuable subject.
One developmental study has shown not only how experiments can be done in this area but also
how they can lead to a clear demonstration of the impact of a knowledge base. Chi (1978)
examined the effect of a specialized knowledge base on the recall of chess and digit stimuli. For
her experiment, she selected ten-year-old children who were skilled chess players and adults who
were novices at the game. The task was similar to the one used by Chase and Simon in which
chess pieces were arranged in a normal game configuration. Both groups of participants were
allowed to view the board and pieces and then were asked to reproduce the arrangement on a
second board. A related task, called a meta-memory task—which refers to an individual’s
knowledge about his or her own memory— consisted of asking the children and adults to predict
how many trials it would take to reproduce all the pieces. The results, shown in Figure 11,
revealed that the children not only were better at recalling the arrangement of chess pieces but
also were better at predicting their performance—that is, their meta-memory was more accurate
than that of adults. A standard digit-span task, which is commonly used in intelligence tests, was
also administered, and as expected the adults performed better on recalling these digits and
predicting their performance than the children. The effect of a knowledge base, independent of
age or other types of intelligence (e.g., digit-span performance), appears to measurably enhance
the ability to recall from working memory specialized information that is directly related to the
knowledge base. The issues raised by this experiment, both methodological and theoretical,
suggest that in the future many more studies of this type will appear.
Reasoning and Problem Solving Almost everyone would agree that reasoning and problem
solving are important components of human intelligence, and some would suggest that
separating these concepts is done only for analytic purposes.
Most prominent among the new generation of cognitive psychologists to tackle the question of
human intelligence in relation to reasoning and problem solving is Sternberg (1977, 1980a,
1980b, 1982, 1984a, 1984b, 1986a, 1986b, 1989). The theory of human intelligence proposed by
Sternberg (1984b, 1985a, 1989) is the triarchic theory. It comprises three subtheories that serve
as the governing bases for specific models of intelligent human behavior. These parts are
1. Componential intelligent behavior. This subtheory specifies the structures and mechanism
that underlie intelligent behavior. Within this subtheory are three information processing
components: (a) learning how to do things, (b) planning what things to do and how to do them,
and (c) actually doing the things. People with such ability are generally good test takers and blow
the top off standardized tests. They also do well commenting on other people’s work. However,
they are not necessarily critical thinkers, nor are they particularly creative.
2. Experiential intelligent behavior. This component posits that for a given task or situation,
contextually appropriate behavior is not equally “intelligent” at all points along the continuum of
experience with that behavior or class of behaviors. This kind of intelligence is best
demonstrated when people are confronted with a novel situation or are in the process of
automatizing performance on a given task. Those who have this component may not score
highest on typical IQ tests, but they are creative. Such ability is generally predictive of success in
a chosen field, be it business, medicine, or carpentry.
3. Contextual intelligent behavior. This involves (a) adaptation to a present environment, (b)
selection of a more nearly optimal environment than the one the individual presently inhabits, or
(c) shaping of the present environment to render it a better fit to skills, interests, or values.
Contextual intelligence allows a person to find a good fit with the environment by changing one
or the other or both. We might think of this type of intelligence as instrumental in getting along
in your world, whether that world is the ghetto or the boardroom.