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Transcript Provided by YouTube:
00:01
Smarty pants, egg head, brainiac. You’ve heard terms like these before, maybe you’ve even
00:06
been on the receiving end of one of them. But actually, defining intelligence is a lot
00:10
trickier than just coming up with new names for smart people.
00:13
I mean, intelligence isn’t like height or weight; you can’t just toss them on a scale
00:16
and give it an exact measurement. It has different meanings for different cultures and ages and
00:21
skill sets.
00:21
So what is intelligence? It’s a question that doesn’t give us a lot of answers, but it does
00:26
open a bunch of other equally important and interesting questions.
00:30
Like, what influences it? And how can it be assessed?
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Is it a single, general ability, or does it cover a range of aptitudes and skills and
00:38
talents? How do things like creativity and innovation
00:40
factor in? Or genetics or environment, or education?
00:42
And what about emotional intelligence?
00:45
Most agree that it’s best to think of intelligence not of a concrete thing so much as a concept,
00:49
the ability to learn from experience, solve problems, and use knowledge to adapt to new
00:54
experiences. We’ve often used intelligence tests, to assess
00:57
and compare mental aptitude, but these tests have a long, complex and dark history. I mean
01:02
there are Nazis involved so, yeah.
01:04
So as you’ll see, there are reasons that intelligence is one of the most hotly debated subjects
01:08
in psychology. It’s complicated and controversial.
01:17
[Intro]
01:22
What if I’m the world’s greatest Rubik’s cube solver but a terrible speller? Or a truly
01:26
gifted artist who’s barely mastered long division? Could anyone say I was intelligent or not
01:31
based on those different aptitudes, or would it be more accurate to measure my brainpower
01:35
on several different scales?
01:37
Around the turn of the twentieth century, British psychologist Charles Spearman suggested
01:41
that yes, we do have one comprehensive general intelligence that underlies all of specific
01:45
mental abilities. He called it the G-Factor.
01:49
Spearman conceded that while people may have special talents like basket weaving or saxophone
01:53
solos or doing crossword puzzles, those things still fell under “G”. And he helped develop
01:58
a statistical procedure called factor analysis to try to determine how certain clusters of
02:03
skills might correlate with another one. Like, say someone who tests well in spatial skills
02:08
might be good with numbers.
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We might then refer to that cluster of skills, that factor, as spatial-numeric reasoning.
02:14
But to Spearman, the G-factor was something of an uber-factor connected to all intelligent
02:18
behavior from architecture to healing to survival skills, and it’s why people who do well on
02:24
one kind of cognitive test tend to do well on others. But as you can imagine, reducing
02:29
intelligence to a single numerical test score was and is problematic.
02:33
L.L. Thurstone, an American pioneer of psychometrics and one of Spearman’s first challengers, was
02:38
not into ranking people on a single scale. Thurstone administered 56 different tests
02:43
to his subjects then used them to identify seven clusters of mental abilities. By this
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system, you might turn out to be great at like verbal comprehension but less stellar
02:52
at something like numerical ability.
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Sounds fair. But when researchers followed up on his findings, they actually did see
02:57
that high scores in one aptitude usually meant good scores in the others, essentially backing
03:02
up some evidence for some kind of G-factor. Even though their ideas did not often align,
03:07
Spearman and Thurstone together paved the way for more contemporary theories on intelligence.
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For example, American psychologist Howard Gardner views intelligence as multiple abilities
03:15
that come in different forms. He references instances of brain damage where one ability
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may be destroyed while others stay perfectly intact. Savants usually have some limited
03:24
metal abilities but one exceptional ability when it comes to like, computing figures or
03:28
memorizing the complete works of Shakespeare.
03:29
To Gardner, this suggests that we have multiple intelligences beyond the G-factor. In fact,
03:35
he believes that we have eight intelligences, ranging from our skills with numbers and words
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to our ability to understand physical space and the natural world. American psychologist
03:44
Robert Sternberg tends to agree with Gardner, though he boils them down into three intelligences:
03:49
analytical, or problem-solving intelligence, creative intelligence, or the ability to adapt
03:54
to new situations, and practical intelligence for everyday tasks.
03:57
Both of these models seem reasonable, too, and Gardner and Sternberg’s work has helped
04:01
teachers appreciate students’ variety of talents. But research has suggested that even these
04:06
different ways to be smart are also linked by some underlying general intelligence factor.
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So what about other less tangible forms of intelligence, like creativity, our ability
04:16
to produce ideas that are both novel and valuable? How can a test that demands one correct answer
04:21
account for more creative solutions, so-called “divergent thinking”.
04:25
Well, traditional intelligence tests can’t, and so far, while we do have some tests that
04:30
look at creative potential, we don’t have a standardized system for quantifying creativity.
04:35
But Sternberg and his colleagues have identified five main components of creativity, which
04:39
are useful for framing our understanding of what creative intelligence is and how it works.
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If you go through the list, you know who I think is really great at almost all of them?
04:48
Sherlock Holmes. Hear me out.
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First we’ve got expertise, or a well-developed base of knowledge. This just means knowing
04:54
a lot about a lot. Whether it’s arcane poisons, jellyfish behavior, or how to recognize a
05:00
secret passage behind a book shelf, expertise provides the mind with all sorts of data to
05:04
work with and combine in new ways.
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Obviously Sherlock has incredible imaginative thinking skills, too, which provide him with
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the ability to see things in new ways, recognize patterns and make connections. He loves nothing
05:16
more than rehashing these breadcrumb trails for the dopey constables at the end of the
05:20
case.
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Sternberg also thought a venturesome personality contributes to creativity. By hanging around
05:24
opium dens and chasing thugs and generally courting danger, Sherlock routinely seeks
05:29
new experiences, tolerates risk, and perseveres in overcoming obstacles.
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And everyone knows he’s driven by intrinsic motivation. I mean, he wants to help the widow
05:38
discover the thief and everything, but really, Sherlock is driven by his own interest and
05:43
sense of challenge. He gets pleasure from the work itself.
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And finally, Sherlock benefits from a creative environment which sparks, supports, and refines
05:51
his ideas. For so affectionately maintaining this environment on Sherlock’s behalf, we
05:56
largely have Dr. Watson to thank.
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Sherlock was obviously an academic and creative genius, but he was pretty weak in another
06:03
form of intelligence: the emotional kind. Emotional intelligence, defined in 1997 by
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psychologist Peter Salovey and John Mayer — no, not, not that one– is the ability
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to perceive, understand, manage, and use emotions. I don’t know about you, but I know plenty
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of smart people who have a hard time processing social information. The most brilliant mathematician
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may struggle to communicate with colleagues, neighbors, or staff at the local deli. Likewise,
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Sherlock often annoys, offends, or even baffles those around him.
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Perceiving emotions means being able to recognize them in faces, and even in music, film, and
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stories. Understanding emotions relates to being able to predict them and how they might
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change. And managing emotions comes down to knowing how to appropriately express yourself
06:46
in various situations. And finally, emotional intelligence also means using emotions to
06:51
enable adaptive or creative thinking; like knowing how to manage conflict or comfort
06:55
a grieving friend or work well with others.
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Much like creative intelligence, emotional intelligence can be measured to some degree
07:01
through testing, but there’s no standardized way to, like, assign a numerical value. So
07:06
if we can’t perfectly quantify things like creativity or emotional smarts, how did we
07:11
come up with a way to measure intelligence?
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Well, as I mentioned earlier, it’s a sordid story. The first attempts to do it in the
07:17
western world began with English scientist Francis Galton in the 1800s. Taking a page
07:22
from his famous cousin Charles Darwin’s theories on natural selection, Galton wondered how
07:27
that premise might extend to humans’ natural ability when it came to intelligence. He suggested
07:32
that our smarts have a lot to do with heredity, so if we encouraged smart people to breed
07:36
with each other, we could essentially create a master race of geniuses.
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If that sounds a little sketchy, it’s because it was, like, really, really sketchy!! This
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study of how to selectively and supposedly improve the human population, especially by
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encouraging breeding in some people and discouraging it in others, is called “eugenics”. A term
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Galton himself coined, and I’ll get back to, in a minute. But around the turn of the twentieth
08:02
century when eugenics was taking off, the French government mandated that all children
08:06
must attend school. Many of these kids had never been in a classroom and teachers wanted
08:10
to figure out how they could identify kids who needed extra help. Enter Alfred Binet
08:15
and Theodore Simon, two French psychologists who were commissioned to develop a test to
08:19
measure a child’s so-called mental age.
08:22
The concept of a kid’s mental age is essentially the level of performance associated with a
08:26
certain chronological age. So if six year old Bruno tests as well as the average six
08:30
year old, he’d have a mental age of six.
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Binet believed that his tests could measure a child’s current mental abilities, but that
08:36
intelligence wasn’t a fixed, inborn thing. He believed a person’s capabilities could
08:40
be raised with proper attention, self-discipline and practice. In other words, he was no eugenicist.
08:46
He was hoping that his tests would improve children’s education by identifying those
08:50
who needed extra attention. But Binet also feared that these tests would, in the wrong
08:55
hands, be used to do just the opposite: labeling children as “lost causes”, limiting their
09:00
opportunities. And wow, was he on to something because that is pretty much exactly what happened.
09:06
German psychologist William Stern used revisions of Binet and Simon’s work to create the famous
09:10
intelligence quotient, or IQ measurement. At the time, your IQ was simply your mental
09:16
age, divided by your chronological age, multiplied by a hundred. So for example Bruno is six,
09:21
and so is his mental age, so his IQ ranks at a hundred, but his little sister Betty
09:25
is a four year-old with a mental age of five, so her IQ would be 125.
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That formula works pretty well for measuring kids, but it falls apart when it comes to
09:33
adults who don’t hit measurable developmental steps like kids do. I mean there’s no real
09:38
difference between a mental age of 34 and 35.
09:40
But Stanford professor Lewis Terman started promoting the widespread use of intelligence
09:45
tests in the early 1900s, and with his help the US government began the world’s first
09:50
massive ministration of intelligence tests, when it assessed World War I army recruits
09:54
and immigrants fresh off the boat.
09:56
Unlike Binet, Terman did use these numerical findings as a kind of label, and he thought
10:01
his tests could, as he put it: “ultimately result in curtailing the reproduction of feeble-mindedness”.
10:07
This kind of testing played right into eugenicists’ sensibilities, and soon the eugenics movement
10:11
in the US had a pretty good fanclub, raising money from the Carnegie’s and Rockafeller’s
10:16
and with proponents working at Harvard and Columbia and Cornell.
10:19
In the first half of the 21st century, intelligence tests were used to enforce the sterilization
10:23
of about 60,000 people, around a third of whom were in California. Most were poor white
10:29
women, often unwed mothers or prostitutes. Other eugenics efforts persisted later into
10:33
the century, and there is evidence of poor African American, Native American, or Latina
10:38
women being forcibly or covertly sterilized in large numbers as recently as the 1970s.
10:43
But do you know who really loved their eugenics? The Nazis.
10:46
Hitler and his cronies took the idea of intelligence testing to even darker conclusions. The Nazis
10:51
were all about selecting against so-called “feeble-mindedness” and other undesirable
10:56
traits as they sought to strengthen what they saw as their Aryan nation. They sterilized
11:00
or simply executed hundreds of thousands of victims based of their answers to IQ test
11:04
questions that were really more abut adhering to social norms than measuring actual intelligence.
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Questions like: “Who was Bismarck?” and “What does Christmas signify?” So you can see how
11:13
this terrifying history still makes some people leery of how such tests are administered,
11:18
interpreted, and weighted.
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Today we understand that intelligence, as defined by all the people we’ve talked about
11:23
here, does appear to be a real and measurable phenomenon. But no one can say that they’ve
11:28
disentangled all of the would-be genetic, environmental, educational, and socio-economic
11:33
components of it. In the end, it’s best to think of intelligence as something about which
11:37
we’ve still got a lot to learn. And next week, we’ll talk about how we test intelligence
11:41
today and the problems we still face in doing it.
11:45
Today, your intelligent mind learned about the history of how we think about and define
11:49
different types of intelligence, what the G-factor is, and how Sherlock Holmes is incredibly
11:54
intelligent but emotionally unintelligent. You also learned about the history and methods
11:58
of intelligence testing, IQ scores, and how eugenics turned to the dark side, and has
12:03
since made even talking about intelligence kind of controversial.
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Thank you for watching, especially fto our Subbable subscribers who make Crash Course
12:10
possible. To find out how you can become a supporter, just go to Subbable.com/crashcourse.
12:15
This episode was written by Kathleen Yale, edited by Blake de Pastino, and our consultant
12:19
is Dr. Ranjit Bhagwat. Our director and editor is Nicholas Jenkins, the script supervisor
12:23
is Michael Aranda, who is also our sound designer, and the graphics team is Thought Cafe.
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This post was previously published on YouTube.
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Photo credit: Screenshot from video.
