Unit 1 Intelligence across cultures

?In recent years, researchers have found that people in non-Western cultures often have ideas about intelligence?that differ fundamentally from those that have shaped Western intelligence tests.?Researchers of cultural differences in intelligence, however, face a major dilemma, namely: how to balance the desire to compare people from various cultures according to a standard measure with the need to assess people in the light of their own values and concepts?

For instance, Richard Nisbett, co-director of the Culture and Cognition Program at the University of Michigan, argues that East Asian and Western cultures have developed cognitive?styles that differ in fundamental?ways, including in how intelligence is understood. People in Western cultures, he suggests, tend to view intelligence as a means for individuals to devise categories and to engage in rational debate, while people in Eastern cultures see it as a way for members of a community to recognize contradiction?and complexity?and to play their social roles successfully.

Other researchers have come to similar conclusions. In a study published in Intelligence (Vol. 25, No. 1), Robert Sternberg, PhD, of Yale University, and Shih-ying Yang, of Chi-Nan University in Taiwan, found that Chinese conceptions of intelligence emphasize?understanding and relating to others –including knowing when to show and when not to show one’s intelligence. Such differences between Eastern and Western views of intelligence are tied, says Nisbett, to differences in the basic cognitive processes of people in Eastern and Western cultures.

The distinction?between East Asia and the West is only one of many cultural distinctions that separate different ways of thinking about intelligence. Robert Serpell, who is returning this year to the University of Zambia, spent a number of years studying the concepts of intelligence in rural African communities. He found that people in some African communities—especially where Western schooling has not yet become common—tend to blur?the Western distinction between intelligence and social competence. In rural Zambia, for instance, the concept of nzelu?includes both cleverness and responsibility. “When rural parents in Africa talk about the intelligence of children, they prefer not to separate the cognitive speed aspect of intelligence from the social responsibility aspect,” says Serpell. Likewise, among the Luo people in rural Kenya, it has been found that ideas about intelligence consist of four broad concepts, namely, paro, or practical thinking, winjo, or comprehension, luoro, which includes social qualities like respect, responsibility and consideration, and rieko, which largely corresponds to the Western idea of academic intelligence, but also includes specific skill. Only the fourth is correlated with traditional Western measures of intelligence.

In another study in the same community, Sternberg and his collaborators found that children who score highly on a test of knowledge about medicinal herbs—a measure of practical intelligence—tend to score poorly on tests of academic intelligence.?The results,?published in the journal Intelligence (Vol. 29, No. 5),?suggest that practical and academic intelligence can develop independently or even in conflict with each other, and that?the values of a culture may shape the direction in which a child develops.

They also support a number of other studies which suggest that people?who are unable to solve complex problems in the abstract?can often solve them when they are presented in a familiar context. Patricia Greenfield of the University of California, Los Angeles, and Ashley Maynard, now a professor of psychology at the University of Hawaii, conducted?studies of cognitive development among children in a Mayan village in Mexico, using toy looms, spools of thread and other materials drawn from the environment. The research suggested that the children’s development can be validly?compared to the progression?described by Western theories of development, but only by using testing materials and experimental?designs based on their own culture.?

The original hope of many cognitive psychologists was that a test that was absent of cultural bias?could be developed. However, there seems to be an increasing weight of evidence to suggest that this is unlikely. Raven’s Progressive Matrices, for example, is one of several non-verbal intelligence tests that were originally advertised as “cultural free,” but are now recognized as culturally loaded.?Such non-verbal intelligence tests are based on cultural constructs which may be ubiquitous ?in some cultures but almost nonexistent in others. It is doubtful whether cultural comparisons of concepts of intelligence will ever enable us to move towards creating a test which encompasses all aspects of intelligence as understand by all cultures. It seems even less likely that such a test could be totally free of cultural imbalance?somewhere.??

?The solution to the dilemma seems to lie more in accepting that cultural neutrality?is unattainable?and that administering any valid intelligence test requires a deep familiarity with the relevant?culture’s values and practices.

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