Defining Intelligence: EQ: What are the various methods available in Psychology to define Intelligence?

A Quick Background: In most ancient civilizations, wisdom was valued as the highest type of intelligence. Because of this, most decisions were made by “elders” who had the experience to know what to do in a situation.

A Quick Background: As civilizations moved more toward monarchical structures of government, the embodiment of intelligence became embodied in the monarch This person ruled by divine-right and therefore wielded the knowledge of the gods themselves

A Quick Background: It is only in the most modern sense that we have come to accept that anyone can be intelligent As the definitions of intelligence has changed, so too have the ways in which we view people who are deemed “Intelligent” A true “genius” can come from anywhere

IQ: Intelligence Quotient Possibly the oldest of the currently recognized measures of intelligence, you Intelligence Quotient (IQ) is based on your results from one of many achievement tests Using your indexed score, some generalizations can theoretically be made about your cognitive abilities This approach is called the Psychometric Approach where we use scores to quantify intelligence

G: General Intelligence G was first proposed by Charles Spearman in 1904. According to the theory, there is a correlation between people’s scores on all kinds of cognitive tests A person who scores low on one IQ test will score low on all IQ/Achievement tests.

S: Special Abilities In addition to G, Charles Spearman also proposed the concept of S. According to this theory, some people possess Special Intelligences that would help them with some of the tasks related to cognitive testing

Fluid Intelligence: Our fluid intelligence is our basic ability to reason and problem solve. This can be tested in many different ways. We use our fluid intelligence to constantly solve the problems we face every day.

Crystalized Intelligence: The knowledge we gain from applying our fluid intelligence is called crystalized intelligence An example would be when we start driving and we come to stop light that is flashing red. We learn (through trial and error) that we need to stop then proceed with caution What if the light is completely our???

Information Processing Approach: INTELLIGENT IS AS INTELLIGENT DOES!!! In this approach we focus on behavior Specifically, mental operations such as attention and memory are studied The theory is that intelligent people will display intelligent behavior

Triarchic Theory of Intelligence: A theory by Robert Sternberg that intelligence has 3 aspects -Creative -Analytic -Practical Since these are observable traits, we can study them

The Theory of Multiple Intelligences: TO BE CONTINUED!!!