PRACTICAL INTELLIGENCE
What do Brazilian street children and Berkeley housewives have in common? Both are expert mathematicians. A study showed these children carry out complex mental mathematics in order to run successful street businesses, and another showed that Berkeley housewives smoothly compare grocery prices and quantities to make the best per-weight or per-item buying decisions.
This seems like run-of-the-mill IQ until adding another thing that Brazilian street children and Berkeley housewives have in common: neither can do it in the lab. When researchers tested their abilities to perform the same math on paper, neither group could pull it off. Their practical intelligence is born of situation, distinct from and largely independent of general intelligence.
Robert Sternberg, the Yale/Tufts/Oklahoma State researcher peppered throughout this book, told me another anecdote about practical intelligence, which he includes in his excellent book Practical Intelligence in Everyday Life. See, trash collectors in Tallahassee used to pick up bins from customers’ backyards. This required parking the truck, walking to the backyard to retrieve a full trash bin, wheeling it to the truck, unloading it, returning the empty bin to the backyard, and then walking back to the truck. This was the method trash managers had taught the collectors, who were mostly high school dropouts and unlikely to have especially high testable IQs. That is, it was the method until one trash collector discovered a more practical solution. Here’s a hint: the trash bins were provided by the city of Tallahassee and so were identical. Can you see the solution? It takes practical intelligence but not necessarily IQ to see that if you wheel an empty bin with you during the first trip into the backyard, you can simply trade it for the full one, return to the truck to empty the bin, and then move on to the next house where you trade the newly emptied bin for a full one—repeat as necessary. This simple solution halved the walking time required to turn full backyard bins into empty ones.
When you mash together Brazilian street kids with Berkeley housewives with Tallahassee trash collectors, you end up with a powerful home-brew poison to the traditional conceptualization of IQ: the intelligence we can measure has little to do with the intelligence we express in our lives. Formal studies of IQ and performance agree. For example, Sternberg and his frequent collaborator, Richard Wagner, showed that situational judgment tests (of the kind included in this chapter’s exercises) designed to measure practical intelligence are a much better predictor than IQ of job performance in business managers, bank managers, and graduate students.
IQ doesn’t lead to success. Practical intelligence does.
This disconnect between intelligence and success is particularly true of two groups. The first is made up of, as Sternberg told me, “people who are walking encyclopedias, but they make a mess of their lives. Getting 100 percent on a written driving test doesn’t mean you can drive.” People in this group of gifted idiots have much less success than their IQ predicts.
The other group with a disconnect between testable intelligence and success is the flip side of these gifted idiots. Like the Brazilian street kids, Berkeley housewives, and Tallahassee trash collectors, they’re all street smarts and no book smarts. Or they’re people with strange holes in their IQ—instead of having ye olde consistent level of smarts across the board, they have peaks and valleys of cognitive strengths and weaknesses that add up to average or lower intelligence but allow narrow domains of excellence. These people have more success than their IQ predicts.
In either case, Sternberg shows that practical intelligence grows from something called tacit knowledge—all the unsaid but understood information of culture and situation that allows people to match perfect actions to environments. For example, a student may be able to make an airtight argument in an essay, but without the tacit knowledge that text-message language, full of LMAOs and OMGs, is situationally inappropriate, the student may still earn a low grade. You want this tacit knowledge? Go back even one more step: for the most part, implicit learning creates tacit knowledge (which creates practical intelligence). You don’t necessarily mean to acquire this tacit knowledge, you just pick it up in the background of your cognitive life.
We’ll get to training tacit knowledge through implicit learning in the exercises that follow, but first let’s look at how to best use the practical intelligence you already have. Basically, you can maximize your practical intelligence by ensuring a match between your tacit knowledge and a task. For example, you may have high tacit knowledge of Jamaican patois, but it won’t help you interpret this Cockney rhyming slang: “Have a butchers at them knobby biscuits!” Instead, your tacit knowledge needs to match your environment, in this case understanding that “butcher’s hook,” or “butchers,” refers to look and “biscuits and cheese,” or “biscuits,” refers to knees, making the sentence read, “Have a look at them knobby knees!” Now with your new expertise in Cockney rhyming slang, you can tell the person who budges you in the grocery line to, “Go stick it up your Khyber!”
According to Sternberg, there are two ways to create a match between your existing tacit knowledge and an environment—you can adjust the environment to better mesh with your tacit knowledge, or you can switch environments altogether to cherry-pick one in which you have the tacit knowledge to succeed.
In the first case, shaping your environment to make it more in line with your tacit knowledge might be as simple as pairing yourself on a project with a colleague who has complementary tacit-knowledge skills. Alternatively, you might sit farther away from a frustrating coworker at a meeting. Imagine how you might shape your environment toward your tacit knowledge strengths.
Then again, if the mechanics of your life allow, it might be easier to simply select a new environment that’s a better match for your tacit knowledge. If you know how to survive in a jungle and not in the desert, move to the jungle. If you haven’t got the tacit knowledge of family dynamics required to survive Thanksgiving with the in-laws, avoid it like fourteenth-century sailors avoided ships flying the plague banner.
Finally, if you can’t adjust your environment or switch it, you’ll have to adjust yourself—you’ll have to boost your practical intelligence. Again, the string is implicit learning leading to tacit knowledge leading to practical intelligence. Take a butchers at the following exercises to boost this skill.
WASON SELECTION TASK: EVIDENCE FOR PRACTICAL INTELLIGENCE
This exercise, devised by Peter Wason in 1966, shows that you likely already have practical intelligence. Why? Explaining it here would ruin the result. So complete the following exercises before flipping to the back for answers and discussion.
1. Which of these cards would you need to turn over in order to test the hypothesis that on the other side of every even card is a star?
2. Which cards would you have to turn over to disprove the statement “If a card has a vowel on one side, it has an even number on the other?”
3. One side shows a person’s age and the other shows what they’re drinking. Which would you have to turn over to test the idea that if you’re drinking alcohol, then you must be over twenty-one?
4. Which of these cards would you have to flip in order to test the statement “What goes up must come down?”
Click here for answers.
IF, THEN, BECAUSE: MAKE IMPLICIT LEARNING EXPLICIT
Do you feel out of touch in situations involving work, family, or friends? If so, blame your implicit-learning skills. Implicit learning should pair conditions, actions, and outcomes, leading to tacit knowledge of social cues. But if your implicit learning isn’t, well, implicit, Robert Sternberg recommends a workaround: make it explicit. Train this subconscious learning by making it conscious.
Do it, he says, by stripping situations down to bare-bones frameworks that describe situations, actions, and outcomes. Effectively, a situation described in this way is a crystallized piece of tacit knowledge—a mental Rolodex of these tacit knowledge cards that match a specific environment will increase your practical intelligence in this situation.
Here’s how:
Look at the tacit-knowledge template at the end of this exercise. In the IF and AND IF blanks, write the information that sums up the situation. In the THEN blank, list your action in this situation. Finally, list the result of your action in the BECAUSE blank. Now you have situation, action, and outcome. (Note that if your action flopped and you want to avoid similar idiocy in the future, you can list your action as a THEN DON’T.)
Here’s how Sternberg describes the experience of a meeting conflict, stripped down to the elements that train tacit knowledge—notice the structure created by the IF, AND IF, THEN, and BECAUSE:
IF <you are in a public forum>
AND IF <the boss says something or does something that you perceive is wrong or inappropriate>
AND IF <the boss does not ask for questions or comments>
THEN < speak directly to the point of contention and do not make evaluative statements about your boss’s, staff’s, or peers’ character or motives >
BECAUSE < this saves the boss from embarrassment and preserves your relationship with him >
It’s important to note that this list of proper actions refers to a specific employee and a specific boss. Remember, we’re talking about knowledge that matches a specific environment. With your boss in your work environment, speaking to the point of contention might not, in fact, be the best course of action. You need to develop your own tacit knowledge. Again, the trick is learning to consciously observe causes, effects, and reasons in the world around you so that you can form your own conclusions about your specific surroundings. Give it a try and see if you can get the hang of it. Tomorrow, aim to create maybe four or five of these tacit-knowledge cards. Copy and cut out a stack of the templates included here or make your own. When you encounter a sticky situation, think back to crystallize the conditions, actions, and outcome. If you can keep this up for a while, pretty soon you’ll have a whole encyclopedia of practical intelligence at your fingertips, which you can flip through when other tough situations arise, either figuratively by thinking back to its contents or literally by flipping through its pages.
If______________________________________________________________________
_________________________________________________________________________
And If__________________________________________________________________
_________________________________________________________________________
And If___________________________________________________________________
_________________________________________________________________________
And If___________________________________________________________________
_________________________________________________________________________
Then____________________________________________________________________
_________________________________________________________________________
Because_________________________________________________________________
_________________________________________________________________________
Click here to download this exercise.
Click here for answers.
SITUATIONAL JUDGMENT TEST
As you’ve seen, in order to express practical intelligence, your tacit knowledge needs to match the environment—again, if you know how to live in a jungle but not in a desert, best live in the jungle. However, Sternberg and his colleagues have also shown some crossover in all this know-how. For example, someone who knows how to live in the jungle is more likely than most to also know how to live in the desert. In other words, tacit knowledge and thus practical intelligence can be very domain-specific, but there’s also a general component: people tend to have some degree of general street smarts.
You can see this in what are known as situational judgment tests (SJT). Pioneered in the 1920s, these tests present situations along with good and bad actions. By comparing answers to the responses of the top performers, testers—usually HR managers—discover the degree of practical intelligence a job candidate is likely to bring to workplace scenarios. But the thing is, people who score high on SJTs that measure workplace competencies tend to also score high on SJTs measuring life skills or military skills or … anything, really.
So your responses to the situation-specific scenarios below aren’t as situation-specific as they might seem. Instead, they (generally) measure your overall degree of practical intelligence. And if you want to improve your practical intelligence, after answering, ask yourself why these actions are the worst and best. Think them through. This process of evaluating tricky experiences not only tests but trains practical intelligence. Although the following situations and answers are modernized, the core dilemmas and solutions are adapted from situational judgment tests by Sternberg and Wagner.
You’re an ambitious new hire as a copywriter at a fast-paced marketing and PR firm. In your first week on the job, you get a Facebook friend request from your boss’s boss. You ask around a bit and find that not everyone’s been friended—only young, attractive employees like you, not including your boss.
A) Quietly accept the friend request.
B) Quietly decline the friend request.
C) Mention the request and your concern to your boss and ask for guidance.
D) Schedule a meeting with your boss’s boss to discuss the request and your concerns.
You’re at the park with your young child and a friend who also has a young child. The kids disagree about ownership of a roly-poly bug and quickly come to blows. Your friend grabs her kid from the fray and takes the child to the shade of a nearby tree, where your friend spanks the child for her involvement. All the other parents at the park are horrified.
A) Do nothing. A parent is entitled to his or her own form of discipline.
B) Placate watching parents by immediately explaining to your friend that disagreement between kids is normal, and offer to teach your friend mediation techniques.
C) Wait for twenty minutes and then talk to your friend about the appropriateness of her actions.
D) Choose a Dr. Sears parenting book for your book club, of which your friend is a member.
You’re the foreman of a road construction crew working in the hottest days of summer. You were given five weeks to add a lane to a stretch of highway, but then two weeks into the project your boss tells you that due to unexpected circumstances you’ll only have another two weeks—four weeks total—to complete the job. You know that if you work efficiently, you’ll have no problem finishing in the shortened time, but the next day your crew gripes and groans about the increased work and despite the need to pick up the pace they get even less done than on previous days.
A) Explain to your boss that once he set a five-week schedule, it’s impossible to cut it to four.
B) Fire and replace the most outspoken slacker on your crew as an example to the rest.
C) Explain to your crew that your head’s on the line and you really need their help to make the deadline.
D) Do nothing. Delays in roadwork happen all the time and being behind schedule in this case is perfectly understandable.
You borrowed your neighbor’s lawnmower but when you pulled the starting cord, the mower belched black smoke, caught fire, and incinerated itself leaving naught but a black hunk of metal in the middle of a scorched ring on your lawn. You’re certain it wasn’t your fault. You’re also certain your neighbor will never believe you.
A) Explain the situation to your neighbor’s wife, hoping she’ll intervene on your behalf.
B) Bring your neighbor to the scorched circle and insist he pay for nine square feet of sod to cover the hole.
C) Offer to split the cost of a comparable, new mower.
D) Bring your neighbor a six-pack of Pabst Blue Ribbon as a thank-you for letting you borrow the mower. Wait until he’s had at least two before explaining what happened.
Fresh from an MBA program, you’re hired as a mid-level manager in a large tech company. When you start, you’re excited to find that you’ve leaped to a level of the totem pole that takes most employees ten years to reach, and many of the employees below you have been with the company at least five years. Despite being affable and—you hope—competent, your coworkers exclude you from social interactions and you feel the rumblings of discontent and jealousy from all sides.
A) Ask for a demotion so that you can work your way up from the bottom like everyone else.
B) Do nothing and hope that your job performance eventually speaks for itself.
C) Confront your detractors and explain that you didn’t choose your placement.
D) Defer to peers’ judgment to show your respect for their experience.
You’re leading a brainstorming meeting for new product ideas. While writing on a large whiteboard, you turn back to the group and catch a coworker silently mimicking you. The rest of the group seems to be enjoying your coworker’s unflattering impression and are horrified to be caught.
A) Stop the meeting and ask to be assigned to a different group.
B) Pretend you didn’t notice and continue the meeting.
C) Laugh and suggest that everyone must have strange mannerisms, and as an example offer a lighthearted impression of your unkind coworker.
D) Quip that you’d hoped this group would leave middle school in middle school and continue the meeting.
A coworker with whom you’re friendly leaves home-baked treats in the lunchroom every Monday. Because it’s free food and packed with sugar everything gets eaten and out of politeness, everyone compliments his baking—but the fact is the treats are never very good. One day, your coworker tells you that he’s finally committed to making his dream come true—he’s going to quit his job and start a small bakery. He doesn’t have a family to support but plans to mortgage his condo to pay for startup.
A) Stage an intervention at which you and your coworkers admit that you never really liked the treats and try to persuade the erstwhile baker that his dream is a delusion doomed to failure.
B) Wish your coworker the best. A dream is a dream.
C) Next Monday, buy a plate of treats from the best bakery in town and anonymously set it next to your coworker’s underpowered treats in the lunchroom. See what happens.
D) Have a private heart-to-heart with your coworker, explaining your concerns.
Your friend is convinced that she has the planet’s cutest baby. The baby is not cute. The baby is ugly. Sinfully ugly. Your friend coos publicly and constantly about the ugly baby’s pulchritude and you’re sure it’s only a matter of time before someone says something rude.
A) Explain to your friend that her baby is ugly.
B) Suggest that perhaps cooing about her beautiful baby in public may make parents with less beautiful children feel bad.
C) Don’t touch it with a ten-foot pole. You want no part in this proud mother’s eventual realization.
D) When you’re around, attempt to make eye contact with quizzical onlookers to show that you share their realism about the ugly baby, but please, please will they be kind enough to just shut up about it.
You’re a checkout clerk at a grocery store, scanning groceries for a harried mother with three young kids. You can’t help but notice that in addition to milk and corn, she’s buying nothing but horrendous junk food and two bottles of wine. When her debit card isn’t accepted, the mom puts back the milk and corn. Then, when you point out that your automated system won’t accept the expired 2-for-1 coupon the mom hopes to use for wine, she gets belligerent and insists you override the system—something that is, in fact, within your power.
A) Lie and say that if the customer wants to use the expired coupon, she’ll have to talk to the manager.
B) Pointedly suggest that if the wine seems a less good deal without the coupon, perhaps the mother might opt for the milk and corn, instead.
C) Override the system. Get on with your day and let the mother get on with hers.
D) Be friendly and engage the mother in chitchat. Then suggest support services in the community for struggling parents.
Click here for answers.
NONSENSE AND IMPLICIT LEARNING
The brain wants things to make sense. It wants this so badly that even when presented with nonsense in a Goldilocks range that’s not too obviously idiotic, the brain tries to make sense of it. Neuroscience sees the brain’s attempts at manufacturing sense as a spike of activity in the anterior cingulate cortex. And it turns out this spike in brain activity in response to nonsense not only helps you interpret the nonsense itself but can help you make sense of the surrounding senseless world. Does that make sense?
“When we channel the feeling [of confusion] into some other project, it appears to improve some kinds of learning,” says UC Santa Barbara psychologist Travis Proulx, who explored what happens when you have students read Kafka. In the story Proulx and colleagues used, a country doctor makes a house call to a boy with a toothache only to find the boy has no teeth. Chaos ensues and then lo and behold, the doctor discovers the boy has teeth after all. Fin.
After reading this story, students studied strings of letters, such as “X, M, X, R, T, V.” In these strings were subtle patterns—not patterns the students could articulate, but when Proulx then showed these students other letter strings, they implicitly realized which followed the rule. In fact, students who read nonsensical Kafka prior to the letter-string test identified 30 percent more rule-following strings than students who had read a straightforward short story. Confronting nonsense improves subsequent implicit learning, the mechanism that trains practical intelligence.
There isn’t space here for Kafka, but when you compress sensible nonsense into diamonds, you get Zen koans. To prime your implicit learning as in the Proulx experiment, try wrestling with some of the following nonsense koans, drawn from the great tradition of Zen Buddhism. Within this nonsense lies sense—struggling to find it in these koans will help prime the implicit learning that allows you to find hidden sense in your life.
1. A monk was asked to discard everything. “But I have nothing,” he exclaimed. “Discard that, too!” ordered his master.
2. Bokuju was asked, “We have to dress and eat every day. How can we escape from that?” Bokuju answered, “We dress, we eat.” “I do not understand,” persisted the questioner. “Then put on your food and eat your dress!” replied Bokuju.
3. Hokoji, a Confucian, asked haiku poet Basho, “Who is he who does not keep company with any living thing?” Said Basho, “I will answer that when you swallow the Hsi Ch’iang River in one draught.”
4. A monk asked Master Joshu, “Does a dog have Buddha-nature?” Joshu replied, “Mu.”
5. Huìnéng asked Hui Ming, “Without thinking of good or evil, show me your original face before your mother and father were born.”
6. If you meet the Buddha on the road, kill him.
7. A student asked Master Yun-Men, “Not even a thought has arisen; is there still a sin or not?” Master replied, “Mount Sumeru!”
8. A monk asked Zhaozhou, “What is the meaning of the ancestral teacher’s coming from the west?” Zhaozhou said, “The cypress tree in front of the hall.”
Click here for answers.
IMPLICIT LEARNING TEST
Psychologists Barbara Knowlton and Larry Squire show that your declarative memory—the conscious memory that you can articulate—isn’t necessarily an asset on the path to practical intelligence. When they tested the implicit learning of amnesiacs against that of subjects with functioning memories, they found little difference.
Here, you’ll use an exercise similar to theirs to test your own implicit learning. First, look at the box of strange bugs on the following page, focusing on each bug carefully for about 5 seconds. Give yourself a little break and then take another pass through this box of bugs, evaluating each in turn. Stop! Do it now before continuing to read these instructions.
OK, these bugs are “dingbits.” They are dingbits because they share 7, 8, or all 9 features characteristic of a dingbit. Now, without referring back to the training bugs, look at the 96 test bugs on this page. Are they dingbits? Do they have at least 7 dingbit features? Circle the dingbits and cross out the non-dingbits. There are about half as many dingbits as non-dingbits.
But rather than depending on declarative memory, intelligence, and analysis to discover the similarity and make the call, try to use your implicit learning of the dingbit category. Which animals feel like dingbits to you? Check your answers and the discussion at the end of this book. If you like, work half the test, train your implicit learning via the nonsense strategy above, and then return to the second half of the test to check for improvement.
Click here to download this exercise.
Click here for answers.
