Practical Intelligence: Its Measurement

Practical Intelligence

Sternberg and his colleagues define practical intelligence as ‘the ability to solve real-world everyday problems’ and, most broadly, ‘the ability to adapt to, shape, and select everyday environments’. It is ‘what most people call common sense’ (Sternberg et al., 2000: xi, 97–98).

Although g is known to be a very general ability (Carroll, 1993), Sternberg and his colleagues argue that there exists a second, separate general intelligence – a practical intelligence because adapting to the real-world requires practical action but IQ tests measure only an ‘inert’, ‘academic’ ability. More specifically, they argue that there are two distinct spheres of human activity. The ‘academic’ sphere of activity is said to pose problems that are formulated by other people, well-defined, and complete; possess only a single correct answer and method of obtaining that answer; and are disembedded from ordinary experience and are of little or no intrinsic interest – in other words, the stereotype of an IQ test. In contrast, ‘practical’ problems require problem recognition and formulation; are ill-defined; require information seeking; possess multiple acceptable solutions; allow multiple paths to solution; are embedded in and require prior everyday experience; and require motivation and personal involvement.

This academic-practical distinction in the kinds of tasks that people confront in life is meant to establish a prima facie case that g is not really a general ability, because there must be different intelligences for the two kinds of tasks. Although this distinction among tasks may be useful for some purposes, it cannot moot a century of research showing that higher levels of g actually do provide individuals big practical advantages in everyday life, from level of job and income attained to health and longevity (Gottfredson, 2002, in press b; Schmidt & Hunter, 1998). In fact, higher levels of g are especially advantageous when tasks ‘require problem recognition and formulation, are ill-defined, and require information seeking’, attributes describing the tasks that the Sternberg team assigns to the ‘practical’ sphere of life.

Sternberg and his colleagues draw a second distinction to support the viability of their practical intelligence construct, namely that there are academic and practical forms of knowledge. This is consistent with their ‘knowledge-based’ view of intelligence. This view minimizes the evidence on g's heritability and portrays the g factor mostly as a cultural artefact created by Western schools teaching some skills and knowledge rather than others, presumably to some students and not others (Gottfredson, in press a).

Tacit Knowledge

Sternberg et al.'s (2000) emphasis on distinct forms of knowledge leads directly to the most important construct in their measurement programme – tacit knowledge. In their view, the general intelligence factor g reflects the ‘facile acquisition of formal academic knowledge’ whereas practical intelligence reflects the ‘facile acquisition and use of tacit knowledge’ (Sternberg et al., 1995: 916, emphasis added).

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