"Are we looking at intelligence wrong? There are an awful lot of people who have graduated from top schools who become leaders who are worse than incompetent. They make their countries worse rather than better. And the conclusion I came to is that we made a mistake, in that intelligence was originally defined by the founders of the field Alfred Binet, David Wechsler, and others, as the ability to adapt to the environment a requirement. And answering a vocabulary problem for an obscure word is not about adapting to the environment. So I began to wonder where we lost the train of thought. And the conclusion I came to is that colleges just forgot the original message of the founders of the field, and so we got immersed in these numbers that turn out not to mean that much. So I wrote about intelligence as the ability to get along in the world and hopefully make the world a little bit better. And what I argue in the book is that we not only need to develop this kind of intelligence, we need to recognize that it's important, that getting A's in school and top scores on standardized tests, that's not what intelligence is about. So there are people who make serious efforts to make the world better, who fight pollution, who try to be good at what they do, you know, as judges or lawyers or as cleaning people or car mechanics, or doctors, but those aren't the ones you hear about. The ones you hear about are often those who have prestigious degrees and can't seem to do much with them.”

Robert J. Sternberg is Professor of Human Development at Cornell University and Honorary Professor of Psychology at the University of Heidelberg, Germany. He is a past winner of the Grawemeyer Award in Psychology, and the William James and James McKeen Cattell Awards of the Association for Psychological Science. Sternberg has served as President of the American Psychological Association, and the Federation of Associations in Behavioral and Brain Sciences. His latest book is Adaptive Intelligence: Surviving and Thriving in Times of Uncertainty.

www.robertjsternberg.com

www.cambridge.org/fr/academic/subjects/psychology/cognition/adaptive-intelligence-surviving-and-thriving-times-uncertainty?format=HB&isbn=9781107154384#bookPeople

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