HOT intelligence (7) - individual differences PDF

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Lecture summary on HOT intelligence...

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Lecture notes Assumptions of hot intelligences - IQ predicts school and job performance but there may be more to intelligence than high IQ. - You can be smart in ways not measured by traditional tests Central premises - IQ is not everything - it does not give a full account of individual differences in life successes - Interpersonal skills are independent of IQ: people who do well on IQ tests are not necessarily able when it comes to dealing with others - Interpersonal skills are more important than academic abilities - Interpersonal skills should be conceptualised as a form of ability or intelligence better to be street-wise. Theories Social intelligence - Thorndike - act wisely in interpersonal relations Multiple intelligences - Gardner - bodily - social - spiritual and musical skills Triarchic theory - Sternberg - do well in everyday life - be streetwise Emotional intelligence - Salovey Mayer Goleman - identify and manage emotions of the self and others Early beginnings - social intelligence Thorndike - Ability to read people - Manage others - Act wisely in social relationships - Contrast with mechanical and abstract intelligence Vernon - Defined social intelligence as an ability to get along with people in general - using social techniques to ease into society - having knowledge of social matters - being susceptible to stimuli from other members of the group - insight into temporary moods or underlying personality traits of strangers. Psychometrics of social intelligence - Verbal intelligence i.e a foot is to a shoe as a head is to a what? - Numerical intelligence e.g 1000x50 = what? - General knowledge e.g capital cities - Social intelligence (self-report) - i.e i am very perceptive of others intentions - Social intelligence (vignette) - problem solving multiple choice. Problems - Is it objectively testable - no correct answers - Is it different from personality or cognitive abilities - Does it predict unique variances Multiple intelligences Gardner - Produced 8 levels of intelligence - Intelligence is a biopsychological potential - influenced by experience, culture and motivational factors - Not hierarchical

He believed that traditional tests were too limited Logical/mathematical - Logical thinking - detecting patterns - scientific reasoning/deduction - analysing problems - detecting a cause and effect - performing maths calculations Linguistic - Words and language - written and spoken - interpretation - retention - explanation of ideas - understanding the relationship between communication and meaning. Musical - Musical abilities - awareness - appreciation - use of sound - recognition of patterns understanding the relationship between sound and feeling Spatial - Visual and spatial perception - interpretation and creation of visual images - pictorial imagination and expression - understanding the relationship between images and meanings Bodily kinaesthetic - Body movement control - manual dexterity - physical agility - balance - eye and body coordination Naturalistic - Recognising and distinguishing between plants and animals - categorising them sensitivity to nature and one’s place in it Intrapersonal - Self-awareness - personal objectivity - capability of understanding yourself understanding your relationship with the world and others and one’s own need and reaction to change. Interpersonal - Perception of other people’s feelings - ability to relate to others - interpretation of behaviours and communication - understanding the relationship between people and their situations Gardner’s criteria 8 criteria define an intelligence - The potential of isolation by brain damage - An evolutionary history and evolutionary plausibility (hard to test evolutionary theories) - An identifiable core operation or set of operations (core abilities fundamental to just that ability i.e rhythmics for musical perception but not anything else ect - but distinctions aren’t clear with multiple intelligences - i.e spatial awareness can be involved in math). - Susceptibility to encoding in a symbol system - can it be symbolic i.e language/numerical notations/pictorial expressions/music - but do we need it? - A distinct developmental history - The existence of savants/prodigies and other exceptional people - low general ability but excels at something i.e music/art etc. - Support from experimental psychological tasks - show there is a dissociation - Support from psychometric findings Critique of Gardner - He does not expand on the theory of intelligence (what tests should we be doing to test it?) but denies the existence of it as it is traditionally understood (what his theory is for - just a hypothesis).

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Multiple intelligences are empirical expressions of general processes i.e general intelligence (we can measure the different intelligence - some will be better than others - but it is not necessarily inconsistent with general intelligence - we make choices) - Arbitrary criteria to define an intelligence (problems with defining it) - No empirical evidence and no usable tests - Logical and linguistic intelligences are used for traditional tests - therefore there is likely to be a correlation - g factor would suggest they would correlate with general intelligence. - Depends on culture - Similar to Carroll - three stratum theory - general intelligence relates to different functions like fluid or crystallised intelligence that affects performance. The only thing missing is the G - doesn’t disprove G - it may still exist. Gardner vs Carroll

Emotional intelligence Concepts - EI which is Interchangeably used with EQ, may be the potential and EQ the achieved skill - Ability of EI model - experimenting with recognition of emotions in faces as ability dimension - Mixed EI model - wide array of competencies and skills - touching personality potential for development - Trait EI model - refers to an individual's self-perceptions of their emotional abilities Defining ability EI Perceiving emotions - Ability to detect and decipher emotions in faces, pictures, voices and cultural artifacts - including identifying your own emotions Using emotions - Ability to harness emotions to facilitate various cognitive activities i.e problem solving

- emotionally intelligence people capitalize on changing moods to best fit the environment Understanding emotions - Ability to comprehend emotion language and appreciate complicated relationships among emotions. For example - ability to recognise how emotions evolve overtime. Managing emotions - Ability to regulate emotions in the self and others - Emotionally intelligent people can harness negative emotions and manage them to achieve goals.

Defining mixed EI model - Self-awareness - ability to read emotions and recognise their impact while using gut feelings to guide decisions - Self-management - involves controlling one’s emotions and impulses adapting to changing circumstances. - Social-awareness - ability to sense, understand and react to others emotions while comprehending social networks - Relationship management - ability to inspire, influence and develop others while managing conflict. Defining trait EI - A constellation of emotional self-perceptions located at the lower levels of personality hierarchies - Trait emotional self-efficacy is an alternative name - Typical performance conceptualization of EI is assessed by self-report (or personality like test instruments).

Problems - Ability EI - measurement problems - Mixed EI - validity problems - Trait EI - definition/differential problems Studies that claim EI predicts outcomes - for example health (martins 2010). Triarchic theory of intelligence Sternberg

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Intelligence is a mental activity directed towards purposive adaptation to, selection and shaping of, real-world environments relevant to our lives. componential/analytical - able to take apart problems and being able to see solutions not often seen - i.e Alice thorough literature reviews and statistical analyses to achieve excellent scores and grades. experiential/creative - ability to deal with novel problems - i.e a student not scoring as well as Alice, but proposes the most innovative research problems and questions practical/contextual - able to deal with mental activity involved in attaining fit to context

HOT intelligence (7) - individual differences HOT intelligences - Types of ability that encompass an array of non-cognitive traits - Like the ability to interact with others in social situations - Contrast the traditional cold approach - measuring things like solving abstract math problems. IQ skeptics - Argue that IQ does not measure success - For example, famous politicians who did poorly at school or rich business people with no formal education - Showing that being streetwise is incompatible with book smarts - I.e a man who had a PhD in physics and an IQ of 146 - having an amazing ability to solve math problems most people wouldn’t be able to read - but this is now shown the everyday life - he finds it hard to make friends - harder to communicate or establish romantic relationships. - Can’t understand other people like understanding the world. HOT intelligence supports this idea - that traditional tests measure the wrong type of abilities. - Could be useful to predict academic successes but not about their ability to do well in real life or where it really matters. - For example - in interviews, they may assess situational judgement - social skills and personality - as well as intelligence. Hot intelligence theories assume… - IQ is not everything - not a full account of individual differences in the real world or everyday successes - Interpersonal skills are independent of cognitive abilities - people who score high on IQ tests aren’t necessarily able when it comes to dealing with others. - Interpersonal skills should be conceptualised as a form of ability or intelligence - i.e street smarts instead of book smarts Early beginnings Thorndike’s social intelligence - Conceptualised individual differences in two domains that he hypothesized to be independent of the type of abilities normally seen as determinants of educational and occupational success. - These domains are the ability to manage others and act wisely in relationships and

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represent social intelligence. His distinctions between abstract and social intelligence inspired researchers to look beyond psychometric and traditional intelligence tests. I.e Sternberg's theory of practical intelligence.

Defining social intelligence - Thorndike saw intelligence as having 3 major facets - Mechanical intelligence - the ability to manage concrete objects - Abstract - the ability to understand and manage ideas - Social intelligence - the ability to manage men and women, boys and girls Moss and Hunt - Provided a simple definition of social intelligence in terms of - the ability to get along with others - Helpful to provide a quick and straightforward explanation Vernon - His definition states the ability to get along with people in general, social technique or ease in society, knowledge of social matters, susceptibility to stimuli from other members of a group, social sensitivity, social insight, as well as insight into the temporary moods or underlying personality traits of strangers. Gardner - Argued it as the capacity to know oneself and others is an inalienable part of the human condition - Knowing others (interpersonal) and knowing ourselves (intrapersonal). - He rarely attempted to validate social intelligence - instead, he bases his theories on his theory of multiple intelligences - on case studies and medical evidence for the idea that the isolation of specific brain injuries may impair some abilities. - For example, - Phineas gage can be used to support the idea that the areas of the brain responsible for cognitive operations are independent of those associated with social skills and personality traits. Luria - A case of Zazetsky - the man with the shattered world - Showed how Alzheimer's disease may progressively lead to the decay of cognitive but not social functions. Wong - A representative of a modern approach to social intelligence - Conceptualizes the construct as multifaceted or multidimensional. - Distinguish between social perception - behavioural social intelligence - social insight - social knowledge - Social perception - a person’s ability to understand or decode others verbal and nonverbal behaviours. - Behavioural social intelligence - to do with effectiveness in heterosexual interactions - Social insight - the ability to comprehend observed behaviours in the context which they occur - Social knowledge - knowing the rules of etiquette Theoretical importance of social intelligence There are many reasons why it is important to study individual differences in social

intelligence. 1) Academic or cognitive abilities are not perfect predictors of performance and do not provide a full mage of a person’s capacity to succeed. 2) There is the related assumption that one may be clever in an academic sense but incompetent in interpersonal relations - this idea was in conflict with Spearman’s g theory but the idea of an independent social intelligence factors has been supported by psychometricians (those who study educational and psychological tests) - i.e Guilford structure of intellect model conceptualised 30 facts of social intelligence that were independent of academic abilities - jensen admitted that social competence shows low correlations with psychometric abilities, both verbal and quantitative despite being a supporter of the g factor. 3) There are ideas that in some situations success is more dependent on our ability to relate to others than our ability to think abstractly or manage ideas. But, these claims are yet to be supported by empirical evidence. 4) There is the idea that individual differences in social intelligence can help us understand psychological disorders. I.e where cognitive skills fails to distinguish between healthy and mentally ill patients. DSM-V conceptualises psychological impairments to do with communication, self-care, home-living, social and interpersonal skills ect - overlapping with elements of social intelligence. Autism studies have found problems with the ability to decode and understand other’s intentions and behaviours, i.e theory of the mind 5) Justification of HOT intelligence can also come from studies showing that parents, teachers and students consider the development of social abilities, such as having a good relationship as critical importance. Early problems - Measuring social intelligence has major problems. - Thorndike stating that tests of social intelligence are hard to devise, it can be found anywhere but in a standardized lab. - Early measures of social intelligence predicted social behaviour, which was also correlated with academic performance or personality scales. Earliest measures of social intelligence George washington - Social intelligence test - included facets of judgement in social situations, memory for names and faces, observation of human behaviour, recognition of mental states behind words, recognition of mental states from espression, social information and sense of humour. Hunt - Reported correlations between these facets and job status, extracurricular activities and supervisor ratings at work. - Other studies have found that Washington’s test was also correlated with extraversion and verbal intelligence tests. Thorndike and Stein - Concluded that Washington’s test is heavily loaded with the ability to work with words and ideas, that differences in social intelligence tend to be swamped by differences in abstract intelligence (verbal and symbolic thinking). Skepticism

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About autonomous or independent individual differences in the ability to manage and get along with others. - Criticisms fall under different categories but most are associated with a lack of reliability and validity. There is a lack of social intelligence evidence. - These tests are often not distinguishable from traditional tests - early measures were significantly correlated with traditional intelligence - the most overlap coming from social and verbal intelligence. - Validation studies have attempted to show that social intelligence is different from academic intelligence and a more accurate predictor of social outcomes than IQ. studies have supported one study but rarely both Wechsler - Created intelligence scales for adults and children - the most widely used IQ tests - Arguing that social intelligence is just a form of general intelligence that is used only in social situations. - Additional studies have shown high correlations between the picture arrangement subtest (participants put a sequence of randomly arranged pictures into an order to create a meaningful story) and other more cognitive sections of the test. Showing that the ability to comprehend social situations is associated with ability to score high on other sections of the test. Low correlations between different measures of social intelligence show that they are measuring different things - The core component of social competence may depend on a number of unrelated factors - making us ask, which is the real social intelligence. Problems - Measuring social intelligence often comes from self-report measures - these resemble personality rather than intelligence - Creating problems with social desirability/lack of knowledge - less objectively measured - unlike verbal intelligence (using association analogies and semantic relations between words) - numerical intelligence (mathematical knowledge) and general knowledge (i.e capital cities). - Social intelligence measures follow the same patterns of a personality inventory item - people can lie, exaggerate and fake responses to simply not know themselves well enough. - When using likert scales, people may be more inclined to pick extreme answers (social desirability). - It can resemble traditional ability tests in logical sense but there is still no objective correct answer. - In a vignette (where you choose the best of multiple answers) it does attempt to relate to real life scenarios and everyday problems that require social intelligence.it seems a good measure as those with higher social intelligence should be more likely to choose the right behaviour and make the correct decision in real-life problems. - The problem with these measures is that any of the possible choices may be just as successful and unsuccessful - there is no a priori justification for any choice and there is no way to test that one response would have been better than another including those not within the vignette. Measuring social intelligence is hard because there are no clear-cut solutions and social intelligence is also context-dependent They are also harder to to solve in theory using ill-defined problems

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Traditional tests use well-defined problems with objective answers regardless of context. Suggesting that it is easier to measure social intelligence via self-report - there are still overlaps with personality dimensions. In the middle of an intelligence (demanding objective performance) and a personality (using self-report) - therefore it may be conceptualized as an ability or a trait.

Recent approaches - implicit theories Ford and Tisak - Succeeded in identifying a psychometrically coherent social intelligence factor ina sample of 600 high school students. - They redefined the concept into behavioural effectiveness and used multiple measures self, teacher and peer ratings of social competence and behavioural observations). - Finding differences between factors of social and academic intelligence and that ratings of social intelligence predicted the observed behaviours. This was later replicated by marlowe - Creating a multitrait-multimethod design consisting of 5 dimensions of social intelligence. 1) Interest and concern for other people 2) Social performance skills 3) Empathetic ability 4) Emotional expressiveness and sensitivity to others emotional expressions 5) Social anxiety and lack of social self-efficacy and self-esteem These measures seemed unrelated to measures of verbal and abstract intelligence Bar...