COVER STORY
Intelligence across cultures
Rearch in Africa, Asia and Latin America is showing how culture and intelligence interact.
By ETIENNE BENSON豆角焖饭
Monitor Staff
February 2003, Vol 34, No. 2
Print version: page 56
In recent years, rearchers in Africa, Asia and elwhere have found that people in non-Western cultures often have ideas about intelligence that differ fundamentally from tho that have shaped Western intelligence tests.
Rearch on tho differences is already providing support for some of the more inclusive Western definitions of intelligence, such as tho propod by APA President Robert J. Sternberg, PhD, of Yale University and Howard Gardner, PhD, of Harvard University's Graduate School of Education (e related article). Eventually, it may also help rearchers design new intelligence tests that are nsitive to the values of the cultures in which they are ud.
Rearchers of cultural differences in intelligence face a major challenge, however: balancing the desire to compare people from various cultures according to a standard measure with the need to asss people in the light of their own values and concepts, says Elena Grigorenko, PhD, deputy director of the Center for the Psychology of Abilities, Competencies and Experti at Yale.
"On the one hand, mindless application of the same tests across cultures is desired by no one," she suggests. "On the other, everyone would like to be able to do at least some comparisons of people across cultures."
内账会计的工作内容
Thinking about thinking
水果们的晚会Some cultural differences in intelligence play out on a global scale. In "The Geography of Thought" (Free Press, 2003), Richard Nisbett, PhD, co-director of the Culture and Cognition Program at the University of Michigan, argues that East Asian and Western cultures have developed cognitive styles that differ in fundamental ways, including in how intelligence is understood.
People in Western cultures, he suggests, tend to view intelligence as a means for individuals to devi categories and to engage in rational debate, while people in Eastern cultures e it as a way for members of a community to recognize contradiction and complexity and to play their social roles successfully.
Other rearchers have come to similar conclusions. In a study published in百佳超市购物卡 Intelligence (Vol. 25, No. 1), Sternberg and Shih-ying Yang, PhD, of National Chi-Nan University in Taiwan, found that Taiwane-Chine conceptions of intelligence emphasize understanding and relating to others--including knowing when to show and when not to show one's intelligence. Such differences between Eastern and Western views of intelligence are tied, says Nisbett, to differences in the basic cognitive process of people in Eastern and Western cultures.
蛋挞的制作方法
University of California, Berkeley, psychologist Kaiping Peng, PhD, who has collaborated with Nisbett on a number of studies, also believes that there are differences between the cognitive styles of people raid in Eastern and Western cultures. But, like Nisbett, he cautions against the simplistic idea that everyone raid in a particular culture will share equally in that culture's style of thinking, or that someone raid in one culture will be unable to learn the cognitive style of another.
"I don't believe that simply becau you are born Asian means you will think like Asians,"
读书名言小学生
says Peng. "Culture is not just race, nationality or any particular social category--culture is experience."
The distinction between East Asia and the West is only one of many cultural distinctions that parate different ways of thinking about intelligence. Robert Serpell, PhD, who is returning this year to the University of Zambia after 13 years at the University of Maryland, Baltimore County, has studied concepts of intelligence in rural African communities since the 1970s.
Serpell and others have found that people in some African communities--especially where Western schooling has not yet become common--tend to blur the Western distinction between intelligence and social competence. In rural Zambia, for instance, the concept of nzelu includes both cleverness (chenjela) and responsibility (tumikila).
"When rural parents in Africa talk about the intelligence of children, they prefer not to parate the cognitive speed aspect of intelligence from the social responsibility aspect," says Serpell.
Over the past veral years, Sternberg and Grigorenko also have investigated concepts of intelligence in Africa. Among the Luo people in rural Kenya, Grigorenko and her collaborators have found that ideas about intelligence consist of four broad concepts:rieko, which largely corresponds to the Western idea of academic intelligence, but also includes specific skills; 观猎王维luoro, which includes social qualities like respect, responsibility and consideration; paro, or practical thinking; and winjo历年高考作文范文, or comprehension. Only one of the four--rieko--is correlated with traditional Western measures of intelligence.
