Keith E. Stanovich, a professor of human development and applied psychology at the University of Toronto, will receive the 2010 Grawemeyer Award in Education, the University of Louisville has announced.
Mr. Stanovich was honored for his 2009 book, What Intelligence Tests Miss: The Psychology of Rational Thought (Yale University Press). His research shows that many people who score highly on measures like the IQ test and the SAT still make poor life decisions. Such tests are incomplete measures of good thinking, he says, because they fail to take into account the rational skills needed to exercise good judgment in daily life.
Mr. Stanovich's work "encourages us to rethink what intelligence means and come up with a better way to measure this important human trait," said Bill Bush, an education professor at Louisville who directs the award.
The award is one of five Grawemeyer prizes that are presented each year in recognition of achievements in the arts, humanities, and social sciences. The awards were created in 1984 by H. Charles Grawemeyer, a University of Louisville alumnus, and are given by the Grawemeyer Foundation. Each prize carries a $200,000 cash award.
The recipients of the 2010 prizes in music composition, for ideas improving world order, and in psychology were announced earlier this week. More information about the awards and their recipients is available on the organization's Web site. —Charles Huckabee
Comments
1. rbrunson56 - December 03, 2009 at 05:17 am
Professor Stanovich's work reminds me of something I have heard referred to as emotional intelligence. Casual observation confirms that there isn't necessarily a correlation between a high IQ (buckets of brain cells), and the quality of one's life.
The ability to think with clarity and make good decisions appears to trump raw IQ as a predictor of life quality. Not sure I can reference a white paper on the subject, but would be interested in reading such a report.
2. isugeezer - December 03, 2009 at 11:22 am
To rbrunson56: If you want some background information regarding EQ, Howard Gardner has been writing about this for many years.
3. davdlev - December 03, 2009 at 02:00 pm
As I understand it Stanovich is skeptical regarding Gardner. The core question in his work is centered on why so many peole who score very high in standardized testing make poor, even irrational decisions.
His thesis is that there are other things besides what we think of (and measure) as intelligence that come into play in decision making, and that we need to understand and measure what those things are.
4. arrive2_net - December 03, 2009 at 11:33 pm
I haven't read that book but I do have a reaction to the content of the above article. I don't think that the concept or variable we call 'intelligence' would necessarily be improved by being made more global. Intelligence tests are used in fields other than just education. They are used in psychiatric diagnosis and research as well as more general medical diagnosis and research (where brain function is of interest) and many other contexts as well. Perhaps the existing measures of intelligence are useful in such contexts, partly because they are as narrow as they are. A global measure of 'rational thought', calibrated based on 'exercising good judgement in dailey life', is ultimately an outcome measure which is itself based on success. Success is dependent upon factors in addition to 'intelligence'. An example of such additional factors would be Gardener's concept of Emotional Intelligence (discussed in comments above), but there are other factors involved beyond nominal cognitive or emotional intelligence. Factors may include the 'context of the challenge', individuals may exercise 'rational thought' in some contexts but not in others. Inhibition or stimulation of a given individual's exercise of intelligence may be due to prior trauma or prior training (or lack of training), and therefore rational thinking is not necessarily strictly a function of 'intelligence' (if intelligence is some form of cognitive processing). 'Intelligence' (defined as some sort of cognitive processing) may be available in an individual's brain, but may or may not be exercised to create rational thought or action. It is worth mentioning that Daniel Goleman's idea of 'multiple intelligence' also suggests that 'rational thinking' may be more complicated than global intelligence.