MACMILLAN Intelligence in Context: The Cultural and Historical Foundations of Human Intelligence

This book reflects on the various ways in which intelligence can manifest itself in the wide range of diverse contexts in which people live.  Intelligence is often viewed as being tantamount to a score or set of scores on a decontextualized standardized intelligence test.  But intelligence always acts within a sociocultural context. Indeed, early theorists defined intelligence in terms of adaptation to the environment in which one lives.  The tradition of decontextualization is old, dating back to the very beginning of the 20th century with the development of the Binet-Simon Intelligence Scales.  This tradition is not only old, however, but obsolete. Because people live in different sociocultural as well as physical environments, intelligence can take somewhat different forms in different places and even at different times. The essays show that intelligence viewed in the abstract is a somewhat vacuous concept - it needs to be contextualized in terms of people’s physical and sociocultural surroundings. From the Back Cover This book reflects on the various ways in which intelligence can manifest itself in the wide range of diverse contexts in which people live. Intelligence is often viewed as being tantamount to a score or set of scores on a decontextualized standardized intelligence test.  But intelligence always acts within a sociocultural context. Indeed, early theorists defined intelligence in terms of adaptation to the environment in which one lives.  The tradition of decontextualization is old, dating back to the very beginning of the 20th century with the development of the Binet-Simon Intelligence Scales.  This tradition is not only old, however, but obsolete. Because people live in different sociocultural as well as physical environments, intelligence can take somewhat different forms in different places and even at different times.  The essays show that intelligence viewed in the abstract is a somewhat vacuous concept - it needs to be contextualized in terms of people’s physical and sociocultural surroundings. About the Author Robert J. Sternberg is Professor of Psychology at Cornell University and Honorary Professor of Psychology at the University of Heidelberg, Germany.  His PhD is from Stanford University and he holds 13 honorary doctorates.  He is a past-president of the American Psychological Association.  He has won the Grawemeyer Award in Psychology and the James and Cattell Awards of the Association for Psychological Science.  He is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and of the National Academy of Education.David Preiss is an educational and cultural psychologist interested in investigating instructional and learning processes as well as individual differences in higher order cognition, with an emphasis on creativity and writing. He is a Professor of Psychology at the Pontificia Universidad Catolica de Chile. He holds a PhD. in Psychology from Yale University. He was Chair of the Pontificia Universidad Catolica de Chile’s  School of Psychology  between 2013 and 2019.