What is giftedness, anyway?

My mentor Robert J. Sternberg and I discuss how to identify and nurture childhood giftedness and how to broaden our perspectives on talent, creativity, and wisdom.

Robert J. Sternberg is one of the most cited and acclaimed psychologists of all time. When I was in college I read his book “Successful Intelligence” and it really resonated with my own thinking that there is so much more to intelligence than what is measured by IQ tests. In particular, I loved how he brought in the importance of creativity, and how we can far exceed people’s expectations. When I was accepted into Yale to study with him, it was one of the highlights of my life. I credit Dr. Sternberg as one of the most important influences on my career and thinking.

I recently interviewed Dr. Sternberg for my newsletter. In this interview we discuss a wide range of topics, but they all come back to the basic theme: What is giftedness, anyway? 

RJS:

1. You have to be really good at something.

2.  You have to be consistently good at it.  (You can’t be just a one-time wonder.)

3.  You have to find some way of showing that you are good at it.  (It’s not enough just to feel you are good at it, say you are good, or even to have it inside of you, but to have no way of expressing it.)

4.  You have to be a lot better than other people at it. (Lots of people are really good at breathing, but that does not make them gifted.)

5.  Whatever you are good at has to be societally valued as worthwhile. (So, excelling in hot dog eating probably won’t count.)

(This is based on my pentagonal theory of giftedness.)

SBK: What do you think of the phrase “gifted child”?

RJS: Many people use this expression, including me, but it is a misleading expression, nevertheless. 

1.  People are not “gifted” or “not gifted”—what you have referred to as “ungifted.” Obviously, there are gradations.

2.  The phrase is often used to apply to child identified by conventional identification methods, which, as discussed below, are woefully inadequate and sometimes harmful.

3.  There are many different kinds of giftedness, but the expression implies to many people that there is some kind of unidimensional scale or single kind of giftedness.

4.  As giftedness is often developed and manifested over time, the expression implies a certain immutability—either you are or you aren’t throughout your life, end of story—which is false.

5.  The expression has become too intertwined with socioeconomic class structure in the U.S., where rich parents often “buy” gifted labels from assessors who essentially “sell” the label.  Poor parents cannot afford the prices and may even be unaware that it is for sale.

SBK: Where did the whole concept of “gifted children” even come from?

RJS: In some form, it has been around as long as humankind.  There always have been people, and most notably, children, who were different from others in what they could do. Mozart (music), John Stuart Mill (philosophy), and Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz (poetry), Bobby Fischer (chess), Pablo Picasso (art) would be examples in recorded history.  These, of course, were prodigies who went on to become famous.  Many prodigies flame out, and most we never hear of. 

But the concept as one to identify and nurture in schools probably is most associated with Lewis Terman, a Stanford psychology professor, who adapted Alfred Binet and Theodore Simon’s IQ test from the French, revised it, and sold it to the fields of psychology and education as a measure that could be used to identify gifted children.  This was not an auspicious start for the field, as it linked giftedness too closely to (a) IQ and (b) privilege, as having a privileged background generally provides a substantial advantage for taking IQ tests.

SBK: Why is society so fixated on IQ-type abilities?

RJS: Society has been sold a bill of goods by the IQ-testing establishment and its amen chorus that these tests and their proxies (SAT, ACT, etc.) tell us many very important things, including who is gifted.  Society has been using these tests to select people since the mid-twentieth century.  If you want to look at how well the tests have done in selecting people, look at the messes that leaders funneled through our societal hierarchy have made. 

It is true that people who do better on the tests tend to do better in later life.  But really, so what?  First, the kinds of abilities to solve academic problems on these tests are very different from the abilities to solve real problems in the world. Real problems do not have multiple-choice answers, are emotionally fraught, are for high stakes, are far more complicated, and usually are solved in groups. 

Second, society gives tremendous advantages to kids who do well on these tests—in tracks in school, in college and graduate admissions, in scholarships, and so forth— so is it any surprise that kids who are given tremendous advantages in life do better in life? 

Third, the people who do the studies are usually the ones who did well on the tests, and so look for the kinds of criteria that society pats people on the head for, as they have themselves been patted on the head.

SBK: Why do you think the traditional approach to giftedness is still so pervasive in education?

RJS: The traditional approach is pervasive in education for several reasons. First, the fundamental principle of interpersonal attraction is that we look for people are like us. Well, schools look for people who are good at what they offer—schoolwork! Even professors like students who are easy to teach, whether or not they show any signs of skills that will lead to positive citizenship and leadership in the world. Second, some tests like the SAT and the ACT don’t cost the schools anything—the kids or their parents pay. Third, schools are entrenched. They tend to do the same thing over and over again, coming to believe that what they do is what they should do. Fourth, test scores give select schools bragging right. “Look how brilliant our students are!” Fifth, it’s much easier to use standard criteria for identification than actually to ask what better ways of doing things would be, including finding ways of measuring skills that are not so straightforward as what the current tests measure.

SBK: What’s the difference between “gifted” performance and gifted performance?

RJS: I have argued that giftedness can be viewed as a trait, but it also can be viewed as a state. In my new article just published online this past week in Gifted Child Quarterly, I suggest that there are people who act in gifted way—for example, they find the courage in themselves to do extraordinary things—that never would have been predicted from any of their intellectual or personality traits. There are others who are identified as gifted but end up being what I call “inertly” gifted—they just don’t live up to their identified potential. In the end, what matters is what you do in your life, not some trait supposedly discovered by a test.

SBK: Why is IQ inadequate as the sole measure of giftedness and why has it lasted so long as the primary measure for identifying giftedness? 

RJS: In my own theorizing, IQ measures primarily academic knowledge and abstract-analytical reasoning skills. It does not measure creative, practical, or wise thinking.  Nor does it measure critical thinking: There are an awful lot of IQ-smart people who are poor critical thinkers—they think irrationally. Mostly, they are deceived by emotion, ideology, doctrinaire religious beliefs, or whatever. IQ does not measure citizenship or ethical leadership skills either. It doesn’t measure humanity or concern for people other than oneself. The things that matter most in life, it doesn’t measure.  The IQ-testing field is still living in the early 20^thcentury or earlier. We’re lucky that the medical field isn’t. Leeches, anyone?

SBK: How do you conceptualize the whole notion of “talent”? Do you think some people are inherently more talented than others, and how much does that matter? 

RJS: Scholars differentiate between “gifts” and “talents” in different ways.  I think the distinction is fuzzy. Talents are usually viewed as pertaining to more specific kinds of pursuits, such as musical, athletic, leadership, artistic, literary, or whatever. 

People are born with different potentials and propensities. But in the end, what matters most is often not even so-called gifts or talents, but one’s willingness to focus, to work hard, to be productive, to want to make a positive difference, and most of all, to care about others besides just oneself. There are too many so-called “gifted” people who only use their knowledge and skills to benefit themselves.

SBK: You argue that giftedness is not a property of the person. What do you mean by that?

RJS: Consider a thought experiment involving two identical twins, A and B, separated at birth. One is brought up in an upper-class family with all the advantages that provides.  The other is brought up in a family that struggles to put bread on the table.  The first is socialized to succeed in today’s competitive world. The second twin must figure out how to get enough food to eat. Whom do you think is more likely to achieve in a way to lead them to be identified as gifted? The first was in a far better situation and was given tasks to do that would prepare them for higher education and career success. The problem in our society is that the “gifted” label often ends up perpetuating across generations the lucky few who happen to be born into well-resourced families. Those kids start, metaphorically, at third base while the poor kids barely can get away from home plate. But the advantaged typically do not appreciate their advantages. They just see themselves as, well, “better.”

SBK: In your new book with Ophélie A. Desmet you argue that giftedness is often defined in a transactional way. What do you mean by that?

RJS: Some of our worst political and other leaders went to Ivy League and Ivy level colleges and universities. Some probably got in through family connections, but others got in because they are “gifted” in a traditional sense. But do we really want to produce more snaky, immoral, and hypocritical leaders such as so many we have right now? Some of them seem incapable of telling the truth. They will do pretty much anything to get re-elected, and I do mean anything. We have one particularly reprehensible one in the state in which I live. 

I mention this because, of course, the problem is not limited to politicians. In focusing so much on IQ and IQ proxies like the SAT and ACT, we end up, too often, with people who are good students but narcissistic, Machiavellian, and in too many cases, psychopathic. They are so-called “dark triad” leaders, something you have studied. We are making a serious mistake in our identification of the gifted. 

Transactionally gifted individuals are ones who are involved in our societal system of give-and-take, tit-for-tat. They work hard in school. Some of them go on to be constructive high achievers; others learn to work the system and care a lot about rewards but not so much about either being constructive or a high achiever.

Transformationally gifted individuals are ones who want, through their efforts, to make, at some level, a positive, meaningful, and potentially enduring difference to the world. They may or may not succeed at the level they hope for, but they try. They want to make the world a better place. They are not like the sell-out political and other supposed leaders from my own state and other states, with fancy educations, who want to make the world a better place, but only for themselves. 

You are not born transformationally gifted. You develop it. You take whatever knowledge and skills you have and then deploy them in a positive and constructive way. Society has tremendous problems: air and water pollution, global climate change, violence, poverty and severe income disparities, and on and on. Has IQ solved any of these problems? Has it even helped?  Or has it provided a means for the creators of some of these problems to profit from what they have done, while others suffer? 

The current system for thinking about the “gifted” is so utterly inadequate to the problems of the 21^st century. Those who are enablers of this system might want to ask themselves whether the world we are creating is the one they want for their children, gifted or not. It certainly is not the world I want for my kids, and I have five of them!

SBK: What’s the role of environmental context on the identification of giftedness?

RJS: It provides or withholds the opportunities for young people to develop into gifted adults. In a highly class-bound society, such as the U.S., many of these opportunities depend on financial resources, whether for fancy private schools or expensive colleges. A year at Harvard now costs about $84,000. Many other private colleges and universities are in the same ballpark. Harvard has lots of endowment for scholarships, although middle-class kids get screwed because their parents neither can pay nor can they, often, get enough aid. But most kids do not have parents who can shell out that much money for a year, especially since the cost is well in excess of the average family total income in the U.S., especially after taxes.  There is a reason why so many of the students at elite colleges and universities come from wealthy families.

SBK: You argue for an alternate view of intelligence and giftedness. What is your alternative view?

RJS: I have talked about my views on transformational giftedness. My current view of intelligence is that we should define it in terms of the abilities and attitudes needed to formulate, achieve, and as needed, revise one’s (prosocial) goals in life. Intelligence is not much about test scores. It’s about setting goals that match or potentially can match your knowledge, skills, personality, and motivation, while at the same time making the world a better place. Young people with gifts should spend more time seeking positive meaning in their lives, not engaging in the college-admissions rat-race that has come to characterizes the life of our young high-achievers.

SBK: What is “adaptive intelligence” and how does that differ from IQ-type intelligence?

RJS: Adaptive intelligence comprises the knowledge and skills one uses to adapt to, shape, and select environments.  It does not mean just making life better for you, but for the achievement of a common good.  If we do not look out for others and for the environment, all the high IQs in our supposedly gifted leaders won’t help when, through global climate change, pollution, wars, and misuse of land and water resources, we make the world uninhabitable. We are well on the way.

SBK: Do you think creativity is picked up by traditional metrics of giftedness? How do you even define and measure creativity?

RJS: The existing tests of creativity are, on average, as crappy as the tests of intelligence, or maybe worse. They look at the most trivial aspects of creativity. It is no surprise that many of the same people who have been involved in intelligence testing also have been involved in creativity testing. The irony is that the tests of intelligence are not very intelligent, and the tests of creativity are not very creative.  In our research, we have found that conventional tests are poor measures of scientific creativity. If you want to learn about a person’s creativity, look at their actual performance in the domain in which you want to assess their creativity.

Creativity is, in large part, an attitude toward life. It is much more a decision than it is an ability. Most people are not creative not because they cannot be, but rather, because they choose not to be. This is not surprising, because society says it values creativity, until that creativity impinges unfavorably on people’s lives, at which point they no longer want creativity. They want creativity that is not threatening to them personally, but creativity is, by its nature, edgy and sometimes threatening.

Creative people are willing to defy the crowd—to go their own way; willing to defy themselves—to let go of ideas, beliefs, ideologies, or other ways of thinking that no longer work or perhaps never did; and willing to defy the Zeitgeist—the way things are supposed to work in the world and people are not supposed to question. 

In my most recent work, I have emphasized the importance of integrity in both intelligence and creativity. Integrity means that one’s thinking is internally consistent—it makes sense—and is consistent with the way the world actually is, rather than the way we imagine it should be. A lot of creativity has become dark and sometimes malicious because people are using it not to make a better world, but to give themselves an edge over other people.

SBK: Do you think giftedness, however, defined, can ever be measured?

RJS: The best way to measure giftedness is to encourage people to achieve, and then look at their achievements. What matters for giftedness is what people do, not a test score. What people including test constructors, sometimes forget, is that ability tests are also achievement tests. For example, they have vocabulary (no one is born with vocabulary), reading (no one is born knowing how to read), arithmetic computation and/or problem solving (also not innate), understanding of societal customs, and abstract reasoning (shown to be even more susceptible to schooling than verbal skills). So, there is no pure ability test. There have been attempts to measure abilities with neuropsychological and reaction-time measures, but those have not really panned out. Is a reaction-time test going to tell us who makes good decisions about whom to marry, when to have children, and how to deal with an abusive boss? The biggest fault with psychologists, with few exceptions, is that they tend to trivialize phenomena to make them easier to measure. But the trivialized phenomena end up, often, identifying people who excel in trivial problem solving as “gifted.”

SBK: If so, should giftedness ever be measured? Are there any practical uses of measuring the giftedness of children?

RJS” We better—much better—would spend the time, effort, and other resources in instilling in children a transformational attitude toward life—that they are here to make the world better, not to get good test scores and grades.  This is not what tests measure: Tests measure knowledge that for the most part students never will use again.  My 13-year-old son is taking advanced math: They are doing really hard stuff.  It’s a great intellectual exercise, like Latin.  But the stuff they are doing they will never need once they are outside school. Meanwhile, in my home state of New York, roughly 1/5 of millennials believe that Jews caused the Holocaust.  Half of millennials could not name a single Nazi concentration camp.  More than a third of millennials believe that the number of Jews murdered in the Holocaust was less than 2 million. What, exactly, are the kids learning in school? And is it any wonder that top experts in the United States—Ziblatt, Levitsky, Albright, Mounk, among many others—see the United States heading toward fascism. They know no history, so they soon will repeat it.  And we are worried about how many number series problems they can solve?

SBK: Can all of us learn how to be more creative?

RJS: Yes, we all can learn to be more creative. We can learn not to believe and do things just because others believe or do them. We can learn that we can and should change our attitudes as we learn more about the world, not just use any information at all to reinforce our old attitudes, regardless of whether it fits or not. And we can learn that sometimes a worldview becomes worse than worthless. During Nazi times, most Germans accepted horrible lies. During present times, many Americans accept as truth statements demonstrated to be lies. So we need not only to learn to be more skeptical of what we are told or what we think, but also to recognize dark creativity, something you have studied, Scott—to recognize when others are trying to manipulate us for their own selfish and often other-destructive ends. Someone wants to be more creative? Start by being skeptical and coming up with your own ideas rather than just accepting the ideas of others. My undergraduate mentor at Yale, Endel Tulving, once said to me that if almost everyone believes something and just knows it is true, it is probably wrong. That was good advice.

SBK: What is wisdom? Do you think wisdom is a part of giftedness? 

RJS: Wisdom is the use of one’s knowledge and skills to create a common good; by balancing one’s own, others’, and larger interests; over the long- as well as the short-term; through the influence of positive ethical values.

Wisdom is entirely different from the IQ.  Many people with high IQs are unwise or even foolish or worse, toxic.  Look at the U.S. Congress, where those people tend to accumulate to dump their toxic mess on the people of the country.  People who are wise care about others, feel for others, and want to see others’ lives improved, not just their own.  They care about making the world better for everyone, not just themselves. They do not manipulate people for their own ends and seek justice rather than finding excuses for injustice. Too many so-called “gifted” people end up using their gifts to garner benefits for themselves, people like themselves, and of course, their children. That has led the world to a perilous place. So, of course, the schools have reacted as they usually have: They keep doing what they have done before, oblivious to the fact that they are producing an ignorant citizenry.  After all, if test scores are high enough, who cares if the kids are unprepared for life as active citizens and ethical leaders? 

SBK: Can children even be wise? Or is that solely the province of (some) adults?

RJS: Most adults are not wise, as we see in daily life.  It is easy to think of “smart” leaders. Try naming some wise ones beyond the time-tested list of Gandhi, Mandela, Martin Luther King, Mother Teresa, and a few others.  Many children are wiser than their elders. We socialize them to be smart, but too often, at the expense of being wise. I did a study of teaching for wisdom in basal reading textbooks, from the year 1900 to the year 2000. The amount of wisdom-related content decreased steadily. If we teach children to be wise, they can become wise, overcoming their egocentrism. Piaget seemed to think that it is mostly children who are egocentric. If he were alive today, observing the documented increases in narcissism that you, Scott, have studied, he might reconsider.

SBK: What is “toxic giftedness”?

RJS: Whereas foolishness is the lack of wisdom, toxicity is the opposite of wisdom.  It is the use of one’s knowledge and skills for a common bad—to cause destruction and chaos. Regrettably, psychiatrists such as Bandy Lee and psychologists such as Jean Lipman-Blumen, among many others, have shown that people often are attracted to rather than repelled by toxicity. Toxically gifted people often are charismatic. They look out only for themselves but sell their ideas as helping others. When Sinclair Lewis wrote the book It Can’t Happen Here, he was being ironic. Recent events have made very clear that a toxic and ultimately fascist government is very much within the reach of the U.S. and other democracies, some of which have elected toxic leaders, not only in the past but in the present.  

I find the attitude of schools toward the gifted utterly depressing. The world is falling apart and many (certainly not all) of them worry about what IQ test to use, whether to use enrichment or acceleration, and bragging rights for their alumni. 

SBK: What is “intellectual integrity” and why is that important?

RJS: Intellectual integrity has two parts: first, making sure your arguments are internally consistent—that they make sense—and second, that your arguments are based on the world as it is, not that as filtered through ideological biases and certainly not that as distorted by cynical dictators, would-be dictators, and other unethical partisans.

SBK: What are your thoughts on the recent anti-SAT sentiment that many colleges across America are now adopting? Are you in favor of this anti-SAT movement, or do you think we need more nuance in the discussion?

RJS: In my writing on critical thinking, I, like many other theorists of critical thinking, emphasize the importance of avoiding informal logical fallacies, such as false dichotomization. It is unfortunate that many of our high-IQ leaders are as susceptible to this fallacy as anyone else. In this case, it is either require or don’t require tests.  The great and obvious problem is that, inadequate as the tests are, many other measures are worse. College essays can be written now by generative AI. For those with money, they can be written by college-admissions consultants with a lot of experience writing (or “editing”) such essays. Grades are affected very much by what courses you take and in what school you are. Extracurricular activities are greatly affected by the resources your parents have to buy their children impressive (to college-admissions officers) experiences. I have proposed better tests, but pretty much have been ignored. I do not think standardized tests as they exist now are great, but neither is anything else. We should put more emphasis on making sure all kids can have authentic meaningful experiences for which the kids’ work can be expertly evaluated.

SBK: How can your alternate view of giftedness increase equality and fairness in education?

RJS: We have shown in our Rainbow, Kaleidoscope, and other projects that when testing is expanded to include meaningful creative, practical, and wisdom-based skills, racial, ethnic, and economic differences among groups decline. Why? Because kids from challenging environments must develop creative and practical skills to survive and thrive. We and others have done a lot of research to show this. By broadening the range of skills taught for and assessed, we automatically increase fairness and equity without ever asking kids what their race, ethnicity, nationality, or family income is.

What is a strengths-based approach to giftedness, and what strengths are associated with childhood adversity? Can adversity be a motivational trigger?

I have coauthored with others an entire book on how childhood adversity can increase strengths. People respond to the challenges of their environments. Why did IQs rise in the 20^th century? According to James Flynn because the environment demanded more cognitive skills. Why are IQs decreasing in many places today? Because the environments no longer require those or other additional cognitive skills. So yes, adversity can be helpful. 

You, Scott, and I both probably do work in the field of intelligence because of childhood adversity—having been identified as kind of stupid in our childhoods. At least for me, and perhaps for you, I was motivated not only to show my teachers (not that any of them are still alive!) they were wrong, but to improve the world by creating a more equitable notion of intelligence. 

We should teach to strengths, of course, but we also need to teach children how to correct and compensate for weaknesses. Otherwise, what will bring them down when they are older is the weaknesses that they never learned either to correct or compensate for.

SBK: How can creativity and wisdom be enhanced through adversity?

RJS: When the chips are down, and nothing you’ve done before works, you need to become creative to survive. Creativity, as I said earlier, is very much an attitude toward life. A challenged life often either breeds creativity—or failure. Adversity can help people develop wisdom (Mandela, Gandhi) or it can help people develop a sense of victimhood, which populist politicians are always ready to exploit to the advantage of the politicians and ultimately to the disadvantage of the people they lead.

SBK: What factors contribute to the recovery or lack of recovery from early childhood stressors associated with specific disabilities? 

RJS: I think the main factors in recovery are (a) environmental support, (b) compensatory resources, but also (c) an attitude that one can conquer adversity and not only survive, but also thrive. You, Scott, and I were both labeled as not so bright when we were kids. We either could have just accepted the label, or we could decide to fight it and prove the suckers wrong. We both chose the latter path. Rather than sinking into victimhood, we both chose to show that we could work hard to make the world better for others. When I hire people, the main thing I look for is a “can-do” attitude. That most important criterion usually has worked in my hiring—and also in my life. Last night, my wife Karin explained why she is good at so many things. She figures that if others can do all these things, she can do them at least as well and very likely, better. The difference in life is in the attitude—what Albert Bandura called “self-efficacy.”

SBK: What is dual exceptionality?

RJS: Dual-exceptionality can be having two distinct intellectual or learning disabilities, or being both gifted and challenged by a learning disability at the same time. Many people who are gifted in some way also have a disability. In a sense, we all have disabilities—things we are unusually bad at. I found it easy to choose a career because there are so many things I am bad at and so few I am good at. It led me right into the path I have taken. What is most important is that society recognize dual exceptionality for what it is—that, for example, kids with ADHD or LD challenges still can contribute exceptionally positively to the world.

SBK: Any other thoughts on this incredibly important topic?

RJS: Not at the moment. Thanks!