Compare and Contrast Spearman's General Intelligence (G)and Specific Abilities (S)with

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--Spearman hypothesized the existence of a single common factor across all these aspects—g, or general intelligence—that accounted for the overall differences in intellect among people. All intelligence test items are positively correlated, he thought, because they reflect the influence of overall intelligence. Spearman wasn’t sure what produces individual differences in g, although he speculated that it has something to do with “mental energy” (Sternberg, 2003). For Spearman, g corresponds to the strength of our mental engines. Just as some cars possess more powerful engines than others, he thought, some people have more “powerful”—more effective and efficient—brains than others. They have more g. Spearman didn’t believe that g tells the whole story about intelligence. For every intelligence test item, Spearman (1927) also proposed the existence of a factor called s, or specific abilities, that are unique to each item, as shown in Figure 9.1. That is, according to Spearman, how well we perform on a given mental task depends not only on our general smarts (g) but also on our particular skills in narrow domains (s).

--Multiple intelligences: different domains of intellectual skill. According to them, the concept of g is wrong, or at least incomplete. These psychologists maintain that we can’t simply say that Sally is smarter than Bill, because there are many ways of being smart. Gardner (1983) outlined a number of criteria for determining whether a mental ability is a separate intelligence. Among other things, he maintained researchers must demonstrate that different intelligences can be isolated from one another in studies of people with brain damage; people with damage to a specific brain region must show deficits in one intelligence but not others. Gardner (1999) proposed eight different intelligences: linguistic, logico-mathematical, spatial, musical, bodily-kinesthetic, interpersonal, intrapersonal, and naturalistic.

--Moreover, because Gardner hasn’t developed formal tests to measure his intelligences, his model is virtually impossible to falsify (Klein, 1998). In particular, there’s no good evidence that his multiple intelligences are truly independent, as he claims (Lubinski & Benbow, 1995). If measures of these intelligences were all positively correlated, that could suggest that they’re all manifestations of g, just as Spearman argued. Even research on autistic savants doesn’t clearly support Gardner’s model, because autistic savants tend to score higher on measures of general intelligence than do other autistic individuals (Miller, 1999). This finding suggests that their highly specialized abilities are due, at least partly, to g.

Compare and Contrast Spearman's General Intelligence (G)and Specific Abilities (S)with

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