![]() Over the past several years, Sternberg and Grigorenko also have investigated concepts of intelligence in Africa. "When rural parents in Africa talk about the intelligence of children, they prefer not to separate the cognitive speed aspect of intelligence from the social responsibility aspect," says Serpell. In rural Zambia, for instance, the concept of nzelu includes both cleverness ( chenjela) and responsibility ( tumikila). 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. 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. The distinction between East Asia and the West is only one of many cultural distinctions that separate different ways of thinking about intelligence. "Culture is not just race, nationality or any particular social category-culture is experience." "I don't believe that simply because you are born Asian means you will think like Asians," says Peng. But, like Nisbett, he cautions against the simplistic idea that everyone raised in a particular culture will share equally in that culture's style of thinking, or that someone raised in one culture will be unable to learn the cognitive style of another. 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 raised in Eastern and Western cultures. Such differences between Eastern and Western views of intelligence are tied, says Nisbett, to differences in the basic cognitive processes of people in Eastern and Western cultures. 1), Sternberg and Shih-ying Yang, PhD, of National Chi-Nan University in Taiwan, found that Taiwanese-Chinese conceptions of intelligence emphasize understanding and relating to others-including knowing when to show and when not to show one's intelligence. In a study published in Intelligence (Vol. Other researchers have come to similar conclusions. ![]() People in Western cultures, he suggests, tend to view intelligence as a means for individuals to devise categories and to engage in rational debate, while people in Eastern cultures see it as a way for members of a community to recognize contradiction and complexity and to play their social roles successfully. 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. Some cultural differences in intelligence play out on a global scale. ![]() "On the other, everyone would like to be able to do at least some comparisons of people across cultures." "On the one hand, mindless application of the same tests across cultures is desired by no one," she suggests. Researchers 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 assess 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 Expertise at Yale. Eventually, it may also help researchers design new intelligence tests that are sensitive to the values of the cultures in which they are used. Sternberg, PhD, of Yale University and Howard Gardner, PhD, of Harvard University's Graduate School of Education (see related article). Research on those differences is already providing support for some of the more inclusive Western definitions of intelligence, such as those proposed by APA President Robert J. ![]() In recent years, researchers in Africa, Asia and elsewhere have found that people in non-Western cultures often have ideas about intelligence that differ fundamentally from those that have shaped Western intelligence tests.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |