Intelligence versus Creativity

You’ve prob­a­bly heard it before. Some­one men­tions that they have an IQ of 150 or so, usu­ally in math or lan­guage skills. Per­haps you’ve even seen it posted on a friend’s Face­book wall through one of the many free appli­ca­tions which are avail­able out there. How­ever, there’s an inher­ent prob­lem with this claim. Any­one mak­ing this state­ment in some ways have already negated their claim to being “intel­li­gent” with­out know­ingly doing so.

You see, scor­ing high in an IQ or Intel­li­gence Quo­tient test is actu­ally not an indi­ca­tor of high” intel­li­gence.” There’s a prob­lem with the method in which IQ scores become irrel­e­vant past a cer­tain age. The orig­i­nal cre­ator of the IQ test­ing sys­tem, Alfred Binet along with other psy­chol­o­gists and pro­fes­sors were quick to real­ize this fatal flaw of their mea­sure­ment sys­tem. Past a cer­tain age, Binet believed that a child’s men­tal devel­op­ment would nor­mally increase to the point where they could prop­erly answer the ques­tions put in front of them.

The orig­i­nal IQ test was cre­ated in order to deter­mine if a young child had devel­op­men­tal prob­lems. If a child scored really low, then this would serve to tell psy­chol­o­gists and edu­ca­tors that this child prob­a­bly needed extra atten­tion to help over­come obsta­cles. So, the IQ test was designed to mea­sure one end of the func­tion­ing spec­trum, and not at all intended to ever mea­sure or judge those with higher apti­tudes.

Another issue con­cern­ing Intel­li­gence Tests has to do with socioe­co­nom­ics. Chil­dren who grew up in eco­nom­i­cally dis­ad­van­taged sit­u­a­tions were found to score lower on these same tests. Often, these chil­dren were raised with a dif­fer­ent usage of their lan­guage depend­ing on their fam­ily his­to­ries and eco­nomic brack­ets. Scor­ing low didn’t mean that they were “any less” intel­li­gent than oth­ers who scored higher, but that they were unfa­mil­iar with the actual struc­ture of the test itself.

Speak­ing from per­sonal expe­ri­ence, I score around 150 in lan­guage skills. As much as I would like to brag about this high score to oth­ers, I also real­ize it doesn’t mean a sin­gle thing. Just brows­ing through the rest of my posts, I’m cer­tain that you could dozens of typos and gram­mat­i­cal errors. The prob­lem with my high score lies in the fact that I’ve come to mem­o­rize many of these IQ tests over time and learned from my pre­vi­ous mis­takes in answer­ing those ques­tions. Obtain­ing a higher num­ber doesn’t mean I’m any more intel­li­gent than the aver­age per­son, it sim­ply means that I’ve come to expect many of the same ques­tions and know how to prop­erly answer them the sec­ond time around. Essen­tially, I’ve learned from my pre­vi­ous mis­takes. Any­one that really has tried or has taken these same tests over and over again (and they often do not change) will come to learn from their pre­vi­ous errors. Any­one that doesn’t really care or hasn’t taken these same tests repeat­edly would most likely score lower — and quite under­stand­ably so.

In prac­tice, we can divide intel­li­gence into sev­eral dif­fer­ent com­po­nents. The Wikipedia arti­cle on intel­li­gence cur­rently states:

Intel­li­gence is an umbrella term describ­ing a prop­erty of the mind com­pre­hend­ing related abil­i­ties, such as the capac­i­ties for abstract thought, rea­son­ing, plan­ning and prob­lem solv­ing, the use of lan­guage, and to learn. Intel­li­gence is var­i­ously defined; it includes intel­lec­tual traits such as cre­ativ­ity, per­son­al­ity, char­ac­ter, knowl­edge, and wis­dom.

The Mer­riam Web­ster dic­tio­nary def­i­n­i­tion of intel­li­gence reads:

Ety­mol­ogy: Mid­dle Eng­lish, from Mid­dle French, from Latin intel­li­gen­tia, from intelligent-, intel­li­gens intelligent

Date: 14th century

1 a (1) : the abil­ity to learn or under­stand or to deal with new or try­ing sit­u­a­tions : rea­son; also : the skilled use of rea­son (2) : the abil­ity to apply knowl­edge to manip­u­late one’s envi­ron­ment or to think abstractly as mea­sured by objec­tive cri­te­ria (as tests) b Chris­t­ian Sci­ence : the basic eter­nal qual­ity of divine Mind c : men­tal acute­ness : shrewd­ness
2 a : an intel­li­gent entity; espe­cially : angel b : intel­li­gent minds or mind <cos­mic intel­li­gence>
3 : the act of under­stand­ing : com­pre­hen­sion
4 a : infor­ma­tion, news b : infor­ma­tion con­cern­ing an enemy or pos­si­ble enemy or an area; also : an agency engaged in obtain­ing such infor­ma­tion
5 : the abil­ity to per­form com­puter functions

If you read through both of the descrip­tions above, you will note that mem­o­riza­tion is not even men­tioned. That’s because hav­ing a good mem­ory, or in this case recall­ing answers, is in itself not a mea­sure of intel­li­gence. Intel­li­gence has to do with the actual appli­ca­tion of using what one has learned to solve prob­lems. Just because some­one scored well on an apti­tude test and mem­o­rized all of the answers, doesn’t nec­es­sar­ily imply that they can fig­ure their way out of a box.

The cur­rent Amer­i­can edu­ca­tional sys­tem focuses mainly on mem­o­riza­tion skills. In fact, most tests are based around how much infor­ma­tion retains. The Chi­nese sys­tem in par­tic­u­lar places a heavy empha­sis on rote mem­o­riza­tion. Both sys­tems of learn­ing do not empha­sis the actual appli­ca­tion of how to solve a prob­lem based upon what one has mem­o­rized. And this is where our test­ing sys­tems really fall apart. Fol­low­ing this argu­ment, sim­ply because some­one scores very high on a test doesn’t mean that they should be con­sid­ered smart. It only means that they can pay atten­tion or retain what some­body tells them.

With­out men­tion­ing any names, I know of a few peo­ple with extra­or­di­nary mem­o­ries. One friend from child­hood can recall spe­cific events to the very day from over 30 years ago. He has a pho­to­graphic mem­ory of our time play­ing in Kinder­garten together. How­ever, when you look at the rest of his life objec­tively — it is in com­plete sham­bles. He has a bril­liant mem­ory, yet he can’t seem to apply any of that knowl­edge to solve the prob­lems and issues which cur­rently con­front him. In this exam­ple, we can ask our­selves, “is he intel­li­gent?” Well, he’s not dumb. But he seems to be in the same boat that the rest of us are sit­ting in. From a mem­ory stand­point, he’s quite remark­able. How­ever, his extra­or­di­nary reten­tion doesn’t seem to do him any good .

Now, we can take a look at the def­i­n­i­tion of “cre­ativ­ity.” Cre­ativ­ity as defined within Wikipedia states:

Cre­ativ­ity is a men­tal process involv­ing the dis­cov­ery of new ideas or con­cepts, or new asso­ci­a­tions of the exist­ing ideas or con­cepts, fueled by the process of either con­scious or uncon­scious insight.

As you can see accord­ing to this entry, cre­ativ­ity and intel­li­gence are two sep­a­rate def­i­n­i­tions. How­ever, cre­ativ­ity almost always involves some level of intel­li­gence and vice-versa. On the other hand, just because some­one is “cre­ative”, this doesn’t nec­es­sar­ily mean that their ideas are truly use­ful or prac­ti­cal — in fact there “novel” ideas could be a com­plete mess.

Wikipedia also men­tions the dif­fer­ences and sim­i­lar­i­ties between cre­ativ­ity and intel­li­gence which is in lines with my own thinking:

There has been debate in the psy­cho­log­i­cal lit­er­a­ture about whether intel­li­gence and cre­ativ­ity are part of the same process (the con­joint hypoth­e­sis) or rep­re­sent dis­tinct men­tal processes (the dis­joint hypoth­e­sis). Evi­dence from attempts to look at cor­re­la­tions between intel­li­gence and cre­ativ­ity from the 1950s onwards, by authors such as Bar­ron, Guil­ford or Wal­lach and Kogan, reg­u­larly sug­gested that cor­re­la­tions between these con­cepts were low enough to jus­tify treat­ing them as dis­tinct concepts.

Some researchers believe that cre­ativ­ity is the out­come of the same cog­ni­tive processes as intel­li­gence, and is only judged as cre­ativ­ity in terms of its con­se­quences, i.e. when the out­come of cog­ni­tive processes hap­pens to pro­duce some­thing novel, a view which Perkins has termed the “noth­ing spe­cial” hypoth­e­sis.^[25]

A very pop­u­lar model is what has come to be known as “the thresh­old hypoth­e­sis”, pro­posed by Ellis Paul Tor­rance, which holds that a high degree of intel­li­gence appears to be a nec­es­sary but not suf­fi­cient con­di­tion for high cre­ativ­ity.^[12] This means that, in a gen­eral sam­ple, there will be a pos­i­tive cor­re­la­tion between cre­ativ­ity and intel­li­gence, but this cor­re­la­tion will not be found if only a sam­ple of the most highly intel­li­gent peo­ple are assessed. Research into the thresh­old hypoth­e­sis, how­ever, has pro­duced mixed results rang­ing from enthu­si­as­tic sup­port to refu­ta­tion and rejec­tion.^[26]

The root of intel­li­gence is defined in many ways as the abil­ity to solve prob­lems. The def­i­n­i­tion of cre­ativ­ity ranges a broader spec­trum of com­ing up with new ideas, although many of these ideas could be con­sid­ered more or less imprac­ti­cal or use­less such as the Perkin’s “noth­ing spe­cial” hypoth­e­sis. Fol­low­ing the logic of these def­i­n­i­tions, just because some­one is con­sid­ered “cre­ative”, it doesn’t auto­mat­i­cally mean that they are also “intel­li­gent.” How­ever, if some­one is “intel­li­gent” than in my opin­ion, they most likely have to be cre­ative at problem-solving.