"In other words, the better they did on the IQ test, the worse they did on the practical test and the better they did on the practical tests, the worse they did on the IQ test"
About this Quote
Sternberg is poking a hole in the polite myth that “smart” is a single, orderly ladder and IQ is the cleanest rung. The line is deliberately clunky, almost looping on itself, because he’s describing an inversion that feels wrong to anyone raised on meritocratic common sense: the kids who ace the abstract, decontextualized puzzles can stumble when asked to do something messy, social, and real; the ones who navigate everyday problems fluently can look mediocre on timed pattern recognition. The sentence structure performs the argument. It traps you in a see-saw: up here means down there.
The intent isn’t anti-intellectual so much as anti-monopoly. Sternberg’s broader project (triarchic theory, later “successful intelligence”) was written against a late-20th-century testing culture that treated IQ as a near-moral credential: predictive, objective, destiny-shaped. He’s saying the metric is not just incomplete but systematically biased toward a particular kind of cognition: school-friendly, symbol-heavy, quick. Practical intelligence is harder to capture because it lives in context - reading rooms, managing constraints, knowing which rule to bend and when.
The subtext is also institutional: if your gatekeeping tool is optimized for one cognitive style, your “talent pipeline” will quietly exclude people who are competent in ways the system doesn’t reward. Sternberg isn’t merely reporting a quirky negative correlation; he’s warning that we’ve confused test performance with human capacity, then built classrooms, workplaces, and status around that confusion.
The intent isn’t anti-intellectual so much as anti-monopoly. Sternberg’s broader project (triarchic theory, later “successful intelligence”) was written against a late-20th-century testing culture that treated IQ as a near-moral credential: predictive, objective, destiny-shaped. He’s saying the metric is not just incomplete but systematically biased toward a particular kind of cognition: school-friendly, symbol-heavy, quick. Practical intelligence is harder to capture because it lives in context - reading rooms, managing constraints, knowing which rule to bend and when.
The subtext is also institutional: if your gatekeeping tool is optimized for one cognitive style, your “talent pipeline” will quietly exclude people who are competent in ways the system doesn’t reward. Sternberg isn’t merely reporting a quirky negative correlation; he’s warning that we’ve confused test performance with human capacity, then built classrooms, workplaces, and status around that confusion.
Quote Details
| Topic | Learning |
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