Burkart et al. have written a very interesting, erudite, and anthropocentric account in the target article of how principles discovered for human intelligence might be generalized to animals other than humans. The presuppositions behind this article are captured well by Lovejoy (Reference Lovejoy1936) in his book, The Great Chain of Being. The general idea, which goes back to Plato and Aristotle, is that there is a Great Chain of Being containing, among other entities, God at the top, then humankind, and then successively lower animals. At the top of the Earthly beings are humans. So if we want to understand other organisms, according to this view, we can do so by comparing them to humans and seeing in what ways they are similar and in what ways they are different and lacking. Much of early comparative psychology was based on this idea (e.g., Bitterman Reference Bitterman1960).
Other areas of psychology and other behavioral sciences have not been immune from the logic of the Great Chain of Being, except that, in some cases, they viewed different cultures or races of people as occupying differentially elevated positions on the Great Chain (Sternberg Reference Sternberg2004; Sternberg et al. Reference Sternberg, Grigorenko and Kidd2005). Many eminent behavioral scientists, such as Sir Francis Galton and Raymond Cattell, believed in some version of the Great Chain (see https://www.splcenter.org/fighting-hate/extremist-files/individual/raymond-cattell). Moreover, traditional cross-cultural psychological studies of intelligence involved (and still involve) translating Euro-centric intelligence tests, such as the Wechsler, and then administering them to people in other cultures (e.g., Georgas et al. Reference Georgas, Weiss, Van de Vijver and Saklofske2003).
But in the field of cultural studies of intelligence, progress has been made, largely due to the pioneering work of Luria (Reference Luria1976). Luria, in testing individuals in non-European cultures, found that the problems that were alleged to measure intelligence in European populations did not do so in other cultures because the individuals did not accept the presuppositions of the problems they were given. For example, when Uzbekistan peasants were given a syllogisms problem, such as, “There are no camels in Germany. The city of B. is in Germany. Are there camels there or not?”, subjects could repeat the problem precisely and then answer “I don't know. I've never seen German villages …” The subjects did not accept the problems in the abstract modality for which they were intended. Of course, one could argue that they could not do so. But then, Cole et al. (Reference Cole, Gay, Glick and Sharp1971) found that Kpelle tribesmen seemed not to be able to sort items categorically but rather sorted only functionally, until they were told to sort the way a stupid person would, at which point they had no trouble sorting categorically. In our own research (see Sternberg Reference Sternberg2004), we found that rural Kenyan children and rural Alaskan Yup'ik Eskimo children could do tasks that were extremely important for adaptation and even survival in their own cultures (e.g., treating malaria with natural herbal medicines, finding their way across the frozen tundra from one village to another with no obvious landmarks) that their White teachers never could do, but were considered stupid by their teachers because they underperformed in school and on standard Euro-centric cognitive tests. Who was lacking intelligence: the children or the psychologists who gave them tests inappropriate to the demands of their everyday adaptation?
The tests we used for the Kenyan and Alaskan children cut to the heart of what intelligence is – ability to adapt to the environment. That is the core of intelligence, according to surveys of experts in the field of intelligence (“Intelligence and Its Measurement” 1921; Sternberg & Detterman Reference Sternberg and Detterman1986). But the tests that Burkart and her colleagues have devised are not tests highly relevant to animal adaptation; at best, and even then questionably, they are tests of folk conceptions of what animal intelligence should be from a human viewpoint.
An appropriate way to look broadly at the intelligence of any organism is to look at how well it adapts to the range of environments it confronts. Gibson's (Reference Gibson1979) concept of an affordance – an action possibility latent in the environment – is perhaps key here. The humans and other animals that are intelligent, in this view, are those that adapt well to the challenges of the range of environments they can encounter over the course of their lives. To understand animal intelligence, we should be looking at skills that are relevant to the animals' everyday adaptation, such as how well they can forage for food, create adequate shelter, and most important, avoid predators, including humans and the traps humans set for them.
Perhaps, furthermore, we humans should test human intelligence not with the often trivial tests we use (Sternberg Reference Sternberg1990), but rather with tests of how well we humans can avoid the traps – for example, global warming, violence, pollution, poverty, inequality – that we set for ourselves.
Humans, with the serious problems they have created for themselves – pollution, global warming, weapons of mass destruction, terrorism, inequality, among others – may not be well positioned to be the judges of what intelligence looks like in other organisms, or of how intelligent they are. To hold other various animals to the standards of human folk conceptions of intelligence is perhaps an act of intellectual hubris. In the end, how intelligent, really, is a species that may be the only species ever to live on Earth actually to create and sow the seeds for its own destruction (Sternberg Reference Sternberg2002)? If nonhuman animals were to create tests of intelligence for humans, perhaps they would create tests that would measure which humans were not intent on destroying both the animals' habitats and their own.
Burkart et al. have written a very interesting, erudite, and anthropocentric account in the target article of how principles discovered for human intelligence might be generalized to animals other than humans. The presuppositions behind this article are captured well by Lovejoy (Reference Lovejoy1936) in his book, The Great Chain of Being. The general idea, which goes back to Plato and Aristotle, is that there is a Great Chain of Being containing, among other entities, God at the top, then humankind, and then successively lower animals. At the top of the Earthly beings are humans. So if we want to understand other organisms, according to this view, we can do so by comparing them to humans and seeing in what ways they are similar and in what ways they are different and lacking. Much of early comparative psychology was based on this idea (e.g., Bitterman Reference Bitterman1960).
Other areas of psychology and other behavioral sciences have not been immune from the logic of the Great Chain of Being, except that, in some cases, they viewed different cultures or races of people as occupying differentially elevated positions on the Great Chain (Sternberg Reference Sternberg2004; Sternberg et al. Reference Sternberg, Grigorenko and Kidd2005). Many eminent behavioral scientists, such as Sir Francis Galton and Raymond Cattell, believed in some version of the Great Chain (see https://www.splcenter.org/fighting-hate/extremist-files/individual/raymond-cattell). Moreover, traditional cross-cultural psychological studies of intelligence involved (and still involve) translating Euro-centric intelligence tests, such as the Wechsler, and then administering them to people in other cultures (e.g., Georgas et al. Reference Georgas, Weiss, Van de Vijver and Saklofske2003).
But in the field of cultural studies of intelligence, progress has been made, largely due to the pioneering work of Luria (Reference Luria1976). Luria, in testing individuals in non-European cultures, found that the problems that were alleged to measure intelligence in European populations did not do so in other cultures because the individuals did not accept the presuppositions of the problems they were given. For example, when Uzbekistan peasants were given a syllogisms problem, such as, “There are no camels in Germany. The city of B. is in Germany. Are there camels there or not?”, subjects could repeat the problem precisely and then answer “I don't know. I've never seen German villages …” The subjects did not accept the problems in the abstract modality for which they were intended. Of course, one could argue that they could not do so. But then, Cole et al. (Reference Cole, Gay, Glick and Sharp1971) found that Kpelle tribesmen seemed not to be able to sort items categorically but rather sorted only functionally, until they were told to sort the way a stupid person would, at which point they had no trouble sorting categorically. In our own research (see Sternberg Reference Sternberg2004), we found that rural Kenyan children and rural Alaskan Yup'ik Eskimo children could do tasks that were extremely important for adaptation and even survival in their own cultures (e.g., treating malaria with natural herbal medicines, finding their way across the frozen tundra from one village to another with no obvious landmarks) that their White teachers never could do, but were considered stupid by their teachers because they underperformed in school and on standard Euro-centric cognitive tests. Who was lacking intelligence: the children or the psychologists who gave them tests inappropriate to the demands of their everyday adaptation?
The tests we used for the Kenyan and Alaskan children cut to the heart of what intelligence is – ability to adapt to the environment. That is the core of intelligence, according to surveys of experts in the field of intelligence (“Intelligence and Its Measurement” 1921; Sternberg & Detterman Reference Sternberg and Detterman1986). But the tests that Burkart and her colleagues have devised are not tests highly relevant to animal adaptation; at best, and even then questionably, they are tests of folk conceptions of what animal intelligence should be from a human viewpoint.
An appropriate way to look broadly at the intelligence of any organism is to look at how well it adapts to the range of environments it confronts. Gibson's (Reference Gibson1979) concept of an affordance – an action possibility latent in the environment – is perhaps key here. The humans and other animals that are intelligent, in this view, are those that adapt well to the challenges of the range of environments they can encounter over the course of their lives. To understand animal intelligence, we should be looking at skills that are relevant to the animals' everyday adaptation, such as how well they can forage for food, create adequate shelter, and most important, avoid predators, including humans and the traps humans set for them.
Perhaps, furthermore, we humans should test human intelligence not with the often trivial tests we use (Sternberg Reference Sternberg1990), but rather with tests of how well we humans can avoid the traps – for example, global warming, violence, pollution, poverty, inequality – that we set for ourselves.
Humans, with the serious problems they have created for themselves – pollution, global warming, weapons of mass destruction, terrorism, inequality, among others – may not be well positioned to be the judges of what intelligence looks like in other organisms, or of how intelligent they are. To hold other various animals to the standards of human folk conceptions of intelligence is perhaps an act of intellectual hubris. In the end, how intelligent, really, is a species that may be the only species ever to live on Earth actually to create and sow the seeds for its own destruction (Sternberg Reference Sternberg2002)? If nonhuman animals were to create tests of intelligence for humans, perhaps they would create tests that would measure which humans were not intent on destroying both the animals' habitats and their own.