Blackwell Reference Online

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Intelligence is a concept whose meaning has been fashioned by the discipline of psychology. Psychologists view intelligence as a set of mental abilities that are inferred from an individual's performance on an intelligence test. In defining intelligence as one or more abilities, psychologists seek to demarcate it from the accumulation of specific knowledge to which only some individuals are exposed. In this view, intelligence is a broad cognitive capacity that, though often correlated with the acquisition of specific knowledge, is conceptually distinct from it. In emphasizing intelligence as a quality of individual cognition, psychologists differentiate it from other individual qualities, such as personality, character, social skills, and physical abilities. Such qualities may be highly valued by a society, and those who possess them may have different life chances than those who do not; but because they are not cognitive skills, they are not acknowledged by most scholars as forms of intelligence. The prevailing view of intelligence as an attribute of the individual also does not admit the more social view of cognition that sees human cognition as distributed across a group of individuals in a particular social setting, who use tools and artifacts to represent knowledge ( Hutchins 1995 ). Intelligence can be characterized as a hierarchical set of cognitive abilities, with Carroll's ... log in or subscribe to read full text