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way from the cognition laboratory to the study of human intelligence in everyday life. Today Yale psychologist Robert Sternberg is among the leaders of this development.
    The revisionists share much with the classicists. They accept that a general mental ability much like Spearman’s
g
has to be incorporated into any theory of the structure of intelligence, although they would not agree that it accounts for as much of the intellectual variation among people as many classicists claim. They use many of the same statistical tools as the classicists and are prepared to subject their work to the same standards of rigor. Where they differ with the classicists, however, is their attitude toward intellectual structure and the tests used to measure it.
    Yes, the revisionists argue, human intelligence has a structure, but is it worth investing all that effort in discovering what it is? The preoccupation with structure has engendered preoccupation with summary scores, the revisionists say. That, after all, is what an IQ score represents: a composite of scores that individually measure quite distinct intellectual processes. “Of course,” Sternberg writes, “a tester can always average over multiple scores. But are such averages revealing, or do they camouflage more than they reveal? If a person is a wonderful visualizer but can barely compose a sentence, and another person can write glowing prose but cannot begin to visualize the simplest spatial images, what do you really learn about these two people if they are reported to have the same IQ?” 36
    By focusing on processes, the revisionists argue, they are working richer veins than are those who search for static structure. What really counts about intelligence are the ways in which people process the information they receive. What problem-solving mechanisms do they employ?How do they trade off speed and accuracy? How do they combine different problem-solving resources into a strategy? Sternberg has fashioned his own thinking on this topic into what he calls a “triarchy of intelligence,” or “three aspects of human information processing,” 37
    The first part of Sternberg’s triarchy attempts to describe the internal architecture of intellectual functioning, the means by which humans translate sensory inputs into mental representations, allocate mental resources, infer conclusions from raw material, and acquire skills. This architectural component of Sternberg’s theory bears a family resemblance to the classicists’ view of the dimensions of intelligence, but it emphasizes process over structure.
    The second part of the triarchic theory addresses the role of intelligence in routinizing performance, starting with completely novel tasks that test a person’s insightfulness, flexibility, and creativity, and eventually converting them to routine tasks that can be done without conscious thought. Understand this process, Sternberg argues, and we have leverage not just for measuring intelligence but for improving it.
    The third part of Sternberg’s triarchy attacks the question that has been central to the controversy over intelligence tests: the relationship of intelligence to the real world in which people function. In Sternberg’s view, people function by means of three mechanisms:
adaptation
(roughly, trying to make the best of the situation),
shaping
the external environment so that it conforms more closely to the desired state of affairs, or
selecting
a new environment altogether. Sternberg laments the inadequacies of traditional intelligence tests in capturing this real-world aspect of intelligence and seeks to develop tests that will do so—and, in addition, lead to techniques for teaching people to raise their intelligence.
The Radicals: The Theory of Multiple Intelligences
     
    Walter Lippmann’s hostility toward intelligence testing was grounded in his belief that this most important of all human qualities was too diverse, too complex, too changeable, too