Birth

"Real life is where intelligence operates and not in the classroom… The true measure of success is
not how well one does in school, but how well one does in life", writes Robert J Sternberg. A
successful man who wrote Successful Intelligence and Triangular theory of Love, and gave
Triarchic Theory of Human Intelligence in Beyond IQ : A Triarchic Theory of Human Intelligence. He
was born on December 8, 1949 in Newark, New Jersey to Joseph and Lilian Sternberg. Joseph
Sternberg was a supplier of dressing accessories.

Education & Experiments

His teachers had low expectations from him due to his poor performance and he wanted to please
his teachers. So he met their low expectations. Teachers were happy with him and he with his
teachers. Such was the case with many others. He got over his test anxiety and then did extremely
well at various tests. All of a sudden the expectations were raised. Largely it becomes a self-fulfilling
prophecy for him as well as for his teachers. This also means that IQ predicts later success. An
individual gets low scores in his tests, and everything starts to change in his life that leads him on
the downhill slide.

Bob, as he was known in childhood, was considered an average child, totally unnoticed by his
teachers, except Mrs Alexa, his fourth grade teacher. With her encouragement, he started to get
good results. He always remained obliged to Mrs. Alexa for her belief in his abilities. Years later, he
dedicated his book Successful Intelligence to Mrs Alexa. Even the school arranged for the reunion
of this teacher and student to celebrate a teacher's role in development of a student.

A widely known expert on intelligence testing, Robert Sternberg could be seen as a befitting reply to
an early failure of fear of examination (test) anxiety, who scored poorly in an IQ test in his sixth
grade. He was sent to fifth grade to appear in a lower level test. Here, he did quite well as he felt
mentally free of any peer pressure. Next year, in his seventh grade he invented his own version of
intelligence test called 'Sternberg Test of Mental Ability' (STOMA).

He has always successfully achieved a kind of single-minded devotion he went on to overcome

obstacles placed in his path. When he was in seventh grade, he discovered a copy of the Stanford
– Binet Intelligence test in the adult section of the Maplewood, New Jersey, public library and
decided to try it out on his classmates. First he experimented with the girl he was attracted to
thinking this could break the ice. He states, "She did very well on it, but the relationship did not get
off the ground." Then he passed it on to a boy in his Scout group. The boy went home and reported
to his mother, who called the school psychologist and complained. He was ordered by the Principal
and informed that if he ever brought the test to school again, it would be destroyed. Another teacher
who played an important role in his development as a specialist in the field of intelligence was his
science teacher Mr Adams, who stepped in between and protected his student.

He took to study intelligence secretly, sending away copies of tests by pretending to be a graduate
student. This stimulated Bob's interest to work hard and to bring out something substantial in the
field of intelligence. The incident marked the beginning of a lifelong obsession with developing his
own abilities, to help prove himself a successful and intelligent person through his contribution in
psychology.

By high school, he had already achieved the status of an expert in the field. He is happy for all the
events and experiences he had been through. He says, "There is an advantage to feeling like a
failure a lot of time. It prevents you from getting too stuck."

He continued working on this line during his high school and graduation. In his summer vacation
after 10th grade he worked on a project studying the effects of distractions on mind and on
performance. His findings showed that he most distractions had no effect except Beatle's music.
The pop songs improved his performance level. Next year he invented psychic aptitude test, which
was used by the school for placement purpose for many years. Bob worked for the Psychological
Corporation as a research assistant in summer vacation after 12th. In his first year for graduation,
he opted for psychology as his major. But he could not make it in the first grade and had to go for
math where he did miserably and returned to psychology, this time to conquer it all with distinction
in psychology.

He went to Stanford for his graduation and worked under the able guidance of Gordon Bower. In his
first year he worked on part-whole and whole-part free-recall phenomena, but his attention was
captured by componential analysis and then he concentrated on research in that area.

Always Working Hard For The Best

While in college, he spent his summers working at the Psychological Corporation and Educational
Testing Service with major writers of standardized testing materials. During his student days at
Stanford University, he was motivated by Barron’s Educational Publishing Company to write a book
on how to prepare for the Miller Analogies Test. His works included critical examinations of different
kinds of mental exercises typically featured in such tests. Strengthened by the success of his early
studies, he came up with a ‘componential’ theory of intelligence in which he associates various
stages of information processing with specific functions of the brain. His early work was built on the
standard psychometric conception of intelligence as a single, general trait. His componential theory
broke ‘G’ down into its subordinate information processing components. He realized that his
componential theory and the tests he developed to measure the component processes missed
many things. Individuals who scored high on his early test were not guaranteed success and many
individuals who did not score as well have a better record of real life accomplishments than those
who scored well on his other traditional IQ tests. He has developed a better theory than
componential theory, which is known as the Triarchic Theory of Intelligence.

"A postdoc in mathematical statistics took me to Cambridge, England, after which I joined the
Psychology Department at Penn, then being revolutionized by my mentor, Robert Bush. There, my
interests again changed. Influenced by Donald Broadbent’s Perception and Communication, I
began to study the mental operations used in simple, everyday tasks. In labs courses we taught
together, Jacob Nachmias and Robert Teghtsoonian guided me in learning to experiment with
humans."

Career

By the time he was a graduate student, his doctoral work could fetch him the Sidney Siegel
Memorial Award. Dr Sternberg was graduated Summa Cum Laude Phi Beta Kappa from Yale in
1972 and received his Ph D from Stanford University in 1975. Upon obtaining his PH D he joined
Yale University as a teacher and has been associated with the place since then. He has worked
with the admissions office and Institutional Research office at Yale University, the Test Division of
the Psychological Corporation, and at the Educational Testing Service.

He is a member at the Department of Psychology and the Institute for Research in Cognitive
Science at the University of Pennsylvania. He conducted basic research at Bell Telephone
Laboratories for 15 years, headed by Human Information – Processing Research Department. He
was happy working with the brilliant, supportive and highly interactive colleagues. He writes, "I was
excited by problems of memory retrieval, control of moments sequences, short term dynamics of
visual representation and perception of duration and temporal order, and I developed a method for
using reaction time measurements to reveal the structure of mental processes. Hard times befell
Bell Labs and I returned to Penn in 1985."

Genius At Work

Sternberg is critical of the dominant role in American education of Intelligence Quotient (IQ) test,
Structured Aptitude Test (SATs), General Reasoning and English Test (GRE) and other
conventional assessment measures. He says, "Our view in this country wastes a lot of talent. There
are a lot of kids who have potential to be successful in their fields, but the way the system is set up,
they never get the chance." Sternberg believes that the tests mainly measure the ability to succeed
in a system that rewards the best test-takers. Conventional aptitude and achievement tests define
intelligence precisely and choose people who outshine in certain ways of mental ability, mainly
analytical thinking and memory skills. Such tests are predicators of things, including school grades
and performance. He believes that those who get high scores on traditional tests receive high honor
since early days, they are nurtured by secondary school teachers, accepted well into prestigious
colleges and get placed in good jobs or graduate schools once they attain their degrees. He
mentions, "It becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy, fooling people into thinking that test performance is
somehow ordained by God or nature as a marker of success, rather than simply reflecting society’s
chosen values."

He further adds that there is no absolute definition of intelligence. There’s no final answer to
intelligence. To a large extent, intelligence is our own creation, which says that in terms of adaptive
skills, some people have more than others.

Children whose strengths fall outside the limelight, who are adept to creative or practical abilities in
his intelligence tests and educational materials are effectively locked out. Schools make no effort to
teach them in the ways, students find easiest to learn. They quickly get the message that their skills
are not valued and start acting accordingly. "Abilities are not something you’re born with, that are
etched in invisible ink on your forehead and cannot be changed. You can develop new kinds of
abilities that you might not even have known you had," states Sternberg.

People who have superior practical and creative skills often do not do well at tests that reflect only
analytical abilities and are thus deprived of educational opportunities. A deprived teenager with
strong leadership skills and ‘street smartness’ above average might perform poorly on the SAT. A
creative learner, who excels at open-ended assignments might be baffled by multiple-choice tests
or memory tasks, ruining the chances for admission to a top college.

Recognition

He has been the winner of numerous awards, including the Early Career Award and Boyd R
McCandlers Award of the American Psychological Association, the Outstanding Book and Research
Review Awards of the Society for Multivariate Experimental Psychology, and the Distinguished
Scholar Award. He is a past winner of National Science Foundation and Guggenheim Fellowships.
He received the Mensa Education and Research Foundation Award for Excellence in 1989 and is
listed in Science Digest as one of 100 top Young Scientists in the United States. He received the
Citation Classic Designation of the Institute for Scientific Information and the Outstanding Book
Award of The American Educational Research Association. In 1981, he received the Distinguished
Scientist Award for Early Contribution to Psychology. The citation to the award pronounced, "He
has put intelligence into investigations of intellectual abilities… combining experimental methods
and theories of cognitive psychology with traditional mental-testing ideas in analyzing intelligent
performance and individual differences… cross-fertilized and infused vitality into studies of
individual differences and the experimental analysis of intellectual performances."

He is currently a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, American Association for
the advancement of Science, American Psychological Association, and American Psychological
Society. He has won four awards from the American Educational Research Association, as well as
numerous awards from other organizations. He is editor of Contemporary Psychology and past
editor of Psychological Bulletin. He is also the editor of The Encyclopedia of Intelligence, and on
editorial board of Intelligence, the leading scientific journal in the field of intelligence and mental
ability.

Failure Was Always A Pillar Of Success For Him

Defending Conventional Way Of Thoughts
Triarchic Theory specifies that intelligence can be understood in terms of components of information
processing being applied to relatively novel experience and later being automatized in order to
serve adaptation to, selection of and shaping of function in the environment. Three content areas
crossed with these scores are verbal, quantitative and figural. There is more emphasis on ability to
learn than on what has been learnt. Verbal skill is measured by learning from context and not by
vocabulary. Intelligence is always used in some context, and must be measured in certain context.
Intelligence cannot be tested outside the boundaries of a culture. One can identify children who are
gifted in unconventional ways and who would appear developmentally challenged (mentally
retarded) by a conventional test but not by new tests. It should be measured broadly, rather than in
the narrow ways that have failed to give a perfect picture of human capacities.

Throughout his studies, Sternberg realized that he learned better when not required to memorize
information. At his first year of college at Yale, he performed very poorly in a mainly memorizing
section of Introductory Psychology course. His professor urged him to pursue a career outside of
the field of psychology. Sternberg who received C grade in his first course did not serve as an
accurate predictor of his later achievements in the field of psychology.

Sternberg, who has a high sense of humor and made his psychology lectures lighter, has a great
passion for Music. He as a child and during his wonderful four growing years at New York’s High
School of Music and Art, kept himself in tune with chamber music, which gave him aesthetic
pleasure. He is father of two children - Seth and Sara, who are also students at Yale university.

===============================

he belief that intelligence tests can predict business and personal success has always been flawed.

Reason: Standard IQ tests measure a very narrow range of abilities, and the abilities measured by
such tests are inert. They don't predict or lead to actions or commonsense mental skills necessary
to achieve life's important goals. They also don't measure your ability to think.

More critical to achievement is what I call successful intelligence.

NEW WAYS OF THINKING

Successful intelligence is gauged by your ability to think in ways that will help you develop personal
excellence and excel at work. The keys to successful intelligence include:

Analytical thinking, the ability to solve problems and judge ideas.

Creative thinking, the ability to formulate new or clever solutions to problems.

Practical thinking, the ability to use your ideas and implement them effectively.

Successful intelligence is most effective when these three aspects are in balance. People who
possess successful intelligence know how to make the most of what they do well and are able to
find ways to work around their limitations. They are motivated, controlled, persevering and
independent.

Here's how to develop your successful intelligence.

ANALYTICAL INTELLIGENCE
Analytical intelligence involves conscious direction of our mental processes to find thoughtful
solutions to problems. Six steps to better problem solving:

Recognize that there is a problem. If you aren't able to spot a problem, you won't make the effort to
solve it. If you suspect that you have a problem, look for the following symptoms:

Things aren't working as they should.

People, including yourself, are feeling uneasy.

Techniques that once produced one set of results are now producing other, less desirable results.

Your competitive business position is declining.

Define the problem. If you don't correctly define the problems that you have, you may waste a lot of
time trying to solve problems that don't exist.

Example: A supervisor and a subordinate, or a married couple, who continue to have the same
argument may not both have the same problem in mind.

Represent information about a problem accurately, and focus on how to use that information
effectively.

Invest resources. Formulate a strategy by investing significant resources (time and money) in long-
term planning. Think long range, and be willing to delay gratification.

Allocate resources wisely. Think carefully about what resources you want to allocate to solve the
problem both for the short and long terms. Write out your plan. Consider the risk–to-reward ratio.
Then allocate resources that will maximize your return.

Track your progress during the problem-solving process. Evaluate the quality of that process and
the solution you come to. Successfully intelligent people don't always make the right decisions, but
they correct their errors as they discover them.

CREATIVE INTELLIGENCE

A very important aspect of successful intelligence is creative intelligence, the ability to go beyond
the given to generate new and interesting ideas. This usually happens when the crowd goes one
way and you go the other, trying to find a smarter way to accomplish a goal.

Doing things differently often comes at a price, however. Those who seek new solutions usually
encounter barriers. Realize this will happen, and ask yourself, Am I willing to persevere? You can
develop creative intelligence by:

Actively seeking out and planning to become a role model. The most powerful way to develop
creative intelligence in your employees, students and/or children is to serve as a creative role
model.
Recall the teachers who most influenced you. They probably weren't the teachers who crammed
the most content into their lectures, but rather those whose ways of thinking and acting served as
models.

Question assumptions and encourage others to do so, too. Without the impetus of those who
question assumptions, little or no progress would ever be made in any human endeavor.

Take sensible risks and encourage others to do the same. You have to take risks to produce the
work that others will admire and respect.

Allow yourself and others to make mistakes. Creativity comes with a price. The result is worth the
risk.

PRACTICAL INTELLIGENCE

Practical intelligence is the ability to translate theory into practice and abstract ideas into practical
accomplishments. To develop practical intelligence:

Recognize your pattern of strengths and weaknesses. Ask yourself, What do I do well? Consider
not going into activities that are outside of your strengths.

Be honest with yourself. Do you have a flair for solitary work but not for working with teams?
Perhaps becoming a desktop publisher is more realistic than becoming a management consultant.

Strengthen those skills in which you excel, and find a way around those skills in which you don't do
well.

Example: If you recognize that you're not good at taking tests, get yourself a tutor or enroll in a
pretest class.

Believe in yourself. Can do attitudes succeed. Conversely, if you think you can't, you probably
won't. Most authors can wallpaper a room with the rejection notices they received during the
inception of their careers. But many have persevered and then have gone on to sell the very works
that were originally rejected.

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Bottom Line/Personal interviewed Robert Sternberg, PhD, IBM professor of psychology and
education in the department of psychology at Yale University and a fellow of the American Academy
of Arts and Sciences. He is author of many books, including Successful Intelligence: How Practical
and Creative Intelligence Determine Success in Life, Simon & Schuster/$22.50.

Copyright © 1998 by Boardroom Inc.

www.boardroom.com

================================

Sternberg’s Triangular Love Scale

What are the components of your love relationship? Intimacy? Passion? Decision/commitment? All
three components? Two of them?
To complete the following scale, fill in the blank spaces with the name of one person you love or
care about deeply. Then rate your agreement with each of the items by using a nine-point scale in
which 1 = "not at all," 5 = "moderately," and 9 = "extremely." Use points in between to indicate these
values. Then consult the scoring key at the end of the scale.

Intimacy Component

____1.I am actively supportive of _________’s wellbeing.

____2.I have a warm relationhip with _________.

____3.I am able to count on __________ in times of need.

____4._________ is able to count on me in times of need.

____5.I am willing to share myself and my possessions with ___________.

____6.I receive considerable emotional support from ___________.

____7.I give considerable emotional support to _______.

____8.I communicate well with ___________.

____9.I value _________ greatly in my life.

____10.I feel close to ______.

____11.I have a comfortable relationship with ______.

____12.I feel that I really understand ___________.

____13.I feel that _________ really understands me.

____14.I feel that I can really trust ___________.

____15.I share deeply personal information about myself with __________.

Passion Component

____16.Just seeing ________ excites me.

____17.I find myself thinking about __________ frequently during the day.

____18.My relationship with ___________ is very romantic.

____19.I find ________ to be very personally attractive.

____20.I idealize _________.

____21.I cannot imagine another person making me as happy as _______ does.

____22.I would rather be with _________ than with anyone else.

____23.There is nothing more important to me than my relationship with ______.

____24.I especially like physical contact with ______.

____25.There is something almost "magical" about my relationship with ______.

____26.I adore _________.

____27.I cannot imagine life without _________.

____28.My relationship with _________ is passionate.

____29.When I see romantic movies and read romantic books I think of _______.

____30.I fantasize about _______.

Decision/Commitment Component

____31.I know that I care about _________.

____32.I am committed to maintaining my relationship with _________.

____33.Because of my commitment to ________, I would not let other people come between us.

____34.I have confidence in the stability of my relationship with ________.

____35.I could not let anything get in the way of my commitment to ________.

____36.I expect my love for ________ to last for the rest of my life.

____37.I will always feel a strong responsibility for ______.

____38.I view my commitment to ________ as a solid one.

____39.I cannot imagine ending my relationship with _________.

____40.I am certain of my love for ________.

____41.I view my relationship with _________ as permanent.

____42.I view my relationship with ________ as a good decision.

____43.I feel a sense of responsibility toward ________.

____44.I plan to continue my relationship with ______.

____45.Even when ________ is hard to deal with, I remain committed to our relationship.

Scoring Key

Add your ratings for each of the three sections – intimacy, passion, and commitment/ decision – and
write the totals in the blanks below. Divide each subscore by 15 to get an average subscale score.

________
intimacy
subscore ÷ 15 = ________
intimacy
average rating
________
passion
subscore ÷ 15 = ________
passion
average rating
________
decision/
commitment
subscore ÷ 15 = ________
decision/
commitment
average rating

An average rating of 5 on a particular subscale indicates a moderate level of the component

represented by the subscale; for example, an average rating of 5 on the intimacy subscale indicates
a moderate amount of intimacy in the relationship you chose to measure. Following this example
further, a higher average rating would indicate a higher level of intimacy, and a lower average rating
would indicate a lesser amount of intimacy. Examining your ratings for each of the three subscales
will give you an idea of how you perceive your love relationship to be composed of various amounts
of intimacy, passion, and decision/ commitment.

__________________________

Sternberg’s Triangular Love Scale (adapted) from The Triangle of Love by Robert J. Sternberg.
Copyright © 1988 by BasicBooks, Inc. Reprinted by permission of BasicBooks, a division of
HarperCollins Publishers, Inc.

=============================

Triarchic Theory (R. Sternberg)

Overview:

The triarchic theory of intelligence consists of three subtheories: (i) the componential subtheory
which outlines the structures and mechanisms that underlie intelligent behavior categorized as
metacognitive, performance, or knowlege acquistion components , (ii) the experiential subtheory
that proposes intelligent behavior be interpreted along a continuum of experience from novel to
highly familar tasks/situations, (iii) the contextual subtheory which specifies that intelligent behavior
is defined by the sociocultural context in which it takes place and involves adaptation to the
environment, selection of better environments, and shaping of the present environment.

According to Sternberg, a complete explanation of intelligence entails the interaction of these three
subtheories. The componential subtheory specifies the potential set of mental processes that
underlies behavior (i.e., how the behavior is generated) while the contextual subtheory relates
intelligence to the external world in terms of what behaviors are intelligent and where. The
experiential subtheory addresses the relationship between the behavior in a given task/situation and
the amount of experience of the individual in that task/situation.

The componential subtheory is the most developed aspect of the triarchic theory and is based upon
Sternberg (1977) which presents an information processing perspective for abilities. One of the
most fundamental components according to Sternberg's research are the metacognition or
"executive" processes that control the strategies and tactics used in intelligent behavior.

Scope/Application:

The triarchic theory is a general theory of human intelligence. Sternberg has used the theory to
explain exceptional intelligence (gifted and retardation) in children and also to critique existing
intelligence tests. Sternberg (1983) outlines the implications of the theory for skill training. Much of
Sternberg's initial research focuses on analogies and syllogistic reasoning.

Example:

Sternberg (1985) describes the results of various analogy experiments that support the triarchic
theory. For example, in a study that involved adults and children solving simple analogies, he found
that the youngest children solved the problems differently and theorized that this was because they
had not yet developed the ability to discern higher order relations. In another study of analogies with
children at a Jewish school, he discovered a systematic bias towards selection of the first two
answers on the right and suggested that this could be accounted for by the right-to-left reading
pattern of Hebrew.

Principles:

1. Training of intellectual performance must be socioculturally relevant to the individual

2. A training program should provide links between the training and real-world behavior.

3. A training program should provide explicit instruction in strategies for coping with novel
tasks/situations

4. A training program should provide expilicit instruction in both executive and non-executive
information processing and interactions between the two.

5. Training programs should actively encourage individuals to manifest their differences in

strategies and styles.

References:

Sternberg, R.J. (1977). Intelligence, Information Processing, and Analogical Reasoning. Hillsdale,
NJ: Erlbaum.

Sternberg, R.J. (1985). Beyond IQ. New York: Cambridge University Press.

Sternberg, R.J. (1983). Criteria for intellectual skills training. Educational Researcher,12, 6-12.

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