Research Paper

The Concept of Intelligence in Psychology

Salime Rachid

[Institutional Affiliation(s)]

Author Note

The Concept of Intelligence in Psychology

The notion of understanding the concept of intelligence and developing methods for its measurement and improvement has been around for centuries. It has captivated the minds and hearts of many great philosophers and scientists, even in these modern times. As humans, we are fascinated by this concept and sometimes our world seems to revolve around the desire to know what is the concept of intelligence and how much intelligence we are ourselves. This often pushed the humans into the arms of the dilemma of the "Nature versus Nurture" debate, which often confuses us more, rather than providing us answers. This essay will try to address this vast concept of intelligence in the discipline of psychology.

No doubt, our academic forefathers were of the view that our world is being held by many supernatural powers before the introduction of the scientific method and the concept of enlightenment. The human was believed to be composed of two components called Body and Soul, in which the latter seemed to be the symbol of purity, elegance, perfection, and ultimate knowledge before it fused with the body CITATION PlaBC \l 1033 (Plato, 381BC). Thus, the concept of intelligence was naturally associated with many philosophers, like Aristotle and Piaget, with the soul as it was a high virtue in philosophy.

Coming back to contemporary times, what do we think intelligence is? No doubt, this concept has been contested and discussed a lot in the science of psychology. Most people think that Intelligence is a vital component of adaptation in the modern world. It is often regarded as a mixture of physical, ecological and mental capabilities that fuse to allow oneself to take full advantage of the environment around him. The works of Piaget have helped the modern scientific community to understand how the intelligence of a person continues to develop from childbirth CITATION JPi72 \l 1033 (Piaget, 1972). According to him, the concept of intelligence is composed of four complex stages whose complexity increases with the advancement of each stage. First is the stage of the infant, where he is heavily reliant on his motor skills to understand the world surrounding him. Slowly but gradually, the child learns the art of deductive reasoning and reaches the advanced stages of different concepts.

A British psychologist Raymond Cattell divides intelligence into two distinct areas CITATION Cat \l 1033 (Cattell, 1963). The area of Fluid Intelligence givers the ability to solve unknown complex problems and the area of Crystallized Intelligence that deals with the process of reasoning is based on the knowledge previously acquired by a person. Over time, these concepts have incorporated several new concepts like visuals, remembrance and acoustic senses CITATION DLu04 \l 1033 (Lubinski, 2004). Yet the exchanges with the world demand abilities related to Emotional Intelligence, the ability to keep one’s emotional states in check while trying to assess the emotional states of others. This is a necessary section of intelligence required for cooperating with others so that collective goals could be achieved. However, sometimes we witness our emotions get the best of us, and we find ourselves unable to form a bond with our surroundings. This is what we observe in the poor psychopaths, that is incapable to form emotional bonds with their surroundings or act clearly according to the situation. Being overpowered by their emotional impulses, they become highly dysfunctional and detrimental individuals that cause harm to people around them for trivial reasons.

In case of cognitive thinkers, there has been a general trend of the followers of the psychometrics to emphasis on the area of theoretical society where they could place their energies on finding the processes over which intelligence is nurtured over the period. A computer-like equivalence is often discussed that describes in detail how the flow of information occurs in the various senses of the human body through a series of mental notes and other senses. Some psychologists, like CM Jensen, are of the view that mental speeds play an important role in one's abilities to process and use information to one's advantages and needs CITATION CMJ87 \l 1033 (Jensen, 1987). This gives the average person the ability to compartmentalize and process relevant information according to need. Many theorists view this model to describe the concept of basic components of information processing, like thinking, attention, perception, and creativity and combining them accordingly. Several computer models have been made and discussed for detailing mental actions. Psychologists like Atkinson and Shiffrin have gone even further to equate the memory of any human beings into a many-layered model showing various phases that outline the storage and processing of memory in a microprocessor-like fashion that is working in a continuous loop CITATION Ken19 \l 1033 (Kenneth J. Malmberg, 2019).

The cognitive theorists' current ideas are backed heavily by a series of research experiments conducted by various scientists. In these studies, the brain is seen as divided into definite sectors of functioning parts. The temporal lobe in the human brain is believed to be responsible for behavior, speech, and memory while another part, the frontal lobe is believed to be responsible for the functions of movement and intelligence CITATION ESm08 \l 1033 (E. Smith, 2008). The discussion gets even more complex when many scientists attribute intelligence to the coordination among these structures.

This gave rise to the concept of intelligence testing that gave the world the highly discussed perception of Intelligence quotient, simply known as IQ. This concept was developed by Binet-Simon, a French psychologist who wanted to measure general intelligence capabilities.to separate underperforming children from the start of their school years. This series of tests have come under a barrage of criticism recently since these tests undermine the role of culture and surrounding environments that change with each race present in different parts of the world. It is only logical to assume that any person's awareness and abilities depend on the surroundings, as these factors have always been exploited by various groups throughout history to mold their fellow humans into serving a specific purpose, often on military grounds.

Lastly, we can also see that some scientists attribute the amalgamation of cultural and biological factors. They believe that factors like abuse, poverty, and war are also responsible for shaping intelligence in any person. The concept was taken a step further by Karl Marx, who said that the poor are kept in racial and class boundaries so that they are unable to generate a specific thought process and their intelligence is forever hampered by the limitations of their environment CITATION Buc87 \l 1033 (Buchanan, 1987). This makes sense as the poor masses often suffer from lower IQ scores as their families remain dysfunctional due to poverty, which gives rise to several factors such as domestic violence, which is proven by many studies to hamper children's intelligence.

To conclude the argument, psychology has tried to understand the ancient concept of intelligence on scientific grounds so that they would try to shape it according to the needs of their surroundings. Amazingly, Humankind has discovered that it is the other way around. Since, then, the concept has shaped up from being objective to subjective on societal, cultural, environmental and even on cellular levels, as scientists try to uncover the links between the different organs of the human brain that influence human intelligence in both constructive and destructive ways.

References

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Cattell, R. (1963). Theory of fluid and crystallized intelligence: A critical experiment (Vol. 54(1)). Journal of Educational Psychology.

E. Smith, S. K. (2008). Cognitive Psychology: Mind and Brain. Pearson Press.

Jensen, C. (1987). Process differences and individual differences in some cognitive tasks. Intelligence. Vol 11(2), pp107-136.

Kenneth J. Malmberg, J. G. (2019). 50 years of research sparked by Atkinson and Shiffrin (1968). Memory & Cognition, 47(4), 561-574.

Lubinski, D. (2004). Introduction to the Special Section on Cognitive Abilities: 100 Years After Spearman’s (1904) “‘General Intelligence,’ Objectively Determined and Measured. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology.

Piaget, J. (1972). Psychology of a Child. Basic books.

Plato. (381BC). The Republic. Athens.