The Social Nature of Intelligence – more L&B conference

At the conference yesterday, Dr. Josh Aronson from NYU gave a fantastic talk about what he and his colleagues call ‘stereotype threat.’ Essentially, stereotype threat is anxiety caused by any sort of stereotype or worry which in turn causes your ‘intelligence’ level to drop. His lab has studied many, many different versions of this and he has quite a few compelling examples of how and when this process occurs, from GRE tests and AP calculus tests to short term memory tests for older folks. In particular, his lab focuses on race and the work is quite moving. His website is below and I would encourage you to take a look if this is something you are interested in.

http://steinhardt.nyu.edu/faculty_bios/view/Joshua_Aronson

One particularly interesting side note of his talk is what he describes as the social nature of intelligence. He said, “We are as many people as we have social contacts.” By this he means, of course, that our interaction with each person we encounter in our life is unique and makes us a particular version of ourselves for the duration of that interaction, dependent on the biological feedback mechanism that occurs in their presence. We can’t simply separate our social selves from our biological selves. Why are we so articulate when we are in the presence of some people and why are we so tongue-tied with others? Why does that relationship often persist, even when we work to change it? In some part, it is because of this ‘stereotype threat’ (not always a true stereotype of course, just that we understand we are being perceived in a particular way) which has a physiological basis for impairing or strengthening our abilities, including our conversational abilities.

Dr. Aronson does talk a little bit about mitigating this influence. It turns out that just giving people the knowledge that it is happening has a positive effect and helps to improve performance, whatever that means in a given situation. I wonder a lot about social and emotional intelligence and how strengthening those skills could perhaps help to mitigate the effects, or at least allow us to perform the way we want to in a social context. It would be fascinating to spend more time on this in the educational arena, especially around testing. Can we minimize the impact of the stereotype threat that lowers test scores by employing emotional intelligence? If so, this would be one more compelling reason to promote the development of these skills in as many children as we can as often as possible.