Psychologists Defying the Crowd: Stories of Those Who Battled the Establishment and Won

by Robert J. Sternberg (Editor)

Presents brief accounts from eminent psychologists who have defied powerful establishment forces to find their own way in the face of opposition. Softcover.

Genres: Psychology

293 pages, Paperback

First published July 1, 2002

About the author

Robert J. Sternberg's spectacular research career in psychology had a rather inauspicious beginning. In elementary school he performed poorly on IQ tests, and his teachers' actions conveyed their low expectations for his future progress. Everything changed when his fourth grade teacher, Mrs. Alexa, saw that he had potential and challenged him to do better. With her encouragement, he became a high-achieving student, eventually graduating summa cum laude and Phi Beta Kappa from Yale University. In a gesture of gratitude, Dr. Sternberg dedicated his book, Successful Intelligence to Mrs. Alexa.

Dr. Sternberg's personal experiences with intelligence testing in elementary school lead him to create his own intelligence test for a 7 th grade science project. He happened to find the Stanford-Binet scales in the local library, and with unintentional impertinence, began administering the test to his classmates; his own test, the Sternberg Test of Mental Abilities (STOMA) appeared shortly thereafter. In subsequent years he distinguished himself in many domains of psychology, having published influential theories relating to intelligence, creativity, wisdom, thinking styles, love and hate.

Dr. Sternberg's Triarchic Theory of (Successful) Intelligence contends that intelligent behavior arises from a balance between analytical, creative and practical abilities, and that these abilities function collectively to allow individuals to achieve success within particular sociocultural contexts. Analytical abilities enable the individual to evaluate, analyze, compare and contrast information. Creative abilities generate invention, discovery, and other creative endeavors. Practical abilities tie everything together by allowing individuals to apply what they have learned in the appropriate setting. To be successful in life the individual must make the best use of his or her analytical, creative and practical strengths, while at the same time compensating for weaknesses in any of these areas. This might involve working on improving weak areas to become better adapted to the needs of a particular environment, or choosing to work in an environment that values the individual's particular strengths. For example, a person with highly developed analytical and practical abilities, but with less well-developed creative abilities, might choose to work in a field that values technical expertise but does not require a great deal of imaginative thinking. Conversely, if the chosen career does value creative abilities, the individual can use his or her analytical strengths to come up with strategies for improving this weakness. Thus, a central feature of the triarchic theory of successful intelligence is adaptability-both within the individual and within the individual's sociocultural context.

Reviews

[Nathan Albright · Rating 4 out of 5]

This book is a bit less than 300 pages and contains a variety of psychologists writing about their own personal lives and stories.  These psychologists are all portrayed as being iconoclasts, but in many cases their iconoclasm is overrated simply to gain outsider cred.  That isn't to say that the research and perspectives of these psychologists is all bad--some of it is quite good in fact--but there is a lot of angst and whining here about the price that has to be paid for going against the stream even when all one is doing is opposing behaviorism or cognitive psychology or some other orthodoxy that no one cares about outside of the field.  This is the sort of book that overly sensitive people make to encourage themselves that some cool crowd of hipsters likes them even if they get a lot of unfriendly article reviews from mainstream psychologists.  To be sure, this book has an obvious market and an intended reader among those who want to fancy themselves iconoclastic (which I suppose would include this reader), but its appeal is limited by the tone of many of the articles and the self-absorbed nature of much of the material.

This book is nearly 300 pages long and is divided into sixteen different essays, almost all of which amount to autobiographical sketches of the author and his (or her) experience in dealing with the psychological establishment in universities, meetings, and journals.  Most of the time the authors show a rather insular perspective that tends to focus on personal research, how the author came to be a psychologist in the first place, and discussion about university politics and the prestige of positions and journals that one is looking for publications for.  The authors, of course, speak very highly of their own point of view and their own insight and comment knowingly about the problems in the establishment that they criticize for being narrow-minded.  Some of them note that it is better that not so many people are outsiders because it gives them a niche to do research that gives them distinction because it is different from the norm, and many of these writers appear to have an oppositional approach that leads them to be hostile to any orthodoxy even if their views become more popular with time.

What does it mean for psychologists to defy the crowd?  Much of this book contains rants about a few subjects, such as the tendency for psychology to be attracted by fads that limit the sort of problems that are of interest, and the way that the funding of research is easily politicized when one receives federal grant money.  I have a great deal of respect for the researcher who was aware that his research interests were not the sort likely to get grant money, as I can respect someone who is willing to do research without demanding taxpayer money to do so, and less respect for the whiny researcher who complained about how hostile press coverage about her golden fleece award wrecked her marriage to a journalist husband who kept on trying to excuse the behavior she received at the hands of journos.  A few people are here for pioneering social psychology or for opposing intelligence and personality tests, and one gets a sense that these people feel the need to find like-minded souls in order to encourage their iconoclastic tendencies.  But I suppose that is the case for us all.  Creativity and innovation depend on having an infrastructure that includes encouragement and support, and that is no less true for psychologists than the rest of us.

[Stephen · Rating 4 out of 5]

Writing by Elliot Aronson, Ulric Neisser, Walter Mischel, Jerome Kagan, Robert Sternberg, and others