Intelligence is something in which everyone is interested. All cultures recognize certain abilities as outstanding and encourage and support the individuals they consider highly intelligent; they also strive to support those who are considered less intelligent (Ngara & Porath, 2014, p. 131)."
Intelligence and Culture : While the abilities measured by intelligence tests may be valued in other cultures, they do not universally dominate conceptions of intelligence across cultures.
"Culture cannot be ignored in our quest to understand human intelligence and human abilities in general (Sternberg and Grigorenko 2004; Vygotsky 1978). Intelligence and individual differences cannot be fully understood outside their cultural contexts, as intelligence is a social construct. Culture not only describes people’s ways of life and customs and folklore, it encompasses a people’s world views and their ways of knowing, including how they perceive and construct reality from their experiences in their environments (Ngara & Porath, 2014, p. 132)."
Lesson 6 Assignmet - Compare/Contrast Two Articles on Intelligence and Culture: For this week’s assignment I chose to research human intelligence and the impact of one’s culture on the perception of it. I selected “Do Only Fools Smile at Strangers? Cultural Differences in Social Perception of Intelligence of Smiling Individuals,” by Kuba Krys, Karolina Hansen, Cai Xing, Piotr Szarota, and Miao-miao Yang for my first article, and “Cultural Perceptions of Human Intelligence,” by E.A. Cocodia for my second article. “While there is little consensus on what intelligence really means from one culture to the next, the literature suggests that the culture or subculture of an individual will determine how intelligence is conceived; culture and intelligence are interwoven (Cocodia, 2014).” While the first article was more of a humorous piece, it still explored the perception of intelligence in different cultures similarly to the second.
While these articles didn’t broach any new topics, they approached the national perception of intelligence from a new perspective and eluded to the fact that there is no standardized international assessment of intelligence. Through the course readings and my research into the topic, I was able to get a better understanding of an phenomenon I was able to experience first-hand; not all cultures or subcultures share the same barometers of intelligence. “Intelligence is not a fixed thing that we measure. Rather, it is an inferred entity, one that is understood best by evaluating the ways in which individuals who have different kinds of acculturation perform several different kinds of tasks (Ngara & Porath, 2014, p. 134).”
Application to my future career: What I learned this week can easily be applied to my future career as a social sciences teacher in some capacity in a secondary educational setting is simple; I can use the everything I learned in to engage students of an extremely diverse student body. The barometers of intelligence discussed in the coursework this week will help me look beyond the scope of what is normally seen as intelligent behavior that my own culture has possibly limited for me and see how other cultures measure the intelligence of their own people, through their own lense.. |
