*Article* **Improving Gifted Talent Development Can Help Solve Multiple Consequential Real-World Problems**

**Jonathan Wai 1,2,\* and Benjamin J. Lovett <sup>3</sup>**


**Abstract:** Fully developing the talents of all students is a fundamental goal for personal well-being and development and ultimately for global societal innovation and flourishing. However, in this paper we focus on what we believe is an often neglected and underdeveloped population, that of the gifted. We draw from the cognitive aptitude and gifted education research literatures to make the case that solutions to consequential real-world problems can be greatly enhanced by more fully developing the talents of the intellectually gifted population, which we operationalize in this paper as roughly the top 5% of cognitive talent. Should well-supported high achievers choose to solve them, these problems span health, science, economic growth, and areas unforeseen. We draw from longitudinal research on intellectually precocious students and retrospective research on leaders and innovators in society, showing that mathematical, verbal, and spatial aptitudes are linked to societal innovation. We then discuss two remaining fundamental challenges: the identification of disadvantaged and marginalized groups of students who have traditionally been neglected in selection for gifted programming suited to their current developmental needs, and the building of skills beyond academic ones, specifically in the related areas of open-minded thinking and intellectual humility.

**Keywords:** innovation; talent selection and development; gifted education; social returns; cognitive aptitudes and creativity

#### **1. Introduction and Roadmap**

Solving consequential real-world problems would ultimately best be served by fully developing the multitude of talents of *all* individuals in society. Thus, we should without question help all students, through education and other means, to develop to their full potential. In this paper, we focus on what we believe to be an often neglected and underdeveloped population that very likely could contribute greatly to solving real-world problems to a much larger degree than they currently do (Benbow and Stanley 1996; Gardner 1961). This is the intellectually gifted population, which we operationalize as roughly the top 5% of achievers globally. Systemic and structural barriers reducing the likelihood that many talented but disadvantaged students from low-income and minority backgrounds can ultimately develop their talents and eventual expertise to the fullest is a crucial ongoing challenge (Peters 2021). When many children come from poverty, they will not only fail to be recognized as gifted, they might not even develop to be gifted (e.g., Hair et al. 2015). This is true for countries around the world where lack of opportunities and numerous headwinds (Stevens 2020; Wai and Worrell 2020) face talented but disadvantaged students (in particular compared to their advantaged counterparts). These inequalities in opportunities and challenges may have been even further exacerbated by the COVID-19 pandemic and related learning losses globally (e.g., Hanushek and Woessmann 2020), adding up to a cumulative disadvantage over time. Of course, whether talented students choose to

**Citation:** Wai, Jonathan, and Benjamin J. Lovett. 2021. Improving Gifted Talent Development Can Help Solve Multiple Consequential Real-World Problems. *Journal of Intelligence* 9: 31. https://doi.org/ 10.3390/jintelligence9020031

Received: 8 February 2021 Accepted: 9 June 2021 Published: 13 June 2021

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**Copyright:** © 2021 by the authors. Licensee MDPI, Basel, Switzerland. This article is an open access article distributed under the terms and conditions of the Creative Commons Attribution (CC BY) license (https:// creativecommons.org/licenses/by/ 4.0/).

solve consequential real-world problems or do whatever else they want with their lives is entirely up to them. Our hope is that at least for some, choices to fulfill one's potential might also be consonant with an interest in contributing to the broader improvement of society, and it is in that hope that we write this article.

This special issue call for papers asked contributors to take one consequential realworld problem and discuss what we know about cognitive abilities that could help us to solve the problem. We reframe this question slightly to consider two areas of research informed by cognitive abilities that can help us solve *multiple* consequential real-world problems. First, we review the literature making the case that fully developed gifted students in fact already do very likely solve multiple consequential real-world problems but do so broadly very likely based on their personal interests, life circumstances, and educational and developmental trajectories in different areas of achievement and expertise. We further make the case that more fully developing the talents of gifted students or the top 5% of achievers will likely enhance the likelihood of solving real-world problems in the future. Another core problem is identifying and developing the talents of talented but disadvantaged students, especially underrepresented minorities, to ensure personal development and flourishing but also to broaden the talent pool to solve problems from a broader array of perspectives and personal talents. Broadly, we begin our article describing how developed cognitive aptitudes are important to solving real-world problems, introduce our theoretical and empirical perspective that frames the remainder of the article, and discuss issues in regard to the support and development of gifted students, and really all students, on multiple dimensions.

#### **2. Talent Development and Innovation**

In 1957 a group of scientists from the California Institute of Technology, after multiple discussions with industrialists and other leaders, published their forecasts for the most important problems facing humanity for the next 100 years. The authors (Brown et al. 1957, p. 152) concluded that "The problems which we face in the years ahead are indeed both numerous and grave, but, theoretically at least, it seems likely that they can be solved by the proper application of our intelligence." There are many strategies for applying cognitive aptitudes to real-world problems. In this article, we emphasize the importance of investing in all students, with a focus on strategies involving investment in gifted students, in particular those from disadvantaged backgrounds. Cole (2016, p. 23) described the "law of the 5 percent" as the idea that in nearly every field, the top 5% of that field will be responsible for the vast majority of innovation. We introduce the idea of investing in developing more students to be among what is currently the top 5 percent of achievers, then fully developing that broader group of achievers, who we argue have been, are, and will be largely responsible for innovation across multiple fields of intellectual and creative endeavor in the future.

Talented individuals innovate in a variety of ways that can benefit society, and are very likely to rise to positions of influence to be able to implement those innovations (Lubinski and Benbow 2020; Wai and Worrell 2016; Wai 2013). Innovations come from individuals throughout the cognitive aptitude range, and many high achieving students do not choose to solve consequential real-world problems. This suggests we should invest in developing the talents of all students, including gifted students, because as cognitive aptitudes rise, so does the *likelihood* of innovation.

Certainly, the idea of ensuring talent development is not new (Gardner 1961), and is truly a global consequential real-world problem. As researchers who work and live in the US, we are biased towards our local perspective, but also see how in many less developed nations the lack of talent development may even be more severe given greater structural and other barriers such as poverty and lack of opportunity. The US already has a number of programs for the purpose of talent development, both at the level of individual schools and at a national level. However, the availability of talent development programs varies widely. Many schools lack such programming, and the national programs have limited capacity and are often quite expensive. In a broad sense, talent development is the essence of all education (e.g., . Subotnik et al. 2011). However, there remain many students with high potential who simply were not born into circumstances with sufficient opportunities, and whose talent is often overlooked and underdeveloped (Hair et al. 2015; Peters 2021).

In the US, this is at least in part because there remains very little federal support for gifted education (Benbow and Stanley 1996), or even any federal requirements to provide such services. Instead, the decision is up to states and school districts, and the availability of services varies widely across these settings. In many school districts, no formal gifted supports are available at all. Even when some supports are present, they rarely include all the students who should be eligible. Often, those left behind are talented students from low-income and historically marginalized backgrounds (Wai and Worrell 2016) and students with overlooked spatial talents (Lakin and Wai 2020; Wai and Lakin 2020). Some scholars argue that COVID-19 learning losses could add up to trillions (Azevedo et al. 2020). Other scholars argue that the long-run economic impact of this loss is the same as onethird of a year of schooling which translates to a gross domestic product (GDP) loss of 1.5% on average for the remainder of the century (Hanushek and Woessmann 2020; Schleicher 2020). In this context, it is crucial to ensure that talented but disadvantaged students do not get left behind.

To be clear, we should invest in all students throughout the full spectrum to develop and help them use that cognitive potential to the very best of their capacity. However, major societal problems are, again, more likely to be solved by those with the greatest developed talents, and when such problems are solved, everyone can benefit. Gifted education should therefore not be viewed as an individual reward to students for having high ability, but perhaps in part as a societal investment with a high likelihood of good returns. Even merely more optimal matching of high-aptitude individuals to jobs and settings that require the solution of complex problems is associated with more economic growth across countries (Strenze 2013). If we go beyond this matching process to actually fully develop the gifts of those with the highest developed potential, this might even lead to even greater gains. Of course, whether individual students choose to pursue certain life courses is ultimately up to them, whether that means taking advantage of opportunities that are available, finding a domain that suits their interests and aptitudes, or sustaining the years of motivation and hard work often required to attain expertise in a given domain.

#### **3. Cognitive Aptitudes and Giftedness: Definitions**

Though there are numerous verbal operationalizations of what being gifted means (e.g., for a review see . Subotnik et al. 2011), we focus on aspects of giftedness that are measurable through cognitive tests as one indicator of giftedness. More specifically, we focus on a version of the hierarchical model of abilities (Carroll 1993) known as the Radex model (Lubinski 2004), which includes general reasoning at the apex and the specific aptitudes of mathematical, verbal, and spatial. This well-established structure, at least in our view, should at least be considered part of a measurable and consistent definition of intellectual giftedness (Coleman and Cureton 1954; Detterman 1993; Thompson and Oehlert 2010; Kelley 1927). We also view all abilities as developed and that cognitive aptitudes are *current* developed capacities that an individual brings to learning or problemsolving environments at a given time (Lohman 2005; Snow 1996). All aptitudes or abilities are thus developed and malleable (. Subotnik et al. 2011; Uttal et al. 2013), and they are both important to learning and problem-solving environments such as schooling, but also an important *product* of schooling (Ceci 1991; Lohman 1993; Ritchie and Tucker-Drob 2018).

#### **4. High Developed Aptitudes Can Often Lead to Greater Innovation**

Even just a small number of academically gifted and talented scientists can improve our lives in the most remarkable of ways. Pinker (2018) summarized findings from scienceheroes.com, which lists roughly 100 individuals with remarkable achievements who have made life-saving discoveries. Based on this data, Pinker (2018) argues that over 5.5 billion lives have been saved by a small cohort of 100 or so individual scientists. This includes

the discovery of the chlorination of water, smallpox eradication strategy, measles vaccine, penicillin, oral rehydration therapy, among numerous other examples. The scientists who developed the Pfizer/BioNTech COVID-19 vaccine, Katalin Kariko, Ugur Sahin, Albert Bourla, and Ozlem Tureci are contemporary examples (Gelles 2020).

Rindermann and Thompson (2011) illustrated that the cognitive 5% of a nation's population disproportionately influenced innovation and GDP of that nation. Longitudinal studies focused on the gifted population also illustrate that fully developed gifted students can earn doctorates, publications, patents, and even university tenure at the rate of two to eight times that of the general population (Lubinski and Benbow 2006, 2020; Park et al. 2007). Findings within the top 1% of aptitudes are replicated in both nonrandom (Lubinski and Benbow 2020) and random gifted samples (Wai 2014). There does not appear to be a threshold beyond which more aptitude no longer matters for a wide range of life outcomes both within gifted samples (Lubinski and Benbow 2020) and also across multiple population-representative samples in the US and UK (Brown et al. 2021). Even when drawing from a large sample of US leaders across a variety of domains such as business, the media, politics, law, and those with enormous wealth, when retrospectively profiling where these leaders attended higher education, roughly half attended educational institutions that largely selected for the top 1% of aptitude on standardized admissions tests (Wai 2013).

#### **5. Improving Gifted Talent Development has the Potential to Enhance a Wide Range of Innovations and Social Returns**

Innovation can be considered to be largely about creating something truly new and useful. Flexner and Dijkgraaf (2017), as well as Braben (1994, 2020), argued that a key for intellectual advancement is to encourage brilliant and unique minds to pursue whatever interests them—or even what goes against the current popular research topics—and to choose questions that do not necessarily have immediate application. Differential psychology (Revelle et al. 2011) shows us that people have varying interests (Su 2020), and this is true within the gifted population as well (e.g., Lubinski and Benbow 2006, 2020; Wai 2013), suggesting that different interests may be linked to wide ranging areas of innovation. Studies on cohorts of intellectually talented youths in the top 1%, top 0.5% and top 0.01% of aptitude show that as the average talent of the gifted cohort rises, so does the accomplishments of that group (Lubinski and Benbow 2006, 2020). Crucially, the range of innovation of these talented youths is spread across a wide array of domains, from science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) fields to the humanities, heads of business, partners in law firms, and publication of novels. Coupled with the findings that the top 1% of academically gifted individuals who attended highly selective institutions make up roughly half of various US leaders of society (Wai 2013), this suggests that high ability individuals innovate across a wide range of areas, perhaps based in part on aptitudes (both level and pattern), interests, personality, motivation, and of course their access to appropriate educational or other stimulating opportunities (Wai et al. 2010).

Jones (2016) argues that investment in developing the talents of all individuals in a nation could have positive spillovers in the form of increased patience, cooperation, and being more knowledgeable and informed. Therefore, investments in nutrition and education may have the potential to improve a wide range of outcomes. Jones and Summers (2020, p. 34) assessed the social returns to innovation, concluding that "innovation investments can credibly raise economic growth rates and extend lives, paying for their costs many times over. And because the social returns exceed the private returns, public policy has a central role, and opportunity, in unleashing these gains." Linking these economic estimates of spillover effects of broad human capital investment to Heckman (2000) payoff curves and broader literature (e.g., Lubinski and Benbow 2006, 2020) showing that fully developed talented individuals may contribute a great deal to innovation in society suggests that investing in the gifted—in particular the less advantaged—has the potential to enhance real-world problem solving and improve the rate of social returns. Admittedly: to ensure that everyone benefits requires social policies that go far beyond gifted education and tal-

ent development to address a wide range of inequalities (e.g., Blanchard and Rodrik 2021). Moreover, even when everyone benefits from innovation and advancement, some groups may benefit more than others, widening gaps that already exist (Ceci and Papierno 2005). We do not want to minimize these complex issues; our point is simply that solving major real-world problems has the potential to benefit everyone. Of course, giftedness can be put to bad uses as well as good ones; in Section 8 below, we discuss how to promote the latter applications of giftedness.

#### **6. Companies Seek Talented People, Who Can Come from Anywhere**

Investing in gifted children in the early years, especially those from disadvantaged backgrounds, can simultaneously help improve innovation and equity. However, in the US at least, gifted education appears to be a low priority in kindergarten through 12th grade (K-12) education. This is in contrast to the broader talent selection and development priority of companies worldwide—including in the US—who are desperately seeking talented individuals from around the world to improve innovation and revenue generation (Roose 2014). For example, global talent searches in the form of high-end programming competitions—Google's CodeJam, Facebook's Kaggle Recruit, or Microsoft's Code4Bill talent search in India—are useful, cost-effective screening tools for top tech companies to get the variety of talented people they need. Google's CodeJam winner in 2012 described the content of the competition as "more like mathematical work or solving logic puzzles," so something very much akin to a high-level cognitive aptitude test (Chabris and Wai 2014). Similarly, the Thiel fellows program gives \$100,000 and access to a network of contacts to those who want to build things and may not need to go through the traditional sequence of schooling such as attending college (https://thielfellowship.org/, accessed on 10 June 2021). Recently, Eric and Wendy Schmidt launched the Rise program, which seeks to uncover talented youths from around the world and provide them with resources for life (Mehta 2020).

Companies may have largely focused on selecting talent later in the pipeline globally instead of investing in talent early in US K-12 education because much of the talent they are interested in (and meets company needs) comes from countries outside the US. For example, 37% of the US Nobel Prize winners from 2000–2020 in physics, chemistry, and medicine were immigrants (National Foundation for American Policy 2020). In 2016–2017, foreign students accounted for 54% of master's degrees and 44% of doctorate degrees given in STEM fields in the US (Congressional Research Service 2019), and many top companies are founded by immigrants (Wadhwa et al. 2007). Not only do these highly gifted immigrants who are educated in the K-12 systems of other countries contribute disproportionately to US innovation; they also often end up residing in the US and having children, and many of those children are highly talented individuals who may also contribute to further innovation, what Anderson (2004, p. 15) has called the multiplier effect. Historically the US has been a magnet for highly skilled individuals in search of opportunity and who have sought out US higher education, which is still among the best in the world. However, in the broader interest of solving worldwide problems there is no reason why the US will be where individuals seek to further their personal opportunities. For solving global real-world problems, the key is that top talent is provided support to innovate wherever they are or wish to live and work.

#### **7. Lack of Development of the Gifted, Particularly among the Disadvantaged**

Underdevelopment of talent is a larger problem in countries outside the US—specifically low-income, low-opportunity countries (Rosling et al. 2018). However, both the students themselves and the country or world as a whole still can benefit from investing in the relatively disadvantaged talented students within the country. This should be done not just for innovation purposes, but for the purposes of equity and seeking to ensure social mobility and that positions of leadership in US society can be accessed by talented students from low-income backgrounds and other marginalized communities, especially underrepresented minorities. Here we discuss the US as we are most familiar with it, but structural and systemic barriers to talent development globally are equally important to consider.

The federal K-12 investment in gifted and talented education in the US has remained at roughly 0.0002% for decades, which amounts to 1 dollar for every \$500,000 spent (Wai and Worrell 2016). This lack of investment in gifted education primarily impacts public school gifted programming, which is what most talented students from poor backgrounds rely on (Peters 2021). At the same time, talented students with parents with greater resources have not been set back by this lack of funding since their parents can find ways to provide a sufficient educational dosage for them outside traditional public schools (Berner 2017). Early universal screening for gifted and talented students coupled with adequate matching of educational programming would do a great deal to help talented-butdisadvantaged students develop to their fullest and improve the likelihood they can ascend the highly competitive elite college admissions hurdles and find their way into positions of leadership in US society. At present, however, many talented-but-disadvantaged students still fall through the cracks.

The issue of *how* and *why* gifted students from some groups are less likely to be identified is complex and controversial (see e.g., Hair et al. 2015; Liu and Waller 2018, for discussion). Societal and structural inequalities including poverty lead to gaps in identification through many mechanisms and hurdles throughout the path to being identified as gifted, but the mechanism relating most to cognitive aptitudes (and thus most relevant to this article) is clear: students from disadvantaged backgrounds are less likely to undergo cognitive testing for potential gifted identification in the first place (Card and Giuliano 2016; Grissom and Redding 2016; McBee et al. 2016). For instance, as Worrell and Dixson (2018) noted, academic achievement gaps between ethnic groups in US schools are large, and given that early educational performance (e.g., grades) is often used as evidence to nominate a child for gifted evaluation, many Black and Hispanic students are less likely to ever even be given aptitude tests. At times, families play a strong role in nomination for gifted evaluation as well, and students from low-socioeconomic status (SES) homes are less likely to have parents who push for such evaluation (Calarco 2018; Grissom and Redding 2016; McBee et al. 2016). This latter mechanism may also explain why the test used for admission into New York City's selective high schools—schools known to have few Black and Hispanic students (e.g., Shapiro 2019)—is only taken by a relatively small proportion of students from those ethnic groups to begin with.

Once a student is evaluated for giftedness, the identification criteria vary widely. Traditional cognitive tests are likely to leave out an important population of gifted students. Almost all standardized tests that are used for various forms of educational selection include primarily math and verbal reasoning measures (Lakin and Wai 2020; Wai and Lakin 2020), leaving out spatial reasoning and other aptitudes. In the hierarchical model (Carroll 1993), below the general factor the three main specific aptitudes are math, verbal, and spatial in the Radex configuration (Lubinski 2004). Through this lens, Lakin and Wai (2020) estimated, based on three independent population representative samples, that over 2 million spatially talented students, who are adept at being able to visualize and rotate figures in their mind's eye and work with their hands, are currently missed in US K-12 education. Therefore, curricula are not set up to suit their strengths, and these students tend to underachieve and are more likely to develop behavioral issues (Lakin and Wai 2020). This is despite the fact that spatial reasoning has been linked to a wide range of innovation outcomes from STEM to the visual arts (Wai et al. 2009), and has been shown to be malleable (e.g., Sorby et al. 2018; Uttal et al. 2013).

#### **8. Development of the Gifted on Multiple Dimensions**

Although we emphasize aptitude testing in *selection* processes for gifted programming, the programming itself should go far beyond traditional academic skills. Regarding character education, we also suggest the cultivation of specific skills and tendencies that have been a focus of recent empirical research. Two especially neglected areas for talent

development are intellectual humility (Leary et al. 2017) and actively open-minded thinking (Baron 2019). Those two traits both involve awareness of common biases and limitations that accompany thinking, and a consequent tendency to seek and seriously consider alternative points of view. Such a tendency may help gifted students to understand that although they are highly intelligent, they should expect to make mistakes at times, and should adjust their intellectual confidence accordingly. Intellectual humility also helps gifted students to understand the importance of domain-specific knowledge when making judgments and decisions. This helps to guard against what the philosopher Nathan Ballantyne (2019) has called *epistemic trespassing*, where people with expertise in one domain make overly confident judgments far outside that domain. As academically highachieving students become accomplished adults, they will typically develop an area of professional focus, and should carefully consider the expertise of those in other areas. Finally, intellectual humility and actively open-minded thinking both mitigate the effects of political or other ideological polarization. Rather than dismissing different perspectives, actively open-minded thinkers deliberately search for reasons why they might be wrong, and are less likely to fall prey to errors caused by biases in reasoning (Toplak et al. 2017). Interestingly, despite their openness, they are also less likely to believe fake news stories (Bronstein et al. 2019). They seem to have the best of both worlds, then—curious and tolerant of multiple viewpoints, but able to evaluate information critically when necessary.

Intellectual humility and actively open-minded thinking are especially important to cultivate in gifted children, given research showing a lack of relationship between cognitive aptitude and *myside bias* in thinking (e.g., Stanovich et al. 2013; Stanovich and West 2008). That is, brighter students are actually not substantially better than their peers at being fair and objective when evaluating evidence and argumentation, or distancing their judgment process from their prior opinions. Instead, high cognitive aptitude may only lead gifted students to be better able to rationalize and justify their beliefs, which would feed polarization rather than attenuate it. There are many studies giving guidance on how to cultivate open-minded thinking. These studies often use the umbrella term critical thinking but include core elements of open-minded thinking. For example, Parks (2015) reviewed the critical thinking literature with a particular focus on applying it to gifted education. There has been less empirical research on the teaching of intellectual humility, but Roberts (2015) suggested that teachers should model intellectual humility themselves, encourage students to explicitly describe how and what they have learned from others, and use literature to show students rich examples of intellectual humility as well as its opposite.

Because talented individuals do end up as leaders of society (Wai 2013) in various domains of influence and also hold a large amount of resources and power (Freeland 2012; Goodhart 2020; Sandel 2020), it is important to help them understand that they are fortunate to be talented to begin with. Although they have likely worked quite hard, they started their journey with cognitive and other resources that many of the less fortunate lacked. Individuals who have a head start in life should be taught not to exploit their influence or aptitudes to the disadvantage of others. Relatedly, they may have not developed the skills required to cope with failure—an experience that they may have rarely faced, instead being consistently at the head of the class and accustomed to success. Murray (2008, p. 132) argued that "No one among the gifted should be allowed to rise to a position of influence without knowing what it feels like to fail. The experience of internalized humiliation is a prerequisite for humility." The gifted can benefit from humility and wisdom. Perhaps one key to help talented students fail deliberately is entirely consonant with ensuring all students are fully if not more than sufficiently challenged and meeting their upper cognitive limits in schools through rigorous educational opportunities (Assouline et al. 2015; Wai et al. 2010). Another might be to help the talented but disadvantaged rise to positions of influence as they will have very likely internalized failure more readily in overcoming adversity. Failure may also be crucial to withstand, perhaps even collectively over time, in order to ultimately make a true scientific or other advance. For example, Harris (2021) explains that repeated unsuccessful efforts to develop an HIV vaccine was in fact a core catalyst for developing the scientific know-how that has led to the development of a sequence of other vaccines that led to successfully combating COVID-19.

To further address polarization, gifted students—like all students—should be educated to value and respect different ways of thinking. In particular, it is important for the gifted 5 percent of achievers to have compassion for those who are not as gifted and who likely face many more challenges throughout their lives because they do not have this cognitive or other head start. The gifted should recognize that though they have earned some of their station in life, being a good citizen may increase their responsibility to care for the common good, given that they started on second or third base. This may lead to solving consequential real-world problems that can improve the common good.

#### **9. Practical Implications**

#### *9.1. Identification of Gifted Students (and Really All Students) on a Developmental Continuum*

First, students with high potential must be accurately identified. Research has repeatedly shown that formal assessments capture students that are missed through teacher nomination processes, and formal assessments also lead to more equitable identification rates across ethnic groups (e.g., Card and Giuliano 2016; Grissom and Redding 2016; McBee et al. 2016). Schools should therefore be universally screening students for high aptitude (Card and Giuliano 2016; Dynarski 2018), and also comparing students to others with similar opportunities to learn using local norms to further broaden the group of those identified and are ready for more challenging educational opportunities (Peters et al. 2019). Screening all students at an early age, on mathematical, verbal, and spatial reasoning, and then matching those students to the right mix or dosage of appropriate learning opportunities, can do a great deal to help develop their talents to the fullest (Wai and Lakin 2020). Testing at more than one point in time is important as well, to make room for late bloomers and to ensure educational programming is matched to short-term developmental need (Kaufman 2013). More generally, individuality is wide ranging and society should encourage multiple forms of talent and find productive ways to encourage intellectual diversity. This screening and support should apply to all students in schools, not just a somewhat arbitrarily defined set of students. As Sternberg (2020) noted, real-world problems often have features that are not found in typical intellectual and academic test items, and so we should always be open to considering new aptitude-related constructs and measures that can supplement current testing.

Assessing multiple areas of aptitude (even just the primary three mentioned— mathematical, verbal, and spatial) also helps to address concerns that gifted students who have concomitant disabilities ("twice-exceptional" students) are being neglected. For instance, if only one measure of aptitude is used, and it is heavily verbally loaded, a gifted student with autism spectrum disorder may not be properly identified (see Dawson et al. 2007). This does not mean that the standards for giftedness or disability identification should vary from student to student (see Lovett 2013, for some of the problems with such approaches), only that when selecting assessment measures, different areas of aptitude and disability should be considered.

#### *9.2. The Imperative of Gifted Support*

Second, formal gifted education should be available in far more school districts; it should be a very rare school where a student cannot access some type of appropriate talent development. Additionally, programming for supporting gifted students comes in a variety of forms and may not be limited to public schools (Berner 2017). For instance, acceleration involves leading high-aptitude learners through academic material at faster rates than their peers (Assouline et al. 2015); this broad class of interventions has relatively clear benefits for academic skill development without negative socioemotional effects (Bernstein et al. 2020; Steenbergen-Hu and Moon 2011). Enrichment strategies instead provide additional information on topics covered in class, exposing academically gifted students to specific content domains of knowledge in greater depth; this intervention is associated with even greater

gains in academic skills, as well as improved socioemotional development (Kim 2016). Both strategies address the needs of the academically achieving 5 percent, replacing potentially redundant content with more challenging and stimulating work. Enrichment programs can also involve introducing high-aptitude learners to real-world problems that they may later choose to investigate in greater depth. In addition, both enrichment and acceleration can expose gifted students to quite difficult material, teaching the coping skills and self-awareness that come with the experience of making mistakes and struggling with conceptual complexity, and ultimately learning to fail productively.

#### *9.3. An Environment Supporting Significant Intellectual Accomplishment*

Finally, there needs to be a valuing and respect and even celebration for high accomplishments in cognitive and academic domains of expertise. Optimally, this would happen in the larger culture, but at the very least, schools should be settings where high-aptitude students are motivated to achieve appropriately ambitious goals through incentives, including attention, recognition, and praise from educational professionals and their peers. Gagné (2018) emphasized the importance of personal excellence goals in talent development, but without some extrinsic reinforcers, gifted students are apt to fall into the common path of underachievement (Siegle 2018).

#### **10. Conclusions**

Improving the talent development of the top 5 percent of gifted students globally will improve the likelihood of solving multiple (including presently unforeseen) consequential real-world problems in the future that can promote the common good and enhance our standard of living. Fully developing the talent of low-income and disadvantaged students is crucially important for equity reasons such as social mobility and will also improve innovation, injecting more diverse talent that has likely overcome more failures and developed character in positions of leadership. Investing in all individuals can also have numerous, broad beneficial spillover effects such as social returns. Finally, apart from the benefit to society of fully developed gifted students, the realization of one's personal and intellectual capacities is important to support for *all* students, and for this reason alone we should be ensuring we help the most brilliant students from every walk of life have the opportunity to become their very best.

**Author Contributions:** Conceptualization, J.W. and B.J.L.; writing—original draft preparation, J.W. and B.J.L.; writing—review and editing, J.W. and B.J.L. All authors have read and agreed to the published version of the manuscript.

**Funding:** This research received no external funding.

**Institutional Review Board Statement:** Not applicable.

**Informed Consent Statement:** Not applicable.

**Data Availability Statement:** Not applicable.

**Conflicts of Interest:** The authors declare no conflict of interest.

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**Noah F. G. Evers <sup>1</sup> and Patricia M. Greenfield 2,3,\***


**Abstract:** Based on the theory of social change, cultural evolution, and human development, we propose a mechanism whereby increased danger in society causes predictable shifts in valued forms of intelligence: 1. Practical intelligence rises in value relative to abstract intelligence; and 2. social intelligence shifts from measuring how well individuals can negotiate the social world to achieve their personal aims to measuring how well they can do so to achieve group aims. We document these shifts during the COVID-19 pandemic and argue that they led to an increase in the size and strength of social movements.

**Keywords:** intelligence; social movements; theory of social change, cultural evolution, and human development; social intelligence; practical intelligence; abstract intelligence; COVID-19; cultural evolution; adaptive intelligence; George Floyd protests

#### **1. Introduction**

Based on the theory of social change, cultural evolution, and human development (Evers et al. 2021; Greenfield 2009, 2016, 2018; Greenfield et al. 2021), we propose a mechanism whereby increased danger in society (as indicated by mortality rate and resource scarcity), plus smaller social groupings, trigger evolutionarily conditioned shifts toward the forms of intelligence valued in the small-scale subsistence ecologies omnipresent in earlier human history. Under these conditions, there are two shifts in valued forms of intelligence: 1. *practical intelligence* rises in value relative to *abstract intelligence*; and 2. social intelligence shifts from measuring how well individuals can negotiate the social world to achieve their personal aims to how well they can negotiate the social world to achieve group aims. We document these shifts during the pandemic as society became more dangerous and social units became smaller. We then argue that these shifts in the valued forms of intelligence have led to an increase in the size and strength of social movements. Lastly, we conclude that, on average, throughout human history, these psychological responses likely contributed to humankind's success by creating the most adaptive society for each set of changing environmental conditions. However, since humans seem to employ adaptive intelligence at the community level, one community furthering its aims can cause harm to another community.

#### **2. Theory of Social Change, Cultural Evolution, and Human Development**

The theory of social change, cultural evolution, and human development is a predictive model of how changing sociodemographic variables shift psychological and behavioral variables consistent with archetypal ecological variables (Evers et al. 2021; Greenfield 2009, 2016, 2018; Greenfield et al. 2021). Sociodemographic variables, all of which induce value changes, include formal education, urbanization, and communication technologies (e.g., Manago 2012; Weinstock et al. 2014). The relevant sociodemographic variables in the case of COVID are mortality rate, resource scarcity, and community size. The two ecological archetypes are subsistence and commercial ecologies. The former is associated

**Citation:** Evers, Noah F. G., and Patricia M. Greenfield. 2021. A Model of How Shifting Intelligence Drives Social Movements. *Journal of Intelligence* 9: 62. https://doi.org/ 10.3390/jintelligence9040062

Received: 6 September 2021 Accepted: 30 November 2021 Published: 13 December 2021

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with a collectivistic value system, and the latter with an individualistic value system. Rather than affecting values directly, ecological shifts can also induce behavior change, which subsequently leads to value change, as occurred in a Maya village in Chiapas, Mexico (Greenfield 2004).

Subsistence ecologies are characterized by small villages, short life expectancies, low material resources, collectivism, and basic survival activities; people produce their own food, shelter, and clothing. Most relevant to our argument, members of subsistence ecologies prioritize practical intelligence over abstract intelligence and measure social intelligence by how well an individual can negotiate the social world to benefit the collective (family and community) rather than the individual (Greenfield 2019). Early in human history, these two forms of intelligence were successful adaptations for living in small-scale ecologies with high mortality rates and scarce resources.

In commercial ecologies (a product of cultural evolution) most people live in largescale urban environments; people have substantially longer life expectancies, access to more material resources, and purchase rather than produce food, shelter, and clothing. Most relevant to our argument, people living in a commercial environment prioritize abstract intelligence over practical intelligence; they measure social intelligence by how well an individual can negotiate the social world to benefit the individual rather than the collective (Greenfield 2019). These forms of intelligence are not mutually exclusive contrasts but are relative prioritizations of intelligence components.

Contrary to the conventional construct of intelligence as measured by IQ, we are taking intelligence as a multi-faceted construct consisting of an amalgamation of different sub-constructs that include ability, knowledge, character, wisdom, values, and skills. Our concept of intelligence also subsumes underlying motives or aims which employ these subconstructs.

#### **3. The Pandemic Creates a Shift in Valued Forms of Intelligence**

Our research has shown that, as COVID-19 increased mortality rates in the United States, made resources scarcer, and greatly reduced the scale of people's social world, values and behavior shifted toward the values and behavior characteristic of subsistence ecologies (Evers et al. 2021; Greenfield et al. 2021), albeit in a technologically enhanced environment (Brown and Greenfield 2021). Since the pandemic made the environment radically more dangerous and people's social world much smaller in a very short period of time, it served as a powerful natural experiment.

High mortality rates and small social units are characteristics of a subsistence village ecology. During the coronavirus pandemic, both of these environmental features increased greatly in a sudden fashion. Under stay-at-home orders, people were interacting with a smaller number of other people. At the same time, many were experiencing increased danger from COVID-19. Conditions were moving toward those found in subsistence ecologies.

Our theory predicted (and we found) that greater survival concerns (e.g., thinking about one's own mortality) and more days spent observing stay-at-home rules would lead to increased subsistence activities and values, more collectivism, greater family interdependence, and parents socializing children to contribute to family maintenance. We tested the theory in the United States with both a large-scale survey and a massive analysis of internet behavior (Evers et al. 2021; Greenfield et al. 2021).

Most relevant to forms of intelligence, subsistence activities (e.g., growing food) are a manifestation of practical intelligence; the frequency of these activities rose during the pandemic both online and in the real world. Shifts in values and new directions in children's socialization supported the development of practical intelligence. During the pandemic, subsistence values (e.g., conserving resources) increased and parents expected children to contribute more to household subsistence with practical skills (e.g., helping prepare family meals). This shift in parent expectations not only developed children's practical intelligence; contributing to family subsistence may have also developed their *collectively oriented social intelligence.* Increases during the pandemic of collectivistic values (sacrificing, sharing, helping, and giving), as well as increased family interdependence (participation in family activities, mutual help to family members) were a manifestation in both values and behavior of the increased importance of collectively oriented social intelligence.

These findings represent a shift in American psychology and behavior toward that typical of the small-scale subsistence villages, prevalent at an earlier point in human history. Since we found "parallel adaptations occurring in only a few weeks during stay-at-home and the pandemic, we suggest that the human species is geared for the same adaptations when these conditions reappear" (Greenfield et al. 2021). However, societies where there was, even before the pandemic, greater respect for authority, a characteristic associated with subsistence ecologies, had an easier time responding to the pandemic with behavioral restrictions than societies, such as the United States, in which the value of individual freedom was greater (Gelfand 2020).

#### **4. The History of Practical Intelligence in the Field of Psychology**

The concept of practical intelligence emerged in the 1940s with the invention of situational judgment tests to assess managerial potential and came to the forefront with Robert Sternberg's triarchic theory of intelligence and subsequent theory of successful intelligence (McDaniel and Whetzel 2005; Sternberg 1985, 1988, 1997). Practical intelligence has been characterized as "street smarts", "common sense", or the "cognitive underpinning of everyday function" (Hedlund 2020, p. 737; Yalon-Chamovitz and Greenspan 2005, p. 220; Nunes et al. 1993). More generally, practical intelligence refers to the ability to solve the problems individuals encounter in everyday life (Hedlund 2020; Sternberg and Grigorenko 2000). It requires employing solutions to problems that involve the actual doing of something and can be contrasted to abstract intelligence, employing solutions that concern theory and ideas.

Practical intelligence is a form of intelligence that evolved to facilitate the functioning and survival of subsistence communities (Greenfield 2019). Subsistence activities require the development of practical intelligence. However, practical intelligence is usually not prioritized in our technological environment, where the emphasis is on abstract intelligence. However, as noted earlier, during the pandemic, there was a significant rise in the exercise of practical intelligence (Evers et al. 2021; Greenfield et al. 2021). This shift was stimulated by increased mortality salience brought about by the all-too-real mortality threat of the pandemic and the narrowing of the social world to household and immediate neighbors due to stay-at-home orders (Greenfield et al. 2021). Activities that increased during the pandemic, such as baking bread or home repair (Evers et al. 2021; Greenfield et al. 2021) require practical intelligence, adapted to real-world contexts, as Alexander Luria (1976) pointed out decades ago.

The different intelligences are suited to the perceived urgency with which a problem needs to be solved. Practical intelligence is better suited to high levels of immediacy, and abstract intelligence is better suited to lower levels of immediacy. For this reason, in times of danger when humans face an immediate threat, they employ more practical intelligence than abstract intelligence and vice versa under safer conditions. This ability to shift the focus of intelligence in order to adapt to different conditions is a basic secret to the evolutionary success of human beings.

#### **5. Types of Social Intelligence in the Field of Psychology**

The modern concept of social intelligence has its origin in E.L. Thorndike's division of intelligence into three different abilities: the ability to comprehend and manipulate ideas (abstract intelligence), concrete objects (mechanical intelligence), and people (social intelligence) (Thorndike and Stein 1937). Thorndike wrote: "By social intelligence is meant the ability to understand and manage men and women, boys and girls—to act wisely in human relations." Since Thorndike's classical formulation of social intelligence, it has been measured and defined in many ways, and two principal perspectives emerged (Kihlstrom and Cantor 2000). The first perspective was social intelligence as an ability, embodied by Thorndike's definition above and subsequently espoused in different notable iterations by Guilford (1967), Gardner (1983), and Goleman (1995). Later, Kihlstrom and Cantor offered a second perspective, "The Knowledge View of Social Intelligence", where social intelligence refers to an "individual's fund of knowledge about the social world", mediated by the individual's general cognitive processes (Kihlstrom and Cantor 2000, p. 573; 1989; Cantor and Kihlstrom 1987, 1989).

However, these definitions assess small differences between individuals in today's developed Western societies. This measurement orientation is evident in the individualistic lens through which social intelligence is defined both by Thorndike and Kihlstrom/Cantor: intelligence as an ability measures how well an individual can manipulate others for their aims. Intelligence as knowledge differs only slightly since it says that social intelligence is an individual's store of specific knowledge about the social world transformed into behavior by general cognitive ability. Whether someone has social intelligence, defined as an ability or a fund of knowledge, their intelligence is measured by how well they can manipulate others for their own aims as an individual. This measure is most relevant for current Western psychology since the status quo of Western thinking and, as a result, psychology as a discipline, is to use the individual as the basic unit of society.

However, in this essay, our interest is in fundamental deviations from the status quo of Western thinking, shifts from the psychology and behavior of modern ecologies toward the psychology and behavior of the subsistence ecologies that defined an earlier era of human history and exist in pockets of today's world. A fundamental difference between subsistence ecologies and ours is that, in the former, the welfare of the community supersedes that of the individual.

Outside the Western definitions of social intelligence as a measure of ability or a fund of knowledge, an entirely different conception has arisen through studying how subsistence ecologies think about what we would refer to as "social intelligence." Mundy-Castle's definition of social intelligence originated in his long-term experience with African cultures. He defined social intelligence to include character, wisdom, and collectivistic values, and emphasized that social intelligence incorporated technical skills insofar as they contributed to the community (Mundy-Castle 1974). Similarly, Dasen, studying a Baoulé village in Ivory Coast, emphasized that the Baoulé concept of intelligence, *n*'*glouèlê,* integrates cognitive and social skills, as do many other African concepts of intelligence (Dasen 2011). Indeed, the most central (in the sense of agreed upon) attribute for intelligent children listed by Baoulé farmers was "readiness to carry out tasks in the service of the family and the community", a social quality (Dasen 1984, p. 426).

Lest one think that collectively oriented social intelligence is not suited to measurement, we note that a Pakistani team psychometrized a closely related concept of social intelligence, developing and validating a social intelligence scale in a sample of Pakistani university students (Habib et al. 2013). Their factor analysis revealed empathy, a key quality in collectively oriented social intelligence. as a principal component of social intelligence, a quality that had been declining in U.S. culture for decades (Konrath et al. 2011).

For our analysis, we distinguish the social intelligence of modern commercial ecologies from subsistence ecologies by the end goal. Whether we define social intelligence as a measure of ability or fund of knowledge, the social intelligence of modern commercial ecologies furthers the individual's aims, whereas the social intelligence of subsistence ecologies furthers the collective's aims. We connect social intelligence in subsistence ecologies to care for a broader community, not just oneself, and the willingness to make sacrifices for others. A rise in the social intelligence important in subsistence ecologies would increase someone's motivation to care more about and make sacrifices for their broader community. Our thesis is that the rising value of this collectivistic form of social intelligence, as well as the increased value placed on practical intelligence, paved the way for large-scale social movements during the pandemic.

#### **6. Shifts in Valued Forms of Intelligence Prime Americans for Social Movements**

Our thesis is that the augmented value of practical intelligence and collectivistically oriented social intelligence resulted in a massive increase in the desire to solve problems that faced communities and to solve them using real-world action. This is the broad-strokes definition of a social movement. Our evidence is that the pandemic witnessed a number of social movements of unprecedented size and strength. In a relatively short period of eight months, three movements spanning ideology and form shook the country. These movements were all similar in that they were expressed through employing solutions that involved the actual doing of something (practical intelligence) and, in all three cases, their aim was to benefit a community (collectively oriented social intelligence). However, each movement served the goals of a different community, thus contributing evidence to the generality of the theory. When environmental danger increases, it shifts intelligences to prime communities to enact social movements, and the shift in valued intelligence implies a shift in values. However, social movements can still occur under other conditions.

Interestingly, despite these proclivities having developed in pre-technology communities, we see them play out in our technologically enhanced environment, a factor that strengthened all of the social movements. In fact, in our increasingly tech-enabled world, the internet is forming communities along unprecedented lines and creating ingroups based on various similarities, whereas, in the past, primarily geographic and ethnic similarities defined communities. Today, the internet can align like-minded folks and place them into information silos, which further entrench their allegiance to their community and strengthen their beliefs in their communities' ideologies.

However, there was also increased interaction within small neighborhood units during the pandemic as geospatial research using cellphone data shows: the number of COVID-19 cases was correlated with increases in neighborhood isolation a week later. Additionally, places with larger populations, more public transportation use, and greater racial and ethnic segregation had larger increases in neighborhood isolation during 2020 (Marlow et al. 2021). Both the kind of communities that formed earlier in human history and those that have developed most recently grew stronger.

#### **7. The George Floyd Protests**

Incited by George Floyd's death in police custody, the George Floyd Black Lives Matter protests became the "largest movement in U.S. History", with an estimated 15 to 26 million adults taking to the streets to demonstrate (Buchanan et al. 2020). George Floyd was not the first black individual to be killed by the police or even to have their murder filmed, so why did his death in particular cause a cultural movement of unprecedented scale? Why did the largest social movement in U.S. history occur during the height of a deadly pandemic, which threatened Americans with the very real possibility of catching an illness that was ravaging the country around them?

Our theory makes the unlikely timing of this protest movement of unprecedented scale understandable. It posits that the dramatic increase in ecological danger increased collectively oriented social intelligence, priming people to want to solve issues that faced their community. The dramatic increases in the mindshare of "sacrifice", "share", "help", and "give" observed in our online analyses (Evers et al. 2021) may have primed people to be more inclined to set aside their daily commitments, forget their hesitations to civil disobedience, and lessen the extent of their self-protective coronavirus measures to improve the welfare of the Black individuals that they viewed as members of their community.

Based on Reny and Newman (2021), it seems that the community driving the George Floyd protests was low-prejudice and politically-liberal Americans. Unlike prior Black Lives Matter protests, which were majority black and could be interpreted as individualistic responses to bettering one's own welfare, almost 95% of the American counties that participated in the recent Black Lives Matter protest, were majority white, indicating an altruistic desire to help disenfranchised members of one's community (Buchanan et al. 2020). Such a community did not exist in geographic space; it was formed virtually by means of the

internet. This rise in altruistic action reflects an increased value placed on collectivistic components of social intelligence. At the same time, the rise in practical intelligence documented in our studies of the pandemic was expressed by practical action on the streets rather than more abstract virtual action online.

#### **8. 2020 United States Presidential Election**

Five months after the Black Lives Matter movement, an unprecedented social movement driven by two very different communities occurred. The 2020 United States presidential election on 3 November 2020, witnessed the highest voter turnout by percentage since 1900, with this voting spike occurring across both Democratic-leaning and Republic-leaning demographics (Park 2020; Frey 2021). The unusually high turnout by both Democrats and Republicans reflects the divided political landscape of America. As predicted by our theory, members of both parties felt a significantly increased desire to solve the problems facing their respective community, that is, members of their political party, and expressed that desire through the real-world solution of voting.

#### **9. 2021 United States Capitol Attack**

Two months after the election, on 6 January 2021, the United States Capitol was violently attacked by a mob of Donald Trump supporters, who successfully disrupted the planned counting of electoral votes that would formalize Joe Biden's victory (Luke 2021; Reeves et al. 2021). The attack resulted in American insurrectionists mounting the first mass breach of the U.S. Capitol since the War of 1812 (Dilanian and Collins 2021; Lakritz 2021). Hundreds of Donald Trump supporters felt a significantly increased desire to solve problems facing their community; in this case the community was right-wing extremists, again very much a product of an internet information silo. They integrated this manifestation of social intelligence with the practical intelligence necessary to organize an attack on the Capitol to disrupt the counting of the electoral votes.

#### **10. Conclusions**

#### *10.1. Implications for Social Change*

When we initially found that residents of the United States valued practical intelligence and collectively oriented social intelligence significantly more during the pandemic, our interpretation was positive (Evers et al. 2021; Greenfield et al. 2021). We predicted that these shifts in valued intelligence would optimize the creation of a more cohesive and empathetic society, thus reversing the documented historical decline in empathy (Konrath et al. 2011) and communitarian activity (Putnam 2000). At the simplest level, we thought people would care more about other people and employ practical methods to realize their desired outcomes. At that point in the pandemic, the Black Lives Matter movement was the only social movement of unprecedented size and strength that had occurred, so, being low-prejudice, liberal Americans ourselves, we concluded that collectivistic goals combined with real-world action lend themselves particularly well to social progress. When the other two unprecedented movements occurred, it threw into question our idea of linear social progress. Today's society is much larger than the social units of early human history. For most of cultural history, the social unit of reference was a small village in which everyone knew each other. However, the United States has a population of over 300 million (United States Census Bureau 2021). Our prediction that the shifts in valued intelligences would create linear social progress was wrong since social progress is subjective, and the functional collective unit is not the United States but subgroups within the country. People identify with their communities and, as the world gets more dangerous and protective responses kick in, those ingroups become even more cohesive. It seems clear that the shifts in valued intelligence created by increased mortality rate, resource scarcity, and a narrowing of the social world do not lead to any particular direction of social change but to stronger and larger social movements that have more to do with a specific community's desired direction of social change than to the country as a whole. Hence, the result can and

has been social movements going in opposite directions. In a complex society, collectively solving one community's social problems may easily be perceived to create greater social problems for a different community.

#### *10.2. How Lasting Are These Pandemic-Induced Intelligence Shifts?*

As observed by Evers et al. (2021) and Greenfield et al. (2021), the pandemic caused humans to adapt very quickly. America witnessed a massive shift in psychology and behavior toward an earlier time of human history within a couple of months. Therefore, humans will likely adapt similarly quickly in the opposite direction when the conditions reverse.

#### *10.3. The Adaptiveness of Shifting Intelligence*

Intelligence is traditionally conceptualized as a general factor in a psychometricallybased hierarchical intelligence model and measured by standardized tests such as the IQ test (Sternberg 2019). Early psychometricians designed the IQ test to predict real-world performance, and the tests were considered valuable to the extent that they predicted that performance (Sternberg 2021). However, a false turnaround has occurred over time where the IQ or score on a similar standardized test of intelligence has become more important than whatever the tests predict. While almost all definitions of intelligence agree on one thing, that intelligence involves the ability to adapt to the environment, the current understanding of "intelligence" refers to a construct that is, at best, vaguely related to intelligence as adaptation (Sternberg 2019). Sternberg rejects the current understanding of intelligence as measured by IQ and similar measures and instead believes that the measure of intelligence should be its adaptiveness in an evolutionary sense (Sternberg 2019, 2021). Human psychological processes and behavior that are "adaptively intelligent" further the biological interests of survival. Sternberg defines adaptive intelligence in the context of success at broad adaptation. Broad adaptation includes narrow adaptation, a "process by which an animal or plant species becomes fitted to its environment; it is the result of natural selection's acting upon heritable variation" (Gittleman 2018) along with "changing the environment to fit oneself (shaping the environment) and finding or creating new environments as needed (selecting environments)" (Sternberg 2019).

By this definition, would the observed shifts in intelligence be considered "adaptively intelligent?" Yes, but in a slightly different fashion than Sternberg's model of adaptive intelligence. First, it appears that the shifts in intelligence observed during the pandemic occurred with the community as the basic social unit and furthered the aims of the community, which may or may not have aligned with the aims of the entire species. However, it is unnatural for humans to think on such a large level as optimizing the survival of the whole human species when we have been hard-wired through evolutionary history to operate on the level of a small village. For this reason, it seems people have a hard time making progress against the existential threats facing humanity, namely climate change, nuclear weapons, and pollution, which Sternberg argues would be some of the best measures for adaptive intelligence (Sternberg 2019). We would say that for better or for worse, evolution did not condition humans for those sorts of threats. They are too big and too distant. Instead, it seems that humans are much better suited to be adaptively intelligent on the level of their community or ingroup. We would posit that intelligence is a community, not an individual or species adaptation.

It is intuitively adaptive that when the world gets more dangerous, the rising value of collectively oriented social intelligence increases motivation to care more about and further the aims of one's tribe, and the rising value of practical intelligence increases the motivation to solve the pressing issues facing their tribe using practical solutions. While this banding together as a community and solving the community's pressing issues is generally a successful evolutionary strategy, it requires that the community solve the correct issues with the correct solutions. For these shifts in intelligence to be adaptively intelligent, they would have to focus on solving survival problems, which would mean that the community would have to care enough about the survival problems and address them with a correct solution. While, on average, humans have been able to do this successfully, that does not mean that the evolutionarily fit decision is always evident.

For example, one might say that refusing to wear masks caused thousands or hundreds of thousands of deaths. However, this is a matter about which different communities, split down partisan, gender, and racial lines, hold differing ideologies (Brenan 2020). One's opinion on this issue says more about the community they belong to than the objective adaptivity of mask-wearing since both the communities that wear masks and those that refuse to can rationalize their behavior using the language of survival. Mask wearers can point to research showing that masks effectively decrease the spread of air-borne COVID-19 particles (Union-Bulletin Editorial Board 2020). In contrast, those who refuse to wear masks can point to research showing that wearing masks can lead to a dangerous false sense of security, cause other health risks, worsen the burden of COVID-19 on an individual, and even increase the spread of COVID-19 through inappropriate mask use (Lazzarino 2020).

Humans can never truly know the actions to execute that will best ensure the survival of their community. Therefore, they act on ideologies since, by definition, an ideology is the system of ideas held by a community. We have examples to show that when people come under threat, they shift these specific intelligences, resulting in furthering the collective's aims through practical measures. However, it seems that the aims of the collective that this adaptation furthers have a higher correlation with the centrality to the community's ideology than the objective adaptiveness of these aims as defined by survival. That said, one can imagine that pressing survival threats in forms that evolution conditioned humans for (not the massive, distant threats of climate change, nuclear weapons, and pollution) would become central to a community's ideology and be solved. Therefore, it appears that humans use a heuristic to reason by proxy that the most adaptive path is to execute their community's ideology. Does this mean that ideology trumps intelligence? No. When the world gets more dangerous, intelligence becomes the vehicle for enacting and furthering ideology. Why might this be evolutionarily fit? Since in dangerous times, individuals banding together as a collective to enact solutions in line with their community's ideology is a safer and faster bet for problem solving than if the individuals were to innovate unique solutions.

#### *10.4. Implications for Cultural Evolution*

Different intelligences are adapted to different ecologies. For example, in pre-COVID times, abstract intelligence was valued over practical intelligence and *individually oriented social intelligence* was valued over collectively oriented social intelligence in the United States and other commercial ecologies (Mundy-Castle 1974; Greenfield 2019). These forms of intelligence are perfect for making technological and scientific progress. As evinced by rising economic inequality and other social problems, this progress came at the cost of having an increasingly less empathetic and community-minded society (Konrath et al. 2011; Putnam 2000). As valued intelligences shift, based on changing ecological conditions, there will always be a trade-off between the psychological conditions that best push humanity into the future through technological and scientific advances and the conditions that strengthen social bonds and lead to solving social problems.

This dynamic interplay between valuing community welfare and valuing technological progress is, in our view, a permanent part of human history. We hypothesize an evolved tendency in social and cultural evolution to favor groups that strengthen their social units in times of danger and instability but push forward with advances in technology and abstract thinking in times of safety and stability. If corroborated by continuing research, the balance between these opposing forces would even appear to be responsible for much of humankind's evolutionary success.

**Author Contributions:** Conceptualization, N.F.G.E. and P.M.G.; writing—original draft preparation, N.F.G.E.; writing—review and editing, N.F.G.E. and P.M.G. All authors have read and agreed to the published version of the manuscript.

**Funding:** This research received no external funding.

**Conflicts of Interest:** The authors declare no conflict of interest.

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