148 Teaching Minds
Similarly, these people probably can influence one another, work in teams, and negotiate with one another to some extent. They may not be great at it, but we wouldn’t characterize the ability to influence others well as a sign of intelligence. Many world leaders are very influ- ential but not all of those are considered to be brilliant.
Similarly, the ability to be a good team player is no way considered to be a sign of intelligence. Some very bright people have difficulty working with others. These things are not signs of intelligence.
Modeling and experimentation ability aren’t really important when we talk about intelligence. Experimentation is something scien- tists do. Children and chefs and nonscientists do it as well, of course. But we wouldn't criticize these interviewees if it turned out that they didn’t know how to experiment. We certainly have no idea from these interviews whether they can experiment or not. We can guess that they cannot. We tend to think that experimentation is the province of brilliant people, but would we say that someone is unintelligent because they don’t know how to conduct a real experiment? Or, that a chef is brilliant because he takes risks with food? (We may say that he is a brilliant chef, but that doesn’t mean we think he is brilliant.) Experimentation has a lot to do with innovation, which is certainly related to intelligence, but, again, it really is not what we think about when we hear interviews and think that the people being interviewed are stupid.
Similarly, we don’t know whether these folks can effectively create a model of the world. It seems a good guess that they cannot, but, yet again, this lies more within the province of science and very intel- ligent thinking than within our everyday definition of intelligence. Some very smart people have weird models of the world or no model of certain aspects of the world.
We do not think that the interviewees are stupid because they don’t conduct experiments or create elaborate world models.
But a different story emerges when we look at the rest of the cogni- tive processes, Which of the remaining processes are clearly missing in the answers supplied by the interviewees above?
Obviously these people don’t speak particularly well.
Being able to aptly describe your views, or describe a situation you have been in, or a thought you have had, is a hallmark of intelligence.
We judge people’s intelligence, at least in part, by how well they speak.
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