To hear Robert Sternberg tell it, his life has been one mistake
afteranother. And a good thing, too. "Most of the work I've done stems
from my own insecurities and failures," says the Yale psychologist,
almost proudly. "Many of my ideas come from the things I think I don't do
well--which are a lot of things." I.Q. tests, for one. The low scores
Sternberg achieved as a child led later to his theory of practical
intelligence--and a book by the same name--about the kind of smarts that
matter in the real world. Relationships, for another: a failed love
affair was the spark for Love is a Story (Oxford University Press), the
most recent of the more than fifty books Sternberg has written or edited
in his twenty-three-year career.
Self-deprecation aside, Sternberg has turned his shortcomings to
impressive advantage, creating sweeping theories about the nature of
knowledge, intelligence, and love. Love is a Story collects the
narratives we all impose on our relationships; Thinking Styles (Cambridge
University Press, 1997) describes our varied mental patterns. Many of his
books explore the different ways we approach the same endeavors. "There
isn't one best way of doing things, something our society very much needs
to learn," says Sternberg. "We're a society that wants things to be black
and white, a, b, c, or d. What other country has such a preoccupation
with multiple-choice tests? Life really isn't that way."
If others in the field are offended | by Sternberg's views on the
limited value of intelligence tests, that's all right with him. "It's
okay to defy the crowd," he says. "Scientists, contrary to lay views, are
even more conformist than other people. They want to be part of a group,
and they follow whatever the fads are." He says he's learned to ignore
such trends, since "science isn't done by majority rule." Still, being an
iconoclast has its costs: "You have to realize that you'll be unpopular
with a lot of people. I've never been good with elections, and I've never
been invited to a lot of parties."
And yet Sternberg thinks his maverick style has served him well.
"People who are serious about their work give it a sort of trademark," he
muses. "I don't worry too much about people stealing my ideas, because I
have a way of doing things that I think people would recognize." And what
is that way? "I'm not one of those super-creative people who overturn
existing patterns. I wish I were, but I'm not," he says. "What I do is
pull a little from here, a little from there, change it a little, and put
it together."
The result is a vision of human nature that may remind the reader
of Sternberg himself: individual, idiosyncratic, and resistant to
classification of any kind. The way teachers teach and lovers love must
be tailored to each individual, he says, or else we lose the glorious
variety that makes us human. Though he will, in irreverent moments,
compare the dissemination of his theories to the selling of soap,
Sternberg is more likely to speak of "making a difference," a phrase that
comes up again and again in his conversation. He wants his ideas to leave
the page and enter people's lives, and he's disappointed that none has
made the leap to his satisfaction. "I hope there's one thing I do before
I pop off that really makes a difference, and I don't think I've done it
yet," he says.
He may yet have his chance "The problem I'd most like to crack," he
says, "is wisdom. I've totally failed at it so far--well, not totally.
Ninety-eight percent." He's still working on a definition of wisdom, and
would like one day I to develop a scale to measure its achievement. "I'm
probably not wise enough yet to do it," says the 48-year-old Sternberg,
chuckling. "I'm hoping that one advantage of becoming an old fogey will
be that I'll become wise and see it better than I do now."
Asked whether wisdom might continue to elude the efforts of
psychologists to pin it down, Sternberg answers that while wisdom "will
never be fully encompassed by psychology, there are things we can do to
understand it. "When we haven't been smart enough to figure out how to
study something, we'll often say that it can't be studied," he observes.
"What we should say is, `Well, I haven't figured that out yet--but
there's always next week.'"
ILLUSTRATION
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