Intelligence as Smart Heuristics

Abstract

“ The great end of life is not knowledge but action ” Thomas H. Huxley (1825–1895) Humans and other animals differ in the amount of intelligence ascribed to them or that can be tested. Observed behavior reflects the underlying cognitive abilities of the individual that are either thought of as a general device system or a system of more or less independent parts. On this continuum, the view of intelligence as fast and frugal heuristics orientates toward a concept that models intelligence as parts (tools) of a larger system ( adaptive toolbox ). This view departs from the notion of intelligence as an assembly of “factors”: either one ( g ), a few, or many. The idea that one could model the intelligence of a person by the values of one or several factors became prominent after the invention of factor analysis, a statistical tool, in the early twentieth century. A key problem with this tool-driven metaphor of intelligence is that it does not describe how cognition translates into behavior. The consequence of this missing link is that the usefulness of factor values to predict behavior is quite limited (Sternberg, Grigorenko, & Bundy, 2001). More importantly, the exclusive focus on paper-and-pencil tasks has estranged the notion of intelligence from the abilities and heuristics that are relevant for everyday behavior as well as for solving the problems that experts struggle with. In this chapter, we propose a radically different view of intelligence that links cognition with behavior in terms of heuristics.

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