Speculations on the Role of Successful Intelligence in Solving Contemporary World Problems †

Ethics and Meditation: A New Educational Combination to Boost Verbal Creativity and Sense of Responsibility

Both creativity and responsibility are important higher-order skills to develop to meet the challenges of the Anthropocene, and both are related to attentional states of consciousness and to ethics. Meditation is a set of practices that trains attentional and emotional regulation. A few studies have shown that different kinds of meditation can foster different kinds of creative thinking, and others have begun to investigate the effect of the combination of meditation and ethics on ethical characteristics (but not yet on creativity or precisely on responsibility, so far). Here, we present a nonrandomized trial with an active control group among second-year science university students (n = 84) to test the effect of the secular Meditation-Based Ethics of Responsibility (MBER) program on creative potential, self-reported awareness, and sense of one's own responsibility. The results show a large effect of the program on sense of one's own responsibility and convergent and divergent creative writing tasks, both in conceptual-semantic and engineering-like verbal ideation. They also suggest that convergent conceptual-semantic thinking might moderate the effect of the MBER program on the awareness and sense of one's own responsibility. This work opens up new research and educational perspectives linked to necessary behavioral changes in the Anthropocene.

Do Different Types of Intelligence and Its Implicit Theories Vary Based on Gender and Grade Level?

The current study investigated correlations among gifted students' academic performance; emotional, social, analytical, creative, and practical intelligence; and their implicit theories of intelligence. Furthermore, it studied the effect of gender and grade on these variables. The participants included 174 gifted fifth (41.4%) and sixth (58.6%) grade students, comprising 53.4% male and 46.6% female. The following analytical, creative, and practical intelligence tests were administered: Aurora Battery, the emotional intelligence scale, the implicit theories of intelligence scale, and an assessment scale of students' performances. The results revealed significant correlations among academic performance, kinds of intelligence, and implicit theories of intelligence. There were no significant differences between the male and female students in these measures. There were, however, significant differences between the fifth and sixth grade students, with the sixth-grade students showing higher levels of all kinds of intelligence, except emotional intelligence. Moreover, the results indicated that the intelligence measures were non-significantly affected by either gender or gender-grade interaction. Overall, our results showed that most types of intelligence are related to giftedness, and that there were no gender differences among gifted students on measures of intelligence.

Problem solving through values: A challenge for thinking and capability development

The paper aims to introduce the conceptual framework of problem solving through values. The framework consists of problem analysis, selection of value(s) as a background for the solution, the search for alternative ways of the solution, and the rationale for the solution. This framework reveals when, how, and why is important to think about values when solving problems. A consistent process fosters cohesive and creative value-based thinking during problem solving rather than teaching specific values. Therefore, the framework discloses the possibility for enabling the development of value-grounded problem solving capability.The application of this framework highlights the importance of responsibility for the chosen values that are the basis for the alternatives which determine actions. The 4W framework is meaningful for the people's lives and their professional work. It is particularly important in the process of future professionals' education. Critical issues concerning the development of problem solving through values are discussed when considering and examining options for the implementation of the 4W framework in educational institutions.

When Irrational Biases Are Smart: A Fuzzy-Trace Theory of Complex Decision Making

I take a decision-making approach to consider ways of addressing the "unresolved and dramatic problems in the world". Traditional approaches to good decision-making are reviewed. These approaches reduce complex decisions to tradeoffs between magnitudes of probabilities, and outcomes in which the quantity and precision of information are key to making good decisions. I discuss a contrasting framework, called "fuzzy-trace theory", which emphasizes understanding the simple gist of options and applying core social and moral values. Importantly, the tendency to rely on meaningful but simple gist increases from childhood to adulthood (or, in adulthood, as people gain experience in a domain), so that specific irrational biases grow with knowledge and experience. As predicted theoretically, these violations of rationality in the traditional sense are associated empirically with healthier and more adaptive outcomes. Thus, interventions that help decision makers understand the essential gist of their options and how it connects to core values are practical approaches to reducing "unresolved and dramatic problems in the world" one decision at a time.

The Strengths of Wisdom Provide Unique Contributions to Improved Leadership, Sustainability, Inequality, Gross National Happiness, and Civic Discourse in the Face of Contemporary World Problems

We present evidence for the strengths of the intellectual virtues that philosophers and behavioral scientists characterize as key cognitive elements of wisdom. Wisdom has been of centuries-long interest for philosophical scholarship, but relative to intelligence largely neglected in public discourse on educational science, public policy, and societal well-being. Wise reasoning characteristics include intellectual humility, recognition of uncertainty, consideration of diverse viewpoints, and an attempt to integrate these viewpoints. Emerging scholarship on these features of wisdom suggest that they uniquely contribute to societal well-being, improve leadership, shed light on societal inequality, promote cooperation in Public Goods Games and reduce political polarization and intergroup-hostility. We review empirical evidence about macro-cultural, ecological, situational, and person-level processes facilitating and inhibiting wisdom in daily life. Based on this evidence, we speculate about ways to foster wisdom in education, organizations, and institutions.

Creativity as a Stepping Stone toward a Brighter Future

If IQs continue to rise over generation, why has the world been unable to solve basic recurrent problems? This paper argues that creativity, which is overlooked in IQ tests and showing no signs of a similar increase, may be part of the reason of why the Flynn Effect has not led to a better world. Creativity's predictive power for traditional positive outcomes, such as school or work performance, is significant but slight. However, there are other ways that creativity can help to make a better world. Two exemplar ways that are discussed in this paper are how creativity can (a) help people lead happier and more meaningful lives and (b) focus a spotlight on talented members of underrepresented groups who are overlooked by traditional measures. Both of these directions can lead to a world that is better equipped to solve larger issues.

Intellectual Brilliance and Presidential Performance: Why Pure Intelligence (or Openness) Doesn't Suffice

In recent years it has become popular on the internet to debate the IQ of the incumbent president of the United States. Yet, these controversies (and hoaxes) presume that IQ has some relevance to understanding the president's actual performance as the nation's leader. This assumption is examined by reviewing the empirical research on the intelligence-performance association in political leadership, with a special focus on U.S. presidents. The review starts by discussing at-a-distance assessment techniques, a method that has yielded reliable and valid measures of IQ, Intellectual Brilliance, and Openness to Experience; three correlated even if separable concepts. The discussion then turns to the reliable and valid measurement of presidential performance-or "greatness"-via successive surveys of hundreds of experts. These two lines of research then converged on the emergence of a six-predictor equation, in which Intellectual Brilliance plays a major role, to the exclusion of both IQ and Openness. The greatest presidents are those who feature wide interests, and who are artistic, inventive, curious, intelligent, sophisticated, complicated, insightful, wise, and idealistic (but who are far from being either dull or commonplace). These are the personal traits we should look for in the person who occupies the nation's highest office if we seek someone most likely to solve the urgent problems of today and tomorrow.