A recent study in the British Medical Journal has found that brain surgeons and rocket scientists perform no better than laymen on 12 online tasks using the Great British Intelligence Test (GBIT).
Howard Gardner was asked by The Daily Telegraph for his thoughts on this finding. He responded as follows:
"The standard IQ test is a reasonably good predictor of how one will perform in a standard school," says Gardner, now Hobbs research professor of cognition and education at Harvard.
"But once you move away from performance in a scholastic environment, other abilities come to the fore. IQ tests tap linguistic and logical-mathematical abilities. But you need assessments of other intelligences to predict who will become an effective therapist or sales person (personal intelligences), athlete or surgeon (bodily-kinesthetic intelligence), composer (musical intelligence), sculptor or architect (spatial intelligence), biologist (naturalist intelligence)."
As a result, Gardner believes we "need to talk about intelligences, rather than intelligence, and about personality traits and motivational factors if one wants to understand fully the nature of surgery or rocket science."
The full article is available here.