Abstract
Intelligence is a well-studied construct in psychology that has correlational relationships with many educational, employment, and health outcomes. However, prior research indicates that incorrect beliefs about intelligence are widespread. In an effort to discern the degree to which the psychology curriculum is responsible for these inaccuracies, we collected course descriptions and catalog information from 303 American colleges and universities. We found that college courses dedicated to mainstream intelligence science are rare. Because the lack of intelligence education within psychology is a plausible contributor to incorrect beliefs about intelligence, we present an outline for a college-level course on intelligence. We also provide advice for implementing a course, including course readings and advice for handling controversies.
Although there is considerable heterogeneity across programs, there are several commonalities to the undergraduate psychology education curriculum. In a recent survey of course catalogs, M. Stoloff et al. (2010) found that over three-quarters of psychology programs offered courses in research methods, developmental psychology, introductory psychology, abnormal psychology, social psychology, personality psychology, physiological psychology, history and systems, learning and memory, and cognitive psychology. These areas largely match the American Psychological Association’s (2014) five “pillars” of psychology that represent the core of the discipline: social/personality, mental and physical health, developmental, cognitive, and biological. However, psychology students generally have a great deal of flexibility in the courses that they must complete to graduate (M. Stoloff et al., 2010; M. L. Stoloff et al., 2015). Many students have the option to take courses in niche areas of psychology such as child psychopathology, drugs and behavior, and behavior modification.
Although we are pleased with the breadth and flexibility of psychology education, we believe there is a major gap in the psychology curriculum: a course on intelligence, which one expert called “…one of the scientifically most productive constructs in psychology…” (Jensen, 2002, p. 150), and yet, it is rarely the subject of a dedicated course in psychology departments. Given that “…intelligence ranks among the best understood psychological constructs…” (Warne, 2016, p. 5), we believe that the consequences of this lacuna in the psychology curriculum have been distinctly negative and that psychology faculty should add an intelligence course to their curriculum.
What Is Intelligence?
Although, like many constructs in psychology, there is disagreement about an exact definition of intelligence, one definition has found widespread support, which states that, Intelligence is a very general mental capability that, among other things, involves the ability to reason, plan, solve problems, think abstractly, comprehend complex ideas, learn quickly and learn from experience. It is not merely book learning, a narrow academic skill, or test-taking smarts. Rather, it reflects a broader and deeper capability for comprehending our surroundings—“catching on,” “making sense” of things, or “figuring out” what to do. (Gottfredson, 1997a, p. 13)
Yet, evidence indicates that psychology students learn little about intelligence in their education. In three different studies analyzing the psychology undergraduate curriculum, researchers found that courses in intelligence were not available to students at all (Perlman & McCann, 1999, 2005; M. Stoloff et al., 2010). However, many students are introduced to the concept of intelligence in their introductory psychology courses, as demonstrated by the fact that every introductory psychology textbook discusses the topic (Griggs, 2014; Warne et al., 2018). This information, though, is often superficial and distorted; Warne et al. (2018) found that more than 75% of textbooks contained basic factual errors about intelligence.
Our opinion is that psychology has neglected its duty to educate its students about intelligence and intelligence research. As a result, there is widespread ignorance about the construct, and empirically weak ideas have filled the vacuum. As evidence of this thesis, we present data from a search for intelligence courses in the course catalogs at 303 universities. Then, we conclude by presenting an example intelligence course and providing guidance to readers who are interested in offering an intelligence course and integrating at their institutions.
Study of Course Catalogs
There are several theories prevalent among nonexperts that are not empirically supported, such as emotional intelligence and multiple intelligences (see Brody, 2004; Castejon et al., 2010; Locke, 2005; van der Linden et al., 2017; Waterhouse, 2006; for robust, empirically based criticisms of these theories). Therefore, it is important to consider how these theories become widespread. Researchers who have investigated the undergraduate psychology curriculum (Perlman & McCann, 1999, 2005; M. Stoloff et al., 2010) indicated that few of psychology departments include courses dedicated to intelligence. Consequently, we sought to examine the place of intelligence theories in the university curriculum as a whole.
As there is no previous research containing data on intelligence courses in colleges, we engaged in an exploratory analysis without conducting any specific statistical tests. Moreover, because there are numerous methods by which one may approach analyzing these data, we believed that using null hypothesis tests would encourage selective reporting and distort our interpretation of our data. Instead, we searched university course catalogs to understand the frequency and nature by which intelligence is taught across all the different fields of study in American universities.
Method
Our sample of universities for our study of course catalogs was taken from the U.S. News and World Report university rankings (available from https://www.usnews.com/best-colleges/rankings/national-universities), which provide a list of the top 100 national universities, top 25 universities in the North, South, Midwest, and West regions, and the top 100 liberal arts universities in the United States. Because there were some ties for the bottom rank in each list, we collected data from a total of 303 different universities. We used these rankings because it created a more objective variable by which to sample universities, and we believed that the equal combination of top competitive universities, regionally based universities, and the more narrow-focused liberal arts colleges would properly represent the diverse colleges and universities across the country.
We searched each university’s catalog for courses containing the word “intelligence” in the course title or description. However, we excluded a priori classes in business intelligence and military intelligence. When we encountered course descriptions that used intelligence as an adjective (e.g., “she spoke with intelligence”), we excluded these as well. Finally, we decided that artificial intelligence classes were appropriate if comparisons were explicitly made to human intelligence, such as a cognitive science class with information processing components. But we did not include artificial intelligence courses that took a perspective based purely in computer science (e.g., machine learning).
We recorded whether courses were fully dedicated to intelligence or whether intelligence was mentioned as a component of the course. A class was only considered to be fully dedicated to intelligence if its title and description refer only to intelligence and its correlates (e.g., a course on “Intelligence and Creativity” would be considered fully dedicated). The courses were categorized further by the following characteristics: Focusing on emotional intelligence, Focusing on social intelligence, Focusing on cultural intelligence, Focusing on multiple intelligences (i.e., Howard Gardner’s theory), Focusing on artificial intelligence (including relationships with human cognition and intelligence), Focusing on animal intelligence, Courses on testing and psychometrics, Focusing on g theories of intelligence, Introductory psychology courses, Focusing on intelligence and race (including courses mentioning intelligence in the context of eugenics or group relations), Generic or unspecified use of the term “intelligence.”
It is important to note that classes could belong to multiple categories, as it is plausible that a class might explicitly mention multiple theories. Finally, we labeled each course as being undergraduate or graduate level.
We formatted the descriptive statistics in several different ways, primarily by course department, intelligence type (from the list above), university type, graduate and undergraduate status, and whether the class was wholly dedicated to intelligence. Our Open Science Framework web page (https://osf.io/fvc97/)contains the data set, and supplemental materials, including all raw data, reformatted tables, as well as lists of the web links used to search each university.
Results
Descriptive statistics for course catalog data are available in multiple formats in Tables 1 –5 as well as in the Appendix. As shown in Table 1, 387 (43.3%) of the 893 courses belonged to the psychology department. However, these classes were overwhelmingly psychometrics courses, introductory courses, or labeled as generic (e.g., developmental psychology courses that refer to intelligence in the context of cognitive changes in aging). Psychology courses accounted for 9 out of the 12 courses that explicitly include mainstream g theory in its description. Of the other 3 courses, 2 belonged to the other social sciences and were specifically focused on how intelligence relates to racial issues, and the other is a philosophy course. Out of those 9 psychology courses, 3 are only available at the graduate level.
Catalog: Frequency of Courses by Subject Department.
Note. Some courses were cross-listed or were part of specialized departments. In these cases, the course belonged to more than one department group.
a Percentages do not include cross-listed courses.
Catalog: Frequencies and Percentages of Courses Based on Department Grouping and Intelligence Categories.
Catalog: Intelligence Topics Mentioned and Dedicated.
Catalog: Frequencies of Categories Available at the Graduate/Undergraduate Level.
Sample Schedule and Sequence of Topics for an Undergraduate Intelligence Course.
Note. Bold indicates topics that we believe are most essential to any course on human intelligence.
The next largest category of courses included business, management, leadership, and personal development courses, which has 188 (21.1%) courses. Of these courses, all but 14 of them included references to the theory of multiple intelligences or emotional, cultural, or social intelligence. None of the others referenced g theory, and most were generic or other less common intelligence theories (e.g., appreciative, creative, and innovative intelligences). Of the other nonspecific courses, one was a study abroad experience that included a reference to animal intelligence, and another was a leadership camp that tests intelligence in an undisclosed manner. As noted in Table 2, this grouping of business-oriented courses was responsible for 75.9% of emotional intelligence classes, 53.3% of social intelligence classes, and 81.0% of cultural intelligence classes.
Education courses, which accounted for 15.0% (n = 134) of courses included in the data set, were the third largest group. Two thirds of all classes teaching multiple intelligences were in education, though most education courses were either generic (n = 57) or related to testing and psychometrics (n = 40). There were, however, no education courses that explicitly mentioned mainstream g-related intelligence theories.
Most courses (n = 765; 85.6%) were not principally dedicated to intelligence, and only mentioned it briefly in the description. Out of the courses that were dedicated to intelligence, there were 6 times (n = 36) more courses dedicated to emotional intelligence than those dedicated to g theories of intelligence (n = 4). Similarly, of courses where intelligence was only mentioned, there were nearly 20 times (n = 159) more courses including emotional intelligence than those explicitly mentioning g (n = 8).
Table 4 indicates the types of courses available at the graduate and undergraduate level. Graduate programs had fewer courses available (n = 295) than undergraduate programs, but the classes were distributed across the categories relatively similarly to undergraduate courses. One notable exception was graduate courses mentioning intelligence testing, which accounted for 58.0% (n = 116) of all courses of that type.
Discussion
Overall, not only did we not expect so few classes (n = 12, with only 3 being fully dedicated psychology courses) explicitly directed at teaching mainstream intelligence theory, we also did not anticipate so many classes teaching unscientific theories of intelligence (emotional, social, cultural, and/or multiple intelligences are taught in 271, or 30.3%, of courses). A total of 28.4% of courses did not have a specific labeling, and if those classes were to follow the same trend as the rest of the data, there would still be a very small percentage of total courses that teach mainstream, empirically supported theories of intelligence. Nonpsychology departments, in particular, appear to be more likely than others to teach empirically weak intelligence theories. Emotional intelligence was largely contained within the business, leadership, management, and personal development courses. Multiple intelligences theory was most notable within education courses. We find this latter fact disturbing because intelligence is one of the best predictors of educational success at the individual level (Cucina et al., 2016; Gottfredson, 1997b), and yet future teachers—if they learn about intelligence at all—are largely taught about Howard Gardner’s empirically unsupported theory of multiple intelligences. Although we do not know how this impacts educational practice, it does not bode well because interventions based on correct theories are more likely to succeed than interventions based on incorrect beliefs about reality.
Given the poor support for non-g theories of intelligence, we are disappointed that these theories are so commonly taught in applied areas of business and education. Teaching incorrect theories may lead future practitioners astray in their work. Business leaders, for example, may select employees for promotion or in hiring who excel in “emotional intelligence” instead of general intelligence, even though the latter is a better predictor of job success (Pesta et al., 2015). Teachers who subscribe to multiple intelligences theory may engage in fruitless efforts to educate all of the “intelligences” in the theory or to seek ways to teach students that align with their supposed strengths.
Collecting data from course catalogs has a few limitations. Catalogs are not standardized, and some universities provided much more information regarding their courses than others. Consequently, it is possible that some instructors teach about intelligence, even though the topic is not mentioned in the catalog. In addition, the groupings created to categorize courses introduce some subjectivity. For example, we listed courses that mention artificial intelligence only if they explicitly mentioned its relationship to human intelligence. Yet, there were some cognitive science courses that were excluded because the catalog did not explicitly mention human intelligence, even though the topic could have naturally fit in with the course content.
Intelligence categories were also subject to interpretation, as many of the references to intelligence were vague or broad in nature. Often course descriptions do not provide enough information to classify a course beyond the generic/unspecified category. Moreover, course descriptions are not detailed enough to justify conclusions about how intelligence is taught or whether different theories are empirically evaluated in individual classrooms. For example, it is likely that a psychometrics course that includes a unit on intelligence testing would inform students of the mainstream theory of intelligence that provides a theoretical foundation and interpretive framework for intelligence tests. However, this information regarding this theoretical and empirical context for interpreting intelligence tests would not appear in a course catalog. Even so, 58.0% of psychometric courses were at the graduate level and were not courses available to the large number of students enrolled in undergraduate psychology majors.
Additionally, there was some inconsistency in the ability to query the catalogs. Some universities do not post pdf versions of course catalogs online, and the class search functions only searched through available courses in a particular semester. In these cases, we typically searched through two years of scheduled courses. However, with 893 different courses collected from 303 universities, we believe that the data set is robust and fairly represents the ways intelligence is taught at institutions of higher education in the United States.
Example Course on Intelligence
The information we present in our analysis of university course catalogs shows that incorrect ideas about intelligence are frequently taught. We believe that adding a course dedicated to the study of intelligence would strengthen psychology education. In this section of the article, we provide information about our institution’s undergraduate course on intelligence and some practical guidelines in the hopes that our experience can help faculty at other institutions plug this hole in the curriculum.
Other intelligence experts have offered advice about creating an intelligence course (e.g., Brody, 2014; Deary, 2014; Detterman, 2014; Haier, 2014; Hunt, 2014; Mackintosh, 2014), and we encourage readers to consult these articles. However, when the second author began the process of creating an intelligence course, he found that these sources were excellent for providing general guidelines, but that specific suggestions were often lacking. Our goal in this section is to provide guidance about issues that may arise in designing and/or teaching an intelligence course.
The first (and sometimes most daunting) task that an instructor has when planning an intelligence course is deciding what to include in the curriculum. Haier (2014) has the most detailed course outline in the published literature, and most of his 18 units will comfortably fit into any intelligence course. Mackintosh (2014) and Detterman (2014) also provided a list of course topics and their sequence, though with less detail than Haier (2014). We encourage readers to consult these outlines. The course that one of us (the second author) teaches follows the sequence in Table 5. The outline in Table 5 is for a 12-week course, which is shorter than most semesters; the extra time is useful for test days and to expand units related to concepts that an instructor finds important. The lessons that we believe are most important are marked in bold and include foundational topics (e.g., an introduction to g, intelligence testing), the biological basis of intelligence (i.e., intelligence and the brain, genetics), related topics from cognitive psychology, and the social impact of intelligence differences in education, work, and health. These units are the core topics because they explain what intelligence is, how it is measured, how it arises in the brain, and why intelligence is important. Any course that does not include these units would have fundamental deficiencies that would prevent students from having a comprehensive understanding of intelligence.
Table 5 is certainly not the only viable curriculum for teaching intelligence. It is suited to the second author’s expertise and the textbook (Hunt, 2011) used in the undergraduate class. Students could benefit from an expansion of some topics, and an instructor may wish to eliminate some of the less essential topics such as the discussion of aging. A class session or two on methodology (especially to refresh students’ knowledge of correlations or to introduce them to factor analysis) may also be a fruitful use of class time. Class units in animal intelligence, longitudinal studies, cognitive development in childhood, evolutionary psychology and intelligence, and other topics may be interesting to students. Student interest may be a particularly important driver of the curriculum at the graduate level, where specialization of study may make our generalist course outline less useful.
The final two units in Table 5 encourage critical thinking and dealing with conflicting societal goals and ambiguous evidence. The unit entitled “logical fallacies used to dismiss intelligence research” is based on a book chapter by Gottfredson (2009) and includes an activity where students watch a video (Hermann & Bentura, 2010) and attempt to identify these fallacies in use. The last unit, societal impacts of intelligence, is an open-ended discussion of how intelligence can inform current political events. As such, the lesson content changes each semester, but the two overall messages from the unit stay the same. The first message is that intelligence has important impacts on society. The second message from the unit is that the scientific facts are value neutral and can support multiple social, political, and ethical goals.
In addition to the Hunt (2011) book, Mackintosh (2011) wrote another viable textbook for this course. Both are suitable for students in their final two years of undergraduate education or the early years of their graduate studies. Supplemental articles could be useful readings, especially classic articles by Gottfredson (1997a, 1997b), Flynn (1987), Murray (2002), and Neisser et al. (1996). Many articles published in the journal Intelligence are accessible to undergraduate students because the methodologies are inherently based on correlations and the writing style in the journal tends to be crisp and direct. Instructors who prefer a more biologically oriented course will find Haier’s (2017) The Neuroscience of Intelligence to be a useful text for undergraduate or graduate students, and Jung and Haier’s (2007) landmark article in the parieto-frontal integration theory of intelligence and the response articles would provide plenty of fodder for discussion for graduate students in neuroscience or biopsychology programs. For a lower division undergraduate or high school course, we recommend Ritchie’s (2015) and Deary’s (2001) basic introductions to intelligence.
A course on intelligence provides many opportunities for assignments that apply students’ new knowledge. The second author’s course includes writing assignments where students summarize and respond to a scholarly article. The final project in the course is also a paper in which students write about a topic of their own choosing from the 100 listed in Table 6. All of these topics have sufficient research that a student could easily find several scholarly articles as sources for an informative paper about the topic. The second author also administers three tests and a number of surprise reading quizzes during the course of the semester.
100 Potential Final Paper Topics in an Undergraduate Intelligence Course.
Other activities can help students master important course concepts. Standard laboratory procedures to examine working memory may be useful when discussing the connections between intelligence research and cognitive psychology. Sample intelligence test items, such as digit span or mental rotation tasks, are helpful in making intelligence test content less abstract, and we have had success in creating materials (available at https://osf.io/fhrdy) that allow students to take the World War I–era Army Beta intelligence test. This latter activity gives students insight into early test development and test items that have reduced language demands. Recordings of television quiz shows can help students classify questions into measuring fluid intelligence or crystallized intelligence. Because intelligence research touches on so many areas of psychology, activities from other courses—especially cognitive psychology, psychometrics, and educational psychology—can help students understand intelligence.
One particular topic deserves frank discussion because of the disproportionate attention that it receives: demographic group differences in intelligence (especially racial/ethnic group differences). In the course that we have experience with, the topic is one of the last in the semester, mostly because we do not believe that it is the most important topic related to intelligence and that foundational ideas emphasized in Table 5 should receive attention first. However, the lesson is carefully structured to reduce the chances of misunderstandings and to emphasize that the data are often unclear and contradictory. When the course started at our institution, the instructor also worked with the then-president of the Black Student Union (a psychology student) to create “ground rules” that governed discussing controversial topics in class without censoring ideas or restricting academic freedom. These were All human beings are entitled to dignity and human rights. Mean group differences do not justify discriminatory behavior. Discussing mean group differences in abilities is not discriminatory. Even though mean differences exist across groups, there is still a lot of overlap across groups. All possible explanations for causes of mean group differences should be explored. It is not bigoted to discuss mean group differences or their causes. Americans have a history of progress toward fairness, openness, and tolerance. This nation should maintain those efforts. All students are welcome to voice concerns about these issues.
Ensuring that every student understands and abides by these rules has been helpful in allowing students with a variety of cultural backgrounds and political beliefs to feel safe in the classroom, even when discussing uncomfortable topics. How one chooses to handle this sensitive topic will vary, according to the student body and institutional climate. Brody (2014) and Hunt (2014) believed that the topic should be discussed frankly and empirically. Mackintosh (2014) preferred to discuss demographic group differences in intelligence early in the course. We understand, though, if an instructor drops this topic from the curriculum, which Warne et al. (2018) stated was a viable strategy for handling the discussion of mean group differences in an introductory psychology textbook discussion of intelligence.
Regardless of the exact curriculum of an intelligence course, we believe that any course is better than the status quo at most universities, which is a haphazard mention of intelligence in tangentially related courses and no dedicated course on the topic. Given that most introductory textbooks in psychology contain basic errors about intelligence (Warne et al., 2018), a course based on strong theory and the research that has accumulated for over a century would clarify misconceptions that many psychology students have. We believe that the degree of neglect of intelligence in the psychology curriculum is a travesty, and implementing even some of our recommendations would be a step in the right direction of filling the gap in the psychology curriculum.
Conclusion
Intelligence is a vitally important concept, from both a scientific and a practical perspective. In this article, we showed inaccurate viewpoints about intelligence pervade American university course catalogs and that most psychology programs do not have a systematic way of teaching about intelligence. Dedicated courses on the topic are rare, and courses on multiple intelligences, emotional intelligence, and other empirically weak ideas are much more common. In an attempt to help psychology instructors fill this gap in their curriculum, we have provided an outline from our university’s dedicated intelligence course. We have also addressed issues related to course readings, activities, and how to handle controversies related to intelligence.
Although changes to the undergraduate psychology curriculum are slow, we are optimistic that future years could see a course on intelligence become more common. If our hopes are fulfilled, then we expect that there would be an increased understanding of intelligence research in the psychology community.
Footnotes
Appendix A
Catalog: Intelligence Category frequencies for colleges based on each list in U.S. News Top Schools Report.
| University Type | UGa | Gb | Emotional | Social | Cultural | Multiple | Generic | g Theory | Introductory | Testing | Race | Artificial | Animal | Other | Total |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| National | 312 | 185 | 119 | 9 | 13 | 23 | 153 | 8 | 17 | 94 | 15 | 37 | 16 | 9 | 497 |
| Liberal arts | 117 | 5 | 12 | 6 | 1 | 5 | 42 | 3 | 13 | 20 | 4 | 16 | 5 | 3 | 122 |
| Regional—Midwest | 45 | 42 | 22 | 3 | 6 | 10 | 11 | 0 | 3 | 27 | 0 | 0 | 2 | 3 | 87 |
| Regional—North | 49 | 26 | 15 | 6 | 0 | 5 | 18 | 1 | 0 | 26 | 0 | 4 | 1 | 0 | 75 |
| Regional—South | 37 | 14 | 9 | 3 | 1 | 2 | 12 | 0 | 2 | 19 | 0 | 1 | 0 | 2 | 51 |
| Regional—West | 37 | 24 | 18 | 1 | 0 | 2 | 18 | 0 | 5 | 14 | 0 | 1 | 0 | 2 | 61 |
| Total | 597 | 296 | 195 | 28 | 21 | 47 | 254 | 12 | 40 | 200 | 19 | 59 | 24 | 19 | 893 |
a UG = undergraduate. bG = graduate.
Appendix B
Catalog—Intelligence Type Based on University Ranking List.
| University Type | UGa | Gb | Emotional | Social | Cultural | Multiple | Generic | g Theory | GeneralPsy | Testing | Race | Artificial |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| National | 312 | 185 | 119 | 9 | 13 | 23 | 153 | 8 | 17 | 94 | 15 | 37 |
| Liberal arts | 117 | 5 | 12 | 6 | 1 | 5 | 42 | 3 | 13 | 20 | 4 | 16 |
| Regional—Midwest | 45 | 42 | 22 | 3 | 6 | 10 | 11 | 0 | 3 | 27 | 0 | 0 |
| Regional—North | 49 | 26 | 15 | 6 | 0 | 5 | 18 | 1 | 0 | 26 | 0 | 4 |
| Regional—South | 37 | 14 | 9 | 3 | 1 | 2 | 12 | 0 | 2 | 19 | 0 | 1 |
| Regional—West | 37 | 24 | 18 | 1 | 0 | 2 | 18 | 0 | 5 | 14 | 0 | 1 |
| Total | 597 | 296 | 195 | 28 | 21 | 47 | 254 | 12 | 40 | 200 | 19 | 59 |
a UG = undergraduate. bG = graduate.
Authors’ Note
Both authors contributed equally to this study. They are listed in alphabetical order as surname.
Declaration of Conflicting Interests
The authors declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.
Funding
The authors disclosed receipt of the following financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article: This study was partially funded by a Utah Valley University Grant for Engaged Learning (GEL).