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PERSONAL INTELLIGENCE: INTERACTIONS OF NATURE AND ENVIRONMENT
The Development of Personal Intelligence: Pros and Cons
The significance of social intelligence for the evolutionary success of primates is clear. However, some of the unique characteristics of personal intelligence in humans may have developed as chance products of rapid brain evolution, raising the possibility that there could be characteristics that are potentially maladaptive. Wills (1993) argued that the very mechanisms involved in rapid evolution could also permit maladaptive changes, that is, the substantial brain grown after birth has allowed for major caregiver and other environmental effects on brain development, creating an increasingly complex gene-culture feedback loop (Huttenlocher, 1979; Wolpaw, Schmidt, & Vaughan, 1991). Gould (1986) also cautioned against assuming that evolutionary changes always occur as benefits and states that many human behaviors arc "side consequences of the building of the human brain" (p. 9).
The pros and cons of personal intelligence can be reviewed by considering the capacity for empathy, a particularly human characteristic that can require exceptional integration of both intra- and interpersonal intelligence. Empathy and altruism are proposed to be interrelated, instinct-based aspects of human nature. The empathy-altruism hypothesis holds that when a human accurately experiences distress or need in another person from the perspective of that other person, there is a built-in urge to reduce that distress, an urge paralleling the magnitude of the empathic emotion (Batson & Shaw, 1991). Although the theory of multiple intelligences defines capabilities that are neither prosocial nor antisocial, a genetic basis for empathy-altruism could provide humans with an intelligence including benevolent intuitiveness and helpfulness to others. Olinerand Oliner (1988) examined characteristics of individuals who risked their lives to save Jews from the Holocaust. They found it was not circumstances, religiosity, or even attitudes about Nazis, that best distinguished rescuers from nonrescuers but rather a characteristic he termed extensivity, that is, the recognition of and caring for the state of others when this extends beyond one's own group, along with associated altruistic behaviors involving risk and cost without expectation of external rewards. This example provides a clue to a potential evolutionary benefit of such integration of self- and other-awareness; that is, the ability to evaluate social situations becomes increasingly independent of algorithms for us-versus-them, follow-the-leader, and so forth. The highest personal intelligence could be seen as the relative capacity to surmount more primitive and instinctive programs, affects, and biases and to view ourselves and others with a unique degree of observational accuracy and rational reasoning (Gardner, 1983; Salovey & Mayer, 1990).
Did these particular characteristics have evolutionary advantage, particularly in dangerous Pleistocene times, or did they simply appear when the mind became sufficiently complex? As Shakespeare demonstrated in Hamlet, consciousness, self-reflection, and preoccupation about others can breed self-doubt and hesitation when action would save the day. Competitive and predatory individuals responding to a situation on a more programmed basis would have the advantage of speed of reaction as well as being able to act in more immediate self-interest.
Farber (1989) has reviewed the literature concerning potential disadvantages of psychological mindedness, which he defined (1985) as "the disposition and ability to reflect on the meaning and motivation of behavior, thoughts, and feelings in oneself and others" (p. 170), a definition similar to Gardner's definition of personal intelligence. The possible negative consequences of psychological mindedness reviewed by Farber include inhibition of spontaneity and action, self-doubt, guilt, emotional detachment, distress, anxiety, depression, and somatic symptoms. Farber found that high psychological mindedness can contribute to lower self-esteem and to others perceiving such individuals as withholding their feelings. He suggests that psychological mindedness brings a heightened awareness of the painful aspects of existence. In line with this, there are some data supportive of "depressive realism/' the proposal that depressed individuals can assess reality more accurately than can nondepressed individuals (Ackerman & DeRubeis, 1991). (There are additional data suggesting that depressed subjects tend to have more accurate judgments only about others and not about themselves.) Nesse (1991) argued that suffering can be an important natural aspect of recognizing and responding successfully to environmental problems. In contrast, Gould (1989) provided an argument for rejoicing in self-awareness, even of knowledge that there may be no apparent meaning or purpose for our existence.
We suspect that the negative consequences of high personal intelligence or psychological mindedness may involve aspects of parenting. Historically, parenting involved indoctrination along with discouragement of autonomy, as discussed by Alice Miller (1983) and illustrated by the Ten Commandments, which speak only to respecting parents and not at all to respecting children. The higher the personal intelligence of a child, the more likely the child will be rejected or punished for having independent, perceptive observations and questions. This, in turn, could lead to a sense of badness for having core mental processes that cannot be stifled. If this is a common occurrence in the general population, then it is likely that any group of individuals with high psychological mindedness and with talents for assessing interpersonal reality will also tend to show higher average scores on measures of depression and low self-esteem.
Parenting is a prime example for considering the difficulty evaluating pros and cons of high personal intelligence in view of the likelihood that quality of parenting significantly affects expression of this intelligence. The higher an infant's capacity for perceptivity of self and others, the more essential could be a good caregiver environment for development of this talent. This concept is compatible with some of Suomi's research (1991). He selectively bred Rhesus monkeys to be "high reactive," that is, very fearful and anxious in new and challenging situations. These monkeys are also highly aware of their environment from birth (S.J. Suomi, personal communication, July 19,1991), which may be analogous to a human capacity for high interpersonal intelligence. Such monkeys tend to maintain an anxious pattern and reach a relatively marginal adult adjustment. However, when raised by exceptionally nurturing foster mothers, such monkeys become the most socially skilled and dominant members of their peer groups. This finding is an indication that these monkeys are not inherently defective, but have an acute sensitivity to their environment resulting in their becoming defective or exceptional adults depending on whether they are raised with the special care that nurtures their unusual talent.
"High reactive" easily distressed infants made up about 20% of the 4-month-old infant population studied by Kagan (1994). The majority of these children develop an inhibited temperament and as adults may be at higher risk for anxiety disorders and depression. Might a significant number of these children been born highly perceptive and aware of their environment, comparable to Suomi's subjects, requiring a special caregiver environment for healthy development of their perceptive gifts (Davis, Luce/ & Kraus, 1994)? Analogously, Boyce et al. (1995) suggested there may be a subset of children with "heightened sensitivity to the character of the social world" who have exceptional vulnerability in high stress, unsupportive interpersonal environments but who develop exceptional resilience in low stress, nurturing environments.
Defective and Perverse Manifestations of Personal Intelligence
In this section, we discuss defective aspects of personal intelligence that could be either inborn or environmentally induced. Two clinically defined personality disorders that appear to be directly linked to defective aspects of personal intelligence are narcissistic personality disorder (NPD) and borderline personality disorder (BPD). The Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM-IV; American Psychiatric Association, 1994) includes the following characteristics for NPD: (a) a grandiose sense of self-importance, (b) a belief that they are special in a very superior way, and (c) a sense of entitlement. All of these indicate an inaccurate sense of self, that is, a defective intrapersonal intelligence. In addition, these individuals (a) lack empathy, (b) have a penchant for envy, and (c) are inter-personally exploitative, indicating a defective interpersonal intelligence.
DSM-IV includes the following characteristics for BPD: (a) severe identity disturbance, (b) a markedly unstable self-image or sense of self, and (c) chronic feelings of emptiness, indicating a defective intrapersonal intelligence. These individuals also exhibit (a) frantic efforts to avoid real or imagined abandonment and (b) a pattern of unstable and intense interpersonal relationships characterized by alternation between extremes of idealization and devaluation, indicating defective interpersonal intelligence.
There are a number of possible causes of defective personal intelligence. First, it is likely that considerable variability can exist from individual to individual in degrees of inborn personal intelligence considering that evolutionary development of such uniquely human characteristics was rapid and recent (Simons, 1989; Wills, 1993). Such genetic variability would allow for some newboms to have much less and others much more than the usual capacity for perceptiveness about self and others. In addition, atavistic genes that were silenced during evolution of personal intelligence could become activated in some individuals (Cantu & Ruiz, 1985).
Second, it is likely that personal intelligence is made up of multiple modular subunits that work together, with the potential that there could be defective or missing subunits as well as poor coordination between such elements. Certainly, modularity is the case in other perceptual systems such as the visual system where many different brain subsystems analyze features such as color, movement, form, and depth (Gazzaniga, 1989; Kosslyn & Koenig, 1992). Characteristics of intrapersonal intelligence that could have modular representations in the brain and vary from individual to individual include abilities to access a range of emotions, to discriminate among emotions, to use emotions to understand oneself, and to have a model of oneself that facilitates decision making. Characteristics of interpersonal intelligence could include abilities to distinguish moods, temperaments, motivations, and intentions of others, as well as capacity for warmth and empathy. In addition, there could be variations in other kinds of reasoning modules suggested by Cosmides and Tooby (1992) and by Premack and Premack (1995). For instance, autistic individuals may have a defective theory of mind mechanism, whereas retarded individuals with Williams Syndrome demonstrate abilities suggesting that such a mechanism is selectively spared (Brothers, 1990; Frith, 1993; Karmiloff-Smith, Klima, Bellugi, Grant, & Baron-Cohen, 1995).
A third major cause of defective personal intelligence may be its high vulnerability to interpersonal and cultural influences during the developing years. Pathological manifestations of personal intelligence resulting from such influences can be considered "perversions" of the instinctual urge to express this intelligence, as with perversions of other instincts such as sex and hunger (eg., bulimia and anorexia) (Welldon, 1988). Factors involved include (a) attachment and phase requirements (Bowlby, 1988; Kohut, 1971), (b) "goodness of fit" between a child's temperament and his or her human environment (Thomas & Chess, 1984), (c) constitutional and maturational irregularities (Greenspan, 1992), and (d) outright abuse and neglect (Cicchetti & Carlson, 1989; Storr, 1990). Because of the unique brain development after birth in humans, it is extremely difficult to differentiate inborn defects from those hardwired after harmful environmental events during the early months and years of life (Teicher, Ito, Clod, Schiffer, & Gelbard, 1994).
With these three types of influence in mind, we speculated about sources of defective personal intelligence in NPD and BPD. It is our impression that patients diagnosed as having NPD frequently have inborn deficiencies in personal intelligence, in particular in the capacity for empathy. Some NPD patients also seem to be strongly motivated by fixed, exploitative frames of mind suggesting the possibility of dominating inborn reasoning algorithms. In addition, many have had childhood experiences that seem to have imperilled the healthy use of the positive capabilities they did have.
Borderline individuals, on the other hand, frequently exhibit characteristics suggesting they have a high inborn personal intelligence, with clear childhood experiences accounting for perverse manifestations such as persuasive, complex projective identification (described below). Finally, individuals with these disorders can have overlapping characteristics. For instance, Kemberg (1975) described "narcissistic personalities functioning on a borderline level," individuals who may have been born with high overall personal intelligence but who may also have specific defects in their personal intelligence (e.g., exceptional ability to detect intentions and vulnerabilities of others but without empathy), and/or extremely chaotic backgrounds, and/or who may have introjected characteristics of very intrusive, cold parents. Such individuals, who lack or suppress empathy, can be very powerful, and/or dangerous, such as Adolf Hitler and Charles Manson (Hartmann, 1991).
Projective identification, a uniquely human phenomenon, is of particular relevance for personal intelligence (Gabbard & Wilkinson, 1994; Kemberg, 1986; Ogden, 1982). Definitions of projective identification vary somewhat, but in general they include the view that it involves an interpersonal transaction in which one person induces specific feelings in a second person, with the second person unaware that feelings are being coerced, that is, believing that he or she "owns" the feelings. Such feelings are not generated de novo, rather a receptive potential must already be present in the second person that has been perceived (out of awareness) by the initiator. Projective identification probably occurs frequently in everyone and can be a positive way of revising attitudes when we can allow others to contain and alter or "launder" our projections, and then reintroject such modified states back to us (Ogden, 1994; C.G., Schulz, personal communication. May 5,1995).