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Why Has Gardner's Theory of Multiple Intelligences Had So Little Impact on Vocational Psychology?
By Andrew D. Carson, Ph.D.

Howard Gardner is a Harvard University psychologist with a number of vocationally relevant books to his credit, but his impact on vocational psychology and career intervention has thus far been negligible. This is somewhat surprising, given how popular his theory of multiple intelligences has become among educators, and given that his major themes include the identification of traits and habits of individuals that support the achievement of great things at work. He has published books on what it takes to become a great leader, or a great artist. He has published psychobiographies of high achievers from a variety of other fields. He has written books on traits that are presumably directed related to adjustment to work. He has talked untiringly about issues related to assessment of career-relevant traits. He has a major career-related theory--the theory of multiple intelligences (MI)--that is the subject of sustained approbation and attention by his colleagues, and remains a perennial program at meetings of the American Psychological Association. As far as psychologists go, he is a success, even a celebrity. But his impact on vocational psychology has nevertheless been negligible.

I remain interested in Gardner's work and he was an important influence in my own career development. Reading Gardner's books was one of the major factors that developed my own interest in vocational psychology. I loved Artful Scribbles, and I thought Frames of Mind was inspiring, and so on with the rest. But over time, I find I refer to his work less and less. I have met him briefly three times, once in the context of helping to start a special interest group in the American Educational Research Association dedicated to spurring research on MI theory. There is hope for Gardner yet as a vocational psychologist, and I would be pleased to see a new Gardner emerge over time, one that proves me wrong on the following counts.

I would suggest there are a number of reasons for why vocational psychologists have largely ignored Gardner's work in general and his MI theory in particular.

First, he has ignored almost all research and theory contributed by vocational psychologists. His theory has strong similarities to some major vocational theories that he has pointedly ignored and to which he has publicly claimed ignorance of. In particular, he has ignored John Holland's theory of vocational personality types, which bears, on the surface at least, such a strong resemblance to his seven intelligences.

I once attended a workshop (mainly for educators) in Oak Brook, Illinois, where Gardner discussed his MI theory. His focus was on types of workers, each reflecting his basic intelligences. This was in the mid-1990s, when he was busy publishing his biographical studies. I had long thought that there was a good correspondence between Holland's six types and Gardner's seven intelligences (see below), except that Gardner had no corresponding intelligence analogous to Holland's conventional type. During question-time, I asked if he was familiar with Holland's vocational theory, and he said no. Bear in mind, Holland was to shortly thereafter receive a lifetime achievement award from the American Psychological Assocation, and that there had been at the time over 400 published empirical studies testing his theories. You cannot take most interest inventories without seeing the impact of his work. Anyway, he said he was unfamiliar with Holland's work, and then I noted that his types seemed to have correspondences to each of Holland's types except the conventional type. He asked me to describe the conventional type, after which he essentially said, "Oh, I know about that, but I didn't want to include that in MI theory because that's the intelligence on which empires and large corporations were built. I wanted to focus on other intelligences." I was appalled, but no one in the room batted an eye. Imagine: proposing a theory of multiple intelligences as a scientific theory, and purposefully leaving out a major intelligence or type, just because you did not accept the political or business-related implications, and then promoting the resulting (incomplete) theory to educators as basis for practice that affects all children, including conventional types?

He does not even cite Holland, or even Anne Roe as far as I can tell, in any of his work, much less those vocational psychologists whose theories are less like his.

Second, despite all the books, there have as yet been relatively few serious, empirical, theory-testing publications of MI theory. Much of the research is small-N and many of the publications are by disciples lacking in research budgets.

Third, he tends to make broad claims about how his MI theory makes sense and seems to imply that competing theories--and theories of g in particular --are lacking in substance; this is despite decades of empirical research supporting the latter.

Fourth, he almost never collaborates or interacts with other vocational psychologists; he doesn't attend their meetings, or present with them on symposia, or collaborate with them on edited books, and only rarely--and only then by invitation--publishes in a vocational journal.

Fifth, he seems romantically inclined rather than philosophically inclined, to borrow Kieran Egan's terms, meaning that he identifies in his topics what in them he finds emotionally engaging, and focuses on extreme limit cases (e.g., his biographies of great achievers), rather than to promote dry, logical, traditional, and testable theories. It is easy to read Gardner and become interested in a topic, and it can make fascinating reading, but consider how different his writing is from the typical article in Journal of Vocational Behavior.

And Yet, He is an Important Theorist

Much of Gardner's focus has been on the identification and description of intelligences or abilities beyond what psychologists have called "Intelligence" (with a capital "I"), or the Intelligence Quotient (I.Q.), or "g". (I shall refer to IQ rather than g because most theories of g are at least in theory not entirely incompatible with the MI theory proposed by Gardner.)

Specifically, Gardner (1983, 1999) proposed the existence of seven intelligences (linguistic, musical, logical-mathematical, spatial, bodily-kinesthetic, intrapersonal, and interpersonal) that affected learning relevant to performance and adjustment to education, work, and other environments. He has proposed eight criteria by which one might determine the existence of an intelligence:

neuroanatomical bases
existence of savants, prodigies and other exception individuals
evidence psychometric findings
evidence from experimental psychological tasks
a distinct developmental history for each intelligence culminating in a definable set of endstate performances (master levels)
an identifiable core operation or set of operations
susceptibility to coding in a symbol systems
an evolutionary history and evolutionary plausibility

Gardner has made more recent statements (see especially Gardner, 1999) through a number of books and articles that fine-tune and update the theory. However, it is probably fair to say that the theory has thus far generated surprisingly little large-scale, systematic empirical research. Because of this, one might argue that the theory, despite its apparent success in many venues (perhaps especially in elementary school reform efforts), is not drawing the research attention it needs to survive as a scientific theory.

As scientists, vocational psychologists should not take it as a matter of simple faith that there even are intelligences beyond IQ or g or even that those variables themselves exist and carry weight in the psyche. Indeed, psychologists such as Anders Ericsson (Florida State University) and Robert Sternberg (Yale University) have challenged our culture's purported obsession with abilities and intelligence and have argued that we might better turn our attention to expertise and its acquisition, irregardless of individual differences in ability or intelligence.

The stakes are high on the outcome of this scientific enterprise, because our theories of the nature of ability, expertise, and the acquisition of skill guide our beliefs about how school, work, and leisure activities should be organized. The implications are critical for education. We spend more than a billion dollars a day on education in the United States alone, but we have no generally accepted theory of abilities and expertise to inform our educational efforts. It is safe to say that the majority of schools in our nation--and probably the vast majority--endorse the IQ view. School Districts throughout the nation generally provide programing for gifted students, but it is usually the case that such programs require (as a prerequisite for admission) the administration of an intelligence test or some other indicator of IQ. Then the policies governing admission to gifted programs typically limit enrollment to a small percentage of students, e.g., the top 2 or 3 percent in IQ. Likewise, many private schools require the use of intelligence tests of some sort as part of the admissions process. Access to special education services often requires a student to complete an intelligence test, with low scores required for admission and access to special services.

However, a number of schools around the United States and the world are now founded on the basis of MI theory, with assessment and curriculum organized around Gardner's theory. As Gardner paints it, his model represents a challenge to the status quo with its IQ orientation. Finally, if the expertise-oriented theories of Andersson and Sternberg are correct, we should rethink and reconstruct our whole assessment system, and focus instead on the modeling of expertise. Similarly, research on MI and related theories has implications for the effective design of work and leisure settings.

Some Suggestions for MI Research:

(Please respond with answers, research findings, or other questions, and I will try to post them to the site. However, for space purposes I may need to edit your responses a bit. If you have another website toward which I may point visitors, please let me know it.)

1. How similar is Gardner's theory to other theories in which abilities are classified into types? To what degree can research on those theories provide evidence for or against Gardner's MI theory?

How similar is Gardner's MI theory to other (historical) theories models of multiple abilities or types, e.g., the work of Spearman, Thorndike, Thurstone, and Johnson O'Connor?

How similar is the theory to Sternberg's triarchic intelligence theory?

To what degree was it anticipated by Spearman's g and specific ability theory?

What are its relations to other empirically developed typologies, such as those of Linda S. Gottfredson (University of Delaware), Dale Prediger (ACT), and Phillip Ackerman (Georgia Tech)?

In particular, how similar is his theory to John L. Holland's theory of vocational personality types, which receives widespread application in career development and vocational psychology?

2. How can Gardner's theory be organized into a set of core statements, with relevant research organized in support or refutation of those statements?

Is it reasonable to evaluate Gardner's theory on criteria that he proposes, e.g., the eight criteria that he uses to determine the existence of an intelligence?

Which studies have reported tests on the core statements of Gardner's theory?

What is the degree of rigor (as usually determined) of such studies?

How many participants are usually included in these studies, and what are the psychometric characteristics of their measures, and how sound are the methods?

Can we conduct a meta-analysis of these studies, and seek, through the aggregation of their findings, to develop a stronger test of the elements of Gardner's MI theory?

Based on these analyses, are there any elements of Gardner's theory that are so demonstrably faulty that they should be dropped from the theory?

Are there some core statements of MI theory that Gardner and others appear to be reluctant to test?

3. In what research methods do MI researchers show great facility? How is interest in testing MI theory associated with skill (and probably also interest) in making use of particular research methods? How might individuals interested in learning such research methods be introduced to and encouraged to continue research on MI theory as part of their education in the use of those methods?

4. How should the intelligences be parsed? How many intelligences are there? Are there any likely candidates for intelligences that Gardner has (apparently) intentionally avoided, and for which good evidence exists to warrant their elevation to formal incorporation into the theory?

5. How vulnerable is MI theory to the charges, from such researchers as Anders Ericsson and Robert Sternberg, that abilities (although they may exist) matter far less than the acquisition of expertise through practice? If the expertise researchers are substantially correct, how much damage would MI theory take?

6. How vulnerable is MI theory to claims by some, such as Kieran Egan (Simon Fraser University), that developmental phases in learning should be the great interest in the design of schools, rather than MI-like theories? More generally, what is the status of MI theory relative to current progress in research in developmental psychology?

7. How extensively and how well is MI theory and its associated research base taught in psychology training programs? How often is it examined in textbooks across the psychology curriculum? What sorts of research evidence are provided along with the statement of MI theory?

References

Gardner, H. (1983). Frames of mind: The theory of multiple intelligences. New York: Basic Books.

Gardner, H. (1999). Intelligence Reframed: Multiple intelligences for the 21st century. New York: Basic Books.

Author note

This essay is based on one published in 2001 through the website for the Special Interest Group on Multiple Intelligences for AERA.

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