The idea that there might be a special kind of intelligence for thinking about risk and uncertainty came to me when I was reading a fascinating paper by two American psychologists Stephen Ceci and Jeffrey Liker which was published in 1986. In that paper, Ceci and Liker showed that expertise in betting on horse races had zero correlation with IQ.
This came as a big surprise to Ceci and Liker, and to me when I read their paper. IQ is the best single measure that psychologists have because it correlates with so many cognitive capacities. Indeed, it is this correlation that underpins the concept of ‘general intelligence’. The discovery that expertise in betting on horse races doesn’t correlate at all with IQ means that, whatever cognitive capacities are involved in estimating the odds of a horse winning a race may be, they are not a part of general intelligence.
Reading Ceci and Liker’s paper led me to wonder if the ability to estimate probabilities accurately and make wise decisions under uncertainty might constitute a special kind of intelligence, to be added to the list of multiple intelligences identified by the psychologist Howard Gardner. Gardner is critical of the notion of a single general-purpose intelligence, preferring instead to conceive of intelligence as consisting of multiple, special-purpose skill-sets.
Gardner identifies eight different kinds of intelligence: bodily-kinesthetic, interpersonal, verbal-linguistic, logical-mathematical, naturalistic, intrapersonal, visual-spatial and musical. None of these involves an ability to estimate probabilities accurately, and yet the study of Ceci and Liker suggested that this was something that some people were very good at. Hence my hypothesis that there is another special purpose skill-set in addition to those identified by Gardner, at the core of which is the ability to estimate probabilities accurately. This is what I'm calling "risk intelligence".
Dylan Evans
6 December 2009