Abstract
Individuals are typically identified as gifted largely on the basis of competence in limited contexts, but their performance in the real world, both as children and adults, often lags far behind their competence. Thus, the identification of the individuals as “gifted,” however useful in theory, is much less useful in practice. This article explains some of the reasons why people identified as gifted by competence often fail in their performance. In this article, I propose a transformational, T-ACCEL model of giftedness. In this model, it is important not only to become an active concerned citizen and ethical leader, but also to do so in a way that makes the world a better place—that makes a positive, meaningful, and possibly enduring difference to the world, not just to one’s national, or ideological, ethnic, racial, religious, or other group.
Keywords
Introduction
Gifted education and talent-development programs typically focus a lot on academic and related skills, but far less on the task and contextual factors that reduce, or occasionally, increase the effective deployment of these skills. In the outside real world, as opposed to the world of the school, how effective a person will be in using their gifts will depend largely on personal characteristics orthogonal to intellectual abilities and on task and contextual factors, not merely on how “gifted” a person is as a result of internal intellectual qualities.
Obstacles to the positive deployment of abilities—the performance deficit
Psychologists have long distinguished between two kinds of models, competence models and performance models (Davidson & Sternberg, 1985). Competence models specify what a person is theoretically capable of doing, whereas performance models specify what a person actually is alleged to do. The two are quite different, an observation that has given rise to the term “under-achiever”—a person whose performance is at a level substantially below their level of competence. What we may fail to realize is that, to a large extent, everyone is an” underachiever.” Almost no one operates at their level of full competence, intellectual or otherwise. And even fewer people than are truly competent in their performance are truly expert in their performance (Sternberg & Grigorenko, 2003).
Traditional models of giftedness conceive of giftedness as IQ plus some other qualities, such as demonstrated levels of motivation or achievement in specific areas (Sternberg & Ambrose, 2021). One major problem, discussed in many of the essays in Sternberg and Ambrose (2021), is that IQ and even school achievement offer too narrow a lens through which to view giftedness. But there is an even bigger problem—the gap mentioned above between competence and performance. The Marland Report (1972) defined gifted and talented individuals in terms beyond just IQ, in particular, in terms of general intellectual ability, specific academic ability, creative or productive thinking, leadership ability, visual and performing arts, and psychomotor ability.
Perhaps nowhere was the gap between competence and performance more obvious, recently, than in the performance of the presidents of Harvard University, the University of Pennsylvania, and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in front of a Congressional committee (Carillo, 2023). After hearing these undoubtedly gifted individuals speak (it is no easy feat to be chosen for a job as president of a top, world-class university), many people wondered exactly what it means to be the president of some of the most prestigious universities in the world, and by extension, to be affiliated as a faculty member or student at such an institution. The presidents, by almost universal consensus, gave answers that were barely coherent and that led to two of the three apologizing later on (Herszenhorn & Yuan, 2023; Leung & Rawiszer, 2023) and then losing their jobs.
One might be quick, as some were, to turn the event into a happening to support a particular political ideology. Ironically, the questioning of the presidents was led by a Harvard graduate who is a 2020 U.S. election-denier and all-around conspiracy-monger, who thus seems scarcely in a position validly to judge anyone (Milbank, 2022). How can gifted leaders be such stunning under-achievers in an important domain (Congressional testimony) of real life? Is it so hard to speak the straight truth without either speaking in circumlocutions (the university presidents) or supporting, with pride (the interlocutor), conspiracies shown in multiple court cases to be false (Wheeler, 2021)? Why do smart, even gifted people, perform at levels so much lower than what their competence would seem to allow? It is argued here that the difference is due to internal and external mechanisms that quickly can wipe out the demonstration of a person’s competence. These factors lead to a steep decline in performance relative to competence. But what matters in life is not so much competence, as how it is exercised in daily performance.
One could argue, of course, that what constitutes a “competent leader” is all a matter of time and place—that is, that quality of leadership depends on situational variables. No doubt, to some extent, this is true. Entering into a war may be a foolish gesture designed to keep a failing leader (e.g., president or prime minister) in power by uniting their citizens around their flag, or it may be a necessary gesture to save the world from a madman (e.g., the entrance of the Allies into World War II). The effect of situations is actually applicable to other psychological traits as well, such as intelligence, creativity, and wisdom (Sternberg et al., 2023). A behavior that is perceived as intelligent at one time, such as shaking hands in normal times upon meeting someone to indicate pleasure at meeting them, may be perceived as unintelligent at another time, such as when the meeting is during the time of a raging pandemic. Nevertheless, just as there are some attributes that are cross-situationally associated with intelligence (e.g., adaptation to the environment, ability to learn, ability to reason inductively—Carroll, 1993), so are there some characteristics cross-situationally associated with good leadership (e.g., ethical behavior, wise judgment that takes into account diverse points of view, thinking about long-term as well as short-term consequences of one’s actions—Lussier & Achua, 2022; Northouse, 2021). Sternberg (2003) has suggested that wisdom, intelligence, and creativity, synthesized (WICS) are relevant to leadership in any situation. Why do leaders and followers as well perform so often at levels below, even far below, their level of competence?
Factors That Degrade Performance Below Competence.
Internal factors
One set of factors driving down everyday performance relative to competence is internal to the person, including the gifted person. What are some of these factors? They can be divided into cognitive, personality, and motivational factors.
Cognitive factors
Informal logical fallacies
Gifted individuals are susceptible to informal and sometimes toxic logical fallacies, which they may never learn to avoid. Informal logical fallacies have essentially nothing to do with deductive (formal) logical reasoning (see Guyote & Sternberg, 1981). Rather, these fallacies are of inductive logic, where there are no deductively certain answers. It may be useful to review some of the informal logical fallacies that people, including very bright ones, commit (see, e.g., Sternberg et al., 2008). 1. Begging the question. Asked a question they cannot or do not want to answer, an individual answers a different question or provides an obviously incomplete answer to the question they received. For example, recently, a politician widely regarded as bright, asked about the causes of the U.S. Civil War, hemmed and hawed but did not mention the obvious cause, slavery (Lopez, 2023). In this particular case, the begging of the question was too obvious, so it largely failed. 2. False dichotomy. People act on the basis of there being two dichotomous options for solving a problem when in fact there are more than two mutually exclusive options. For example, people might ask themselves whether or not they should wear a mask to protect themselves from COVID-19 or any other illness. But, in fact, there are many intermediate options, such as wearing a mask, but only when there are many people present in a closed and crowded indoor setting. It may sound like bright people would not fall into this trap, but in many professions, even the brightest people tend to polarize, much the way politics is polarized in much of the world today. For example, philosophy has sometimes polarized into Continental Rationalists and British Empiricists. Psychology at one point polarized into behaviorists and cognitivists. Physics has its theoretical and empirical physicists. False dichotomization exists all over, including among the most gifted. 3. Ad hominem argument. This type of argument is directed not at the substance of a claim a person is making but rather at the person themselves. It is a personal rather than a substantive attack. The accuser presumably hopes that people will not notice that they have switched the target of an accusation from the argument to the person making the argument. For example, the politician mentioned above accused the person who asked about the U.S. Civil War of being a plant of the opposing political party. This was an ad hominem response, shifting the response from one about the Civil War to one about the person asking about the Civil War. Who asked the question is not relevant to the answer to the question. 4. Straw person argument. In this argument, an individual accuses an opponent of adopting a position that the opponent does not take. The hope is that people will not realize that the opponent’s argument is being incorrectly represented, or that by the time they do realize, the damage will have been done and it will be too late. 5. Appeal to authority. An appeal to authority is an argument that one proposes to solve by citing an authority who is purported to have a definitive answer to the argument. Appeals to authority bypass serious reasoning of any kind and simply pass the buck on to someone else. 6. Confirmation bias. This is our tendency to seek information consistent with what we already believe. We may tune in only to news sources that are consistent with our ideology or only seek out information that we believe supports what we already believe. 7. Sunk-cost fallacy. This fallacy is committed when one digs in deeper on an idea that has already been shown to be a failure. It is sometimes called “throwing good money after bad.” For example, if one loses money in a stock, one might keep the stock, assuming that if it has sunk in value, at some point, it just must go up again. 8. Hasty generalization. One finds one instance, or perhaps a few instances, that support a belief, and one generalizes to a conclusion on the basis of insufficient information.
These informal logical fallacies might seem to be ones that only fools would commit, but unfortunately, nothing could be further from the truth. Stanovich and his colleagues (Stanovich, 2021; Stanovich et al., 2013, 2018; Stanovich & West, 2000, 2007) have found that even very bright people are susceptible to informal logical fallacies. They may be more apt to commit them because they believe that they are immune from them. One can be gifted in terms of formal reasoning, and yet fail miserably in contextualized informal reasoning. Schools don’t teach much reasoning, period. But how are gifted students taught to recognize informal logical fallacies that interfere with their using their gifts to benefit others and especially the world? Do they recognize them in others, or even in themselves?
Cognitive styles
Measures used to identify the gifted, tests and grades, often identify students who are good at doing what they are told to do. Those students often think in a particular way. Teachers may encourage what I have called an “executive” thinking style—a preference for doing what one is told to do, and doing it without much regard for what it is (Sternberg & Grigorenko, 1993; Zhang & Sternberg, 2002). Occasionally, in my own teaching, I have made logically ridiculous arguments as jokes, and many students have simply written them down and not stopped to analyze or question them.
Individuals with an executive style may simply believe what they are socialized or explicitly told to believe, and believe it ardently. There are other styles that are more likely to lead to a questioning stance. The legislative style of thinking—liking to generate one’s own ideas and ways of doing things—and the judicial style—analyzing the validity of ways of thinking and doing things—can be threatening to authorities in some academic settings and certainly do not pay off on the large majority of standardized tests. Programs for the gifted and talented (or anyone else) do not have to be this way (Sternberg & Grigorenko, 1995). They can encourage a legislative and also liberal style—a preference for thinking in new ways—not just an executive style whereby students learn enormous amounts of information and spit it back. They just often do not do so. Nor do many workplaces, where new ideas may be encouraged so long as they do not disrupt the usual ways of doing things.
The executive “stylist” often is the one who most pleases teachers. They do well whatever they believe they should do according to the authority structure of the institution in which they are involved—school, organization, country, or whatever. Sometimes, of course, we all need to do as we are told. They may have very high IQs. Indeed, IQ tests require, for success, doing what one is told to do by the authority of those giving and using the tests. So, whether we are accelerating or enriching, we may be encouraging a style that encourages the same kind obedience that Milgram (1974/2009) identified in his obedience studies, where people would do things that they believed harmed people, simply because authority figures told them to, or insisted on their doing them.
Every society needs people who are executive stylists. They keep the society running and tied to its moorings. The problem is that, in an unjust society, some of them keep the unjust society running every bit as well as they might in a just society. And they may even become True Believers, as discussed below.
Personality factors
Personality traits
Some personality traits compromise people’s ability to perform up to their level of competence, whether that level is ordinary or gifted.
Dogmatism
Dogmatism is an unwillingness to let go of one’s beliefs. Dogmatic people are certain they are right and, when they hear competing views or even facts, are inclined to dismiss them. They are closed-minded. Dogmatism is not limited to people of limited intellect. Hence, no matter what their intellectual level, they lose opportunities to achieve expertise because of their closed-mindedness.
Emotional instability
People who are emotionally unstable (neurotic) are self-conscious, often quick to anger, often anxious, irritable, and susceptible to depression. These attributes pose problems in themselves, but especially, they pose problems in the optimal use of one’s intellect. In a word, one is too self-preoccupied. The emotionally unstable person has to devote a substantial amount of their mental resources to dealing with their problems, and hence suboptimize in the deployment of their mental resources. They may not have enough resources left over after dealing with their own problems. Anxious persons also may not be able to show their optimal level of performance because performing in itself makes them uncomfortable.
Dark triad or dark tetrad
The dark triad consists of the traits of Machiavelllianism, naricissism, and psychopathy (Paulhus, 2014; Paulhus & Williams, 2002). Sometimes, a fourth trait, sadism, is added to form a dark tetrad (Nott & Walker, 2021). People with these traits, no matter how gifted, tend to use their abilities to help themselves at others’ expense. They have little or no empathy toward, or compassion for, other people. Indeed, if they are sadistic, they may delight in others’ misfortune, especially if they cause it. One would like to think that gifted people would be beyond such traits, but there is no evidence of this. On the contrary, sometimes gifted people use these traits to increase the effectiveness of their dark agenda.
Personality defense mechanisms
Psychological defense mechanisms can be used to hide malevolent intentions, in gifted as well as non-gifted individuals. Many of these were identified by Freud (1894/2014). (Although for many psychologists, some of Freud’s theorizing is not currently in favor, his list of defense mechanisms and other aspects of his theory remains as relevant today as when it was first proposed—Stewart, 2023). Defense mechanisms often are used to hide malevolent intentions, not only from others, but also from ourselves. It may be useful, in light of this argument, to review Freud’s (1894/2014) list of psychological defense mechanisms for dealing with unpleasant truths. Anyone can fall back on these defense mechanisms, regardless of whether the individual is gifted, not gifted, or anything else. These defense mechanisms can help the individual hide from themselves how their gifts and talents are being deployed for bad or even toxic purposes. Thus, someone can be gifted, think they are doing the “right” thing, and cause enormous destruction. For example, it takes a gifted mind to develop hypersonic missiles for Russia that will murder large numbers of innocent civilians, including children. Use of weapons of mass destruction is not a Russian invention. The United States devoted enormous resources to the creation of atomic weapons, which were then dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki in Japan, causing countless deaths and injuries and also establishing a precedent. Almost certainly, the world would have been better off for not having a precedent of the use of weapons of mass destruction, no matter what the intentions.
As a reminder for many readers, some of the main mechanisms are: 1. Repression. Subconsciously blocking from consciousness wishes or desires one finds unacceptable. For example, someone desires to oppress and take advantage of others but does not consciously admit to it. Or someone works on weapons of mass destruction and hides from themselves their own destructive impulses. 2. Suppression. Consciously blocking wishes or desires one finds unacceptable. For example, someone desires to oppress and take advantage of others but chooses not to think about it. Or someone develops missiles and just decides not to think about what the missiles will be used for. 3. Reaction formation. A repressed wish or desire is replaced at a conscious level with its opposite. For example, someone who desires to oppress and take advantage of people tells them, and believes, that they desire to help the people flourish. Or someone develops highly destructive missiles and thinks of themselves as saviors of their homeland rather than as brutal murderers at a distance. With a gifted toxic leader, adults can be convinced of many things that, as children, would have horrified them. 4. Projection. One attributes to someone else one’s unacceptable desire or wish. For example, one attributes to others a desire to oppress others, when really that is one’s own desire. Or one wishes one did not have to develop highly destructive missiles but feels that another country’s (often imagined) aggression leaves one with no choice. 5. Rationalization. One convinces oneself through a supposedly rational thought process that an unacceptable wish or desire is really desirable. For example, one concludes that members of a group are incapable of governing themselves and need one’s “firm hand” in order to survive and possibly even flourish in the world. Or one convinces oneself that if one did not develop the missiles, someone else would and might well botch the job.
According to Freud, anyone can use these techniques to find the means to act in ways that would be consciously unacceptable. Whether one is an aficionado of Freud or not, these defense mechanisms should be familiar to almost anyone who has acted in ways that, at some point or another, they knew they shouldn’t have acted. Indeed, if one is more intelligent, one may be better able to use some of these mechanisms, especially rationalization. How are gifted students taught to recognize defense mechanisms that interfere with their using their gifts to benefit others and especially the world? Freudian defense mechanisms degrade cognitive performance, widening the gap between competence and actual performance in the real world.
Motivational factors
Motivational needs that bias thinking
People have personal needs that sometimes override their thinking about what might be the “right” thing to do (Murray, 1938). People differ in their levels of these needs. But the differences are not necessarily correlated with their intellectual levels of competence. Examples of these needs are: • • •
These and other needs can take precedence over any rational thinking. The result is, as with the other internal factors, that people’s performance may only sparsely reflect their level of intellectual competency, if it reflects it at all. Measuring competence is often a compromised way of figuring out how a person will perform.
Motivational attraction to toxicity
First, people are attracted to toxicity in leaders (Kellerman, 2004; Lipman-Blumen, 2006). Gifted people are attracted to toxic leaders just like anyone else. The gifted, like anyone else, can become what have been referred to as “darkly creative” (Cropley et al., 2008, 2010; Kapoor & Kaufman, 2022a, 2022b, 2022c) and “darkly intelligent” leaders (Sternberg, 2022, 2023a, 2023d). Toxic leaders typically combine dark-triad personality traits (narcissism, Machiavellianism, psychopathy—Paulhus, 2014; Paulhus & Williams, 2002) with the dark intelligence and dark creativity that they use to lead to the accumulation of power and other resources for themselves and to destructive outcomes for others. Thus, giftedness not only is not a protective factor, but if deployed darkly, can become a contributing factor toward the achievement of malevolent outcomes. High levels of dark creativity and dark intelligence can lead to much worse outcomes than just dark-triad traits in themselves. The darkly creative and darkly intelligent are particularly effective in using dark-triad traits to cause harm. Nothing in existing procedures of identification screens out people who have, or develop, bad intentions.
Often, people start out with good intentions, but as is often said, “The road to hell is paved with good intentions.” Google started off with the motto, “Don’t be evil.” On May 4, 2018, they disposed of the motto, for whatever reasons. How are gifted students taught to recognize toxic leaders and not to become ones themselves? We as educators cannot just hope for the best when it comes to whether our students become toxic leaders in adulthood. We need to take a proactive role in promoting good behavior, not a role where we believe it is enough to hope for the best. Our programs for the gifted may turn out toxic leaders—indeed, have turned out toxic leaders—and we at least should have a responsibility, as educators, to try to steer future leaders in a more constructive direction.
External factors
All of us find ourselves subject to pressures that lead us in certain directions and not others. In adulthood, and sometimes in childhood, these pressures lead one to behave in ways that are not consistent with one’s intellectual competencies, even gifted levels of such competencies. Examples are need for money (or perceived need for money), need to protect oneself and family members from harm, and need to find a meaningful place in society. What are the roles people can take on when they do the wrong thing, through desire or necessity?
Living challenges
Inadvertent living challenges
There are many living challenges that can degrade performance and reduce it way below competence. These include living through (a) war, (b) famine, (c) natural disasters (e.g., harsh climate), (d) poverty or other economic hardship, (e) evil governments and/or toxic ideologies, (f) abusive family or school environment, (g) severe and/or chronic illness, and more. People in these circumstances often cannot work at their full level of competence because their lot in life simply does not allow it.
Manufactured living challenges
Sometimes reductions of performance below competence result not from the vagaries of the environmental context, but rather from manufactured living challenges, such as alcohol abuse, drug addiction, the decision to put one’s own well-being front and center and ignore the well-being of others, and ideologies that lead one into alternate realities, such as fervent belief in conspiracy theories. In these cases, one goes down a metaphorical rabbit hole of one’s own creation.
Cultural barriers
In gifted education, reduction of performance below competence can result from cultural beliefs that arbitrarily support some people over others—people of one sex or socially-defined race or ethnicity or religious group, or whatever. Sometimes, a particular way of approaching problems is valued because of cultural beliefs. These may seem to be much less limiting than sexism or racism, and yet sometimes, they can be as limiting in terms of who is identified as giftedness as are sexism and racism. An example is the speed conundrum.
Speed of learning and thinking has often been highlighted as desirable. There is a lot of external pressure to show one is “quick.” But quickness can also reflect impulsiveness or lack of deep thought. For example, many tests of intelligence and related abilities, especially group tests and subtests of individual tests, are timed. Speed of function is valued. There is a distinct subset of psychological theories of intelligence that emphasizes mental speed (see reviews in Deary, 2020; Jensen, 1998; Nettelbeck et al., 2020; Vernon, 1983, 1987). Whereas problems presented in forms that are minimally contextualized, such as on a test of intelligence or scholastic aptitude or whatever, benefit from speed of processing, a different point of view is that what matters especially is not how fast a person thinks, but rather, a metacomponential (executive) decision as to when to think quickly and when not to (Marr & Sternberg, 1987; Sternberg, 1981a). In his research, Sternberg found that mental speed is not necessarily good and often is bad. For example, he found more intelligent people were slower in encoding stimuli than were less intelligent people (Sternberg, 1977). By spending more time on encoding, the more intelligent individual then was able to operate more quickly on their encodings. Similarly, in looking at cognitive development, whereas most components of information processing in analogical reasoning sped up with age, encoding slowed down (Sternberg & Rifkin, 1979). Moreover, Sternberg (1981b) found that more intelligent people were slower than less intelligent ones in global planning, the planning one does up front before starting to solve a problem; by thinking more before they started solving the problem, they were able to be faster in local planning.
The Western cultural view is that speed of mental processing is good—that it betokens someone who is intelligent to learn fast, think fast, and act fast. Tests, after all, usually are timed. But if one views intelligence and giftedness as well as a person x task × situation interaction, speed of thinking and action can become undesirable because real-world problems are embedded in complex contexts and hence often do not lend themselves to quick solutions. In the real world, there is no unique correct solution, as on a test; what is correct in the real world often depends on context.
The notion of acceleration in gifted education may send the message that “fast” is good. Material is presented at a more rapid rate and students are expected to learn and process information at a faster rate. Yet, those who make important decisions fast--where to go to college, whom to marry, what job to take, when to move from where one lives--often end up regretting their decisions. They depended on their “Type I” (intuitive) processing or relatively quick “Type II” (deliberative) processing (Kahneman, 2011) when the problems did not lend themselves to rapid solution.
The deployment of the mechanisms to do the wrong thing
There are, I would argue, a number of states of mind that smart, even intellectually or otherwise gifted people, could and sometimes do adopt (based in part on Hyacinth, 2014; Sternberg, 2024), such that they could become “active concerned citizens” and yet join up with a bad or even evil regime, of which there are many in the world today.
Of course, the list of gifted people with strange and often toxic beliefs goes on and on. In current times, Elon Musk, the richest individual in the world, has become as well-known for his outlandish conspiracy-theory beliefs as for his riches (Ghaffary, 2023; Harwell, 2023). He even restored the X (formerly Twitter) account of Alex Jones, a conspiracy theorist who has touted utterly bizarre conspiracies and who has filed for bankruptcy in connection with the legal actions against him for his shameless promotion of falsehoods (Associated Press, 2023). Being intelligent, even gifted, provides little or no protection from people becoming True Believers in bad or even destructive causes. What are talent-development programs and programs for the gifted doing to prevent their students from becoming True Believers in ridiculous or even toxic causes?
Opportunists are of four main kinds. A first kind is motivated by power, a second by financial gain, a third kind by the desire to affiliate with or belong to a powerful group, and the fourth kind by fear. These kinds of opportunists may be in overlapping groups. For example, someone could be motivated by both power and money, or someone could be motivated by fear but nevertheless look forward to financial gain by taking advantage of working for a government that the individual perceives as unsavory. In each case, individuals use their practical intelligence, and any other kind of intelligence they can muster, to seize and take advantage of opportunities they see themselves as having or being able to create for themselves.
Opportunists may be narcissists (Desmet & Sternberg, 2023) but they do not have to be. They may simply be smart people seeking to find or create opportunities to succeed. They may even care whether the opportunities presented to them are ethical, but in the end, decide that the advantages to them outweigh the ethical considerations.
One might think that gifted individuals would not be mere joiners, but that is not the case. As Kuhn (2012) pointed out, most scientists simply join whatever the going paradigm is. And as has been pointed out elsewhere (Sternberg et al., 2002), most creativity simply moves a field a baby step forward from where it is. Academics, in particular, realize that the rewards often are for small contributions that do not threaten any referees who might attempt to sabotage publication of their work.
Gifted individuals need to learn that the more they try to defy the crowd or the Zeitgeist with their creative ideas, the more pushback they will get for those ideas (Sternberg, 2018). In a class for the gifted, their creative work may be appreciated. In real-life settings, one typically has to fight for one’s creative ideas to be accepted. Classes for the gifted often do not prepare students adequately to counter the pushback they will receive in real-life contexts.
How does one decide how to respond to a government that one finds objectionable? The advantage of a democracy is that in a democracy, you get to support or not support a government offering itself up for election. In an autocracy, you are forced to take what you get, or suffer the consequences. Increasingly, countries are becoming autocratic, either by choice, as in the case of Hungary (European Parliament, 2022), or by fraudulent election, as in the recent case of Serbia (Gavin, 2023). The United States, in 2024, will face the choice of whether to elect a candidate who has not hidden his autocratic tendencies. That individual may win. Those who do not learn from history are doomed to repeat it, as George Santayana (1905/1998) pointed out.
To summarize, the traditional view of giftedness is based on a competency model—IQ and associated abilities that, when manifested, are manifested in an academic setting. But what matters for giftedness in life is not so much competency, but rather, how it is translated into performance. There are so many factors that moderate the effects of competency that one might suggest a new model is needed that refers not only to abilities and how they are manifested in school, but also that specifies how they need to be manifested in everyday life. This topic is discussed below.
What’s to be done?
Let’s consider what can be done when the view of giftedness as competency proves to be inadequate to how gifts are manifested in real-life tasks and situations.
Giftedness does not inhere in the individual
Giftedness is a person x task x situation (see, e.g., Sternberg et al., 2023), whereby a person is gifted not merely by virtue of possession of certain gifts or talents, but rather, by virtue of how these gifts and talents manifest themselves in the performance of particular tasks in particular situational contexts (Sternberg, 2021, 2023). The same person may or may not be labeled as “gifted,” depending on what they are asked to do, when, and where. In a country with an autocratic government—China, Russia, Cuba, Belarus, or wherever—the gifted person may be the one who does exactly what they are told, does not do what they are not allowed to do, and follows orders to the letter in a mindless fashion. Those who are seen as “trouble-makers” may end up without education, without jobs, in prison, or just dead (Sternberg, 2023c).
A given action can be either very smart or very stupid, depending on the context. In one context, for example, telling a person that you love the way you are dressed may seem like a great compliment; in another, it may seem like an unwelcome come-on. Some Brazilian street-children can do complex computations in the context of their street business but are unable to do the same computations in a school setting (Ceci & Roazzi, 1994; Nuñes, 1994). Similarly, children who do only poorly in school may be highly adaptively intelligent in the context of their own indigenous environment. For example, they may have hunting, fishing, gathering, and indigenous medical skills that high-IQ or otherwise “gifted” children from post-industrialized environments might not have (Grigorenko et al., 2004; Sternberg et al., 2001).
This view was adumbrated by Sternberg (1993) and Sternberg and Zhang (1995) in a pentagonal model of giftedness, according to which, in the real world, excellence is always judged in particular contexts, never in the abstract. Similar points have been made by Ziegler (2005) and Ziegler and Stoeger (2007) and Borland (2004), among others. The gifted-education enterprise sometimes fails children by not preparing them for the task and situational contextual factors that can lead the young people to deploy their gifts poorly, not at all, or for morally compromised and even toxic purposes. Gifted education needs to focus at least as much on deployment of giftedness as it does on its development as a set of skills (Sternberg, 2021). Giftedness should not be viewed as a static bank account of exceptional skills on which individuals can draw, but rather as a foundation for making the world a better place, and not just for the individual with the gifts or talents (Sternberg, 2023b).
ACCEL
A model that attempted to address the issues raised in this article is ACCEL (Sternberg, 2017). ACCEL is a model for gifted education of talent development that specifies a set of skills and attitudes that individuals should develop in order to fulfill the promise of the acronym,
A problem with traditional models of giftedness is that they deal with a competence, which many theorists of abilities view as broad (e.g., Gottfredson, 1997; Sackett et al., 2020), but others view as narrow (Gardner, 2011; Sternberg, 2017). But the larger problem, I suggest, is that the models ignore performance, which almost always lags behind competence, and they fail to deal with deployment (Sternberg, 2021). What are the gifts used for? Is it all right if the gifts are used to kill children? Should abilities be developed in a morally neutral way that fails adequately to teach that there are moral responsibilities in the deployment of gifts? These are not the “moral” responsibilities taught in the context of dictatorships and cults, which somehow always manage to reflect back to worship of an authoritarian leader, in whatever guise that worship may be disguised. We like to think that “it can’t happen here” (Lewis, 1935/2014), but anyone whose eyes are even half-open will realize that, almost regardless of where they are, it can happen “here,” it has happened “here,” and it might happen “here” again.
ACCEL is only partially successful as a model, however, because it fails to address a key issue—what exactly does “active, concerned citizenship” entail? What if one is a citizen of a despotic and possibly evil regime? Should gifted education ideally teach children to be “good citizens” and active supporters of this regime? And citizens of what and where? One’s country, the world, or what?
The ACCEL model (Sternberg, 2017) suggests that certain skills and attitudes should be emphasized in talent development: (a) critical-thinking skills, (b) creativity, (c) common sense, (d) wisdom, (e) ethical thinking and behavior, and (f) passion. To be an active citizen and ethical leader, one needs a combination of these skills and attitudes, plus the knowledge base to draw on to be able to think in these various ways.
In recent times, the issue of a supporting knowledge base has become a problem. In the United States, for example, almost two-thirds of young adults are unaware that six million Jews were killed in the Holocaust and 23% believe that the Holocaust is a myth (Sherwood, 2020). Apparently, children today are not learning much about other things either: PISA scores across the world, measuring school achievement of a variety of kinds, have been mostly tumbling since 2003 (Hatch, 2023).
It is difficult, if not impossible, to develop good citizenship and ethical leadership knowledge and skills if one is ignorant of basic knowledge about the world, and especially, historical knowledge. At least in the United States, and quite likely elsewhere, the level of ignorance is astonishing. Two-thirds of Millennials could not identify what Auschwitz was; half believed the U. S. Civil War occurred before the American Revolution; more than a third did not know in what century the American Revolution took place; more than half believe that the United States is a direct democracy (Brownfield, 2018), and hence were either ignorant of the U.S. Electoral College or misunderstood its function. More than half of the respondents identified the quote “From each according to his ability to each according to his needs” as being from Thomas Paine, George Washington, or Barack Obama; it is from Karl Marx (Brownfield, 2018).
Such ignorance is unbefitting of a democracy or even a quasi-democracy such as the United States (where institutions are designed to favor a conservative mostly White minority—Levitsky & Ziblatt, 2023; see also Levitsky & Ziblatt, 2018). But ignorance of history does favor a kind of government different from a democracy or a quasi-democracy. Indeed, this kind of government attempts to wipe out, or at least, “sanitize” history to conform to its own preferred version of history and made-up “facts.” This is the autocracy (Sternberg & Fischer, 2022) or even the corrupt democracy. Autocracies, such as China, actively cover up certain facts, such as the massacre at Tiananmen Square, sometimes with the help of Western governments that do not want to confront the autocracies (Reuters, 2021; Weiwei, 2019). It also can favor the anocracy—a combination of a democracy and an autocracy. For example, in the United States, which historically has failed in democracy for many populations, such as African-Americans, there continue even today efforts to cover up the role of slavery in the country’s history (Breen, 2023; Romero, 2021).
With increased emphasis on STEM subjects, at least in the United States, humanities, including history, are being reduced and in some cases, driven out of the curriculum. One large state university, West Virginia University, recently eliminated a number of humanities (and other) majors from its curriculum. The result may be students who know STEM subjects but do not have the historical and related knowledge, as well as the critical-thinking skills, to use what they learn in these subjects for societal betterment.
Governments often do not want their people to learn history, or at least, history as it actually happened. For this reason, they may seek to take control of what students are taught and how they are taught it. One usually thinks of such control as characteristics of autocracies, where the version of history that is presented may well be a fantasy perpetrated by the autocrats. But other forms of government may do the same, sometimes at levels other than the national level. For example, in the United States, versions of history (and other) textbooks sold in the States of California and Texas, two of the largest markets, may present different versions of historical events in order to please and pacify State Boards of Education that may determine what textbooks are allowed to be used in the state.
ACCEL Viewed From the Standpoints of Democracy and Autocracy.
The democracy chooses its own government and is relatively free with respect to what one can say and do, so long as it is within a democratic legal framework. The autocracy either has no elections or has staged elections; sometimes, the election is real but the candidates who are allowed to run are carefully selected either to overtly support the government in power or to be stooges pretending to be the opposition.
The government of an autocracy claims to provide order and security at the expense of freedom. It claims that the leaders care about the people. Indeed, there have been some supposedly “benevolent” dictators. The problem is that benevolent dictators rarely remain benevolent (Stockman, 2023), or even if they do, their successors rarely reach their level of alleged benevolence. The problem is that, as Lord Acton pointed out, “Power corrupts and absolute power corrupts absolutely” (see Ahistrom, 1974). Benevolence often is in the eye of the beholder, in any case. A dictator may be benevolent until they or their agents see someone as crossing them, at which point, their benevolence may vanish quickly.
Individuals who live in any society have a choice to make, which stems from their common sense (or practical intelligence—Sternberg et al., 2000, 2008; Sternberg & Wagner, 1994). Basically, they can adapt to a given environment, try to shape that environment, decide to seek out a new environment (if they are able to), or pursue some combination of these options. An intellectually gifted individual, as typically defined in terms of high IQ and high achievement, could well go for any of these choices. If they decide to adapt, they modify themselves to suit the environment they are in; if they decide to shape, as have Tony Chung in Hong Kong and many of his colleagues and also the countless Iranians living in the dictatorial regime of Iran, they try to make the society conform to their notion of what a better society would be; and if they decide to select, as did Tony Chung eventually did, they get out, either in order to avoid daily misery or to stay out of prison, or worse.
Toxic governments devote very substantial resources to trying to convince their citizens that good citizenship and ethical leadership mean joining up with the toxic government. It is much easier to accept their propaganda than to oppose it. For example, as a citizen of China, you can buy into “Xi Jinping Thought” (see Garrick & Bennett, 2018) or you can think for yourself. The rewards, as a citizen of China, are clearly for the former, regardless of what you truly believe or know to be true.
Transformational ACCEL: T-ACCEL
Leaving aside, for a moment, the question of whether a government is a democracy, an autocracy, or something in-between—perhaps an anocracy, which, as mentioned previously, has elements of both democracy and autocracy—why would an intellectually well-endowed individual choose to side with an oppressive or even evil government? Why would they become “active, engaged citizens” of an evil regime that stifles and imprisons or kills the opposition?
When too many people fall out of high windows, for example (van Brugen, 2023), or are poisoned with radioactive substances (Synovitz, 2020), it is not too hard to identify an evil regime. Would you devote your intellectual gifts to such a regime—perhaps engineering falls or radioactive poisons? Why might others? Why would gifted people, either as (perhaps inadequately) traditionally defined, or even as defined (perhaps inadequately) by ACCEL, join with such evil enterprises? Indeed, why did so many doctors join the Nazi Party (Haque et al., 2012)?
I propose a model I will call T-ACCEL, or transformational ACCEL—Active Concerned Citizenship and Ethical Leadership. Transformational giftedness is giftedness deployed to make a positive, meaningful, and potentially enduring difference to the world (Sternberg, 2020; Sternberg et al., 2021; see essays in Sternberg et al., 2022). It is directed to make the world a better place. “Citizenship” in a transformational sense is citizenship directed toward a common good, of whatever entity—not the good just of the individual, others in the individual’s ideological, ethnic, or other group, nor the state, which often has interests orthogonal or even opposed to the interests of its citizens. Transformational ACCEL is citizenship of the world, not only of the present, but also of the future. And it represents the highest level of ethical leadership—not ethical leadership with one’s eyes half-closed to avoid noticing the injustices the government perpetrates, but ethical leadership to make everyone’s life better.
Although there have been any number of bad leaders in the world, there also have been many good and wise leaders who can serve as role models for those who want to teach about transformational giftedness, or who wish to develop transformationality in their own lives.
In government, examples are: 1. Abraham Lincoln: At great risk and eventually cost to his life, Abraham Lincoln helped to rid the United States of the abominable practice of slavery. 2. Mohandas Gandhi: Gandhi gave up the possibility of a pleasant and peaceful life to help rid India of the yoke of being governed by a colonialist power. 3. Nelson Mandela: Mandela, more than anyone else, was responsible for ending the brutal system of Apartheid in South Africa. 4. Maia Sandu: Sandu has resisted enormous and multi-pronged pressure from a neighboring imperialistic nation to become an unwilling ally. 5. Winston Churchill: Churchill got Great Britain through the horrors of World War II at times when the outlook for the country appeared to be extremely bleak.
In resistance movements, some people have stood out in diverse ways: 1. Susan B. Anthony: Anthony, together with other suffragists, helped to achieve voting rights for women in the United States, where previously women had been deprived of the right to vote. 2. Martin Luther King: Martin Luther King was a tireless crusader for civil rights in the United States whose efforts greatly enhanced civil rights for African Americans in the United States, but ultimately at the cost of his own life. 3. Alexei Navalny: Navalny fought against a dictatorship and sacrificed his life in the hope of achieving freedom in Russia. 4. Malala Yousafzai: Malala has fought for rights of women in Pakistan and around the world and paid with grievous bodily harm; she nevertheless keeps fighting. 5. Narges Mohammadi, winner of the Nobel Peace Prize, is jailed in Iran for her fight for women’s rights and their right, especially not to wear the hijab.
What did all these very diverse people have in common? It might be argued that they had in common their burning passion to transform the world to make it a better place, not only for people like them, but for everyone. They all have sacrificed greatly to achieve positive change, often at the cost of their well-bring or even their life. Were they high IQ? Who knows, and really, who cares? Their gifts were transformational not only in their own work, but in inspiring others to be active citizens and ethical leaders who would transform the world to make it a better place for us all.
T-ACCEL applies not only to states but to oneself (Sternberg et al., 2021). Individuals can be transformational with respect to others, for sure, but also with respect to themselves. When they are self-transformational, they seek to turn themselves into the best person they can be, analogous to Maslow’s (1954, 1962) concept of self-actualization. They seek to create and achieve a destiny that will enable themselves, as they get older, to say that they have become the person they had the potential to be.
Indeed, T-ACCEL is about transformation at any level. One can positively transform oneself, but also one’s proximal and distal environments in the effort to make them better for all. It is this kind of transformation, it is suggested, that should be central in curricula for gifted students.
Reaching T-ACCEL is difficult for any talent-development program because no matter how gifted the students, the teachers, or anyone else might be, there are serious task and situational obstacles that stand in the way. Even very bright people easily can go off the T-ACCEL track. Transformational ACCEL—T-ACCEL—is challenging to reach, for several reasons. First, what appears to be transformational can turn out to be para-transformational (Sternberg, 2004; Sternberg et al., 2024)—it is intended to be, and looks positive in the beginning, but then, as time goes on, turns out not be positive after all. Good ideas can go wrong, no matter how good the intentions. The best one can ask for is that an individual consider the long-term as well as the short-term; but no one has a perfect crystal ball as to what the future holds.
I have discussed the things that programs for the gifted and talent-development programs ought to be teaching. They generally aren’t, and so we get gifted children, educated in supposedly excellent programs, deploying their giftedness badly. And the programs keep ignoring the importance of positive deployment of gifts and talents in place of a performative teaching that looks good on the surface but that often does not teach children what they need to make a positive, meaningful, and potentially enduring difference to the world.
Conclusion
Evolution of Some Models of Giftedness.
Early models, such as of Binet and Simon (1916) and Terman (1925), recognized the need to identify children who have unusual gifts and can profit from instruction that takes their gifts into account. But these psychometric models were too narrow and were based only on academic competencies, as measured by IQ tests and their proxies. Binet, at least, believed in the modifiability of abilities; Terman did not and had a much more fixed view of what was possible for children.
What might be viewed as a second generation of models, such as of Renzulli (1978, 2016), broadened the conception of giftedness and allowed for modifiability, but did not fully deal with the question of deployment—whether the characteristics of the individual would be used for good purposes, a problem Renzulli et al. (2006) addressed after he proposed his initial model. Another exemplar of this generation, Gardner (2011), also proposed a broader conception of giftedness with is theory of multiple intelligences, showing that intellectual abilities could be understood in a way that is much broader than the way suggested by traditional psychometric models.
What might be viewed as a third generation of models (Subotnik et al., 2011; Ziegler, 2005; Ziegler & Stoeger, 2017) proposed systems models, which recognized that what is labeled as “gifted” depends greatly on the context in which an individual operates, and this context affects how the individual, gifted or not, develops their gifts and talents. These systems approaches were important in recognizing that “giftedness” is not just inside a person. It is a label in interaction with a particular system that exists within a situational context or set of such contexts. But these models did not deal fully with the issue of deployment—of the purposes to which gifts would be devoted—good, bad, or indifferent. In a world where governments, usually through taxpayers, fund programs for the gifted, and in which gifts are being used for extraordinarily bad and even evil purposes (such as persecuting, wounding, maiming, and murdering innocent civilians for the sake of maintaining a dark-triad type of leader in power), perhaps we need something more than static conceptions of giftedness that are divorced from deployment.
In a fourth generation, scholars became more concerned about how giftedness is deployed for moral or not so moral purposes in the real world (e.g., Ambrose, 2012, 2022; Sternberg, 2017). These model-builders recognized that raising children to be gifted but indifferent toward or destructive of the world is not a suitable goal. Moral/ethical/citizenship issues matter. These models placed gifted education squarely in the realm of deployment in the everyday world (Glück & Tischler, 2022).
Yet, something was still missing. This was the problem that in corrupt democratic governments, or autocratic ones, dark-triad leaders redefine morality to be whatever will enhance their power. They often do so in 1984-like fashion (Orwell, 1950), where the Ministry of Love, for example, was really a ministry of hate (what earlier was called reaction formation). “Moral” becomes whatever supports the dictator or other autocrat in power. It is for this reason that I have proposed a T-ACCEL model, where good citizenship becomes not of a particular religious, ethnic, racial, state, national, or other interest group, but rather, of the common good of the world. If one is being told that being a good citizen means working for the interests of people like oneself and against the interests of people unlike oneself, one must beware. And the authority of the person making the statements does not matter for T-ACCEL. There are a lot of people in authority who deploy whatever gifts they have in malevolent ways and only for their own benefit.
We, as educators, need to teach gifted students to be able to think slowly and carefully. This is especially true with respect to their response to tyranny, as discussed above. Good citizenship in countries with tyrannical leaders is not necessarily a plus--it may represent moral cowardice or simply lack of other options (as in, be a good citizen or you go to prison for 15 years). In the end, we should not merely focus on acceleration or enrichment in gifted education. Too often, students learn only to accelerate their way to societal success and to enrich and empower themselves. Rather, we should encourage the development of a transformational mindset. The world needs transformational active concerned citizens and transformational ethical leaders. We cannot just hope they will appear. We need to teach so that we develop them through the educational system.
In dictatorial and even anocratic (combined democratic/autocratic) governments, it may not be possible to teach for T-ACCEL or even for critical thinking that goes outside very narrow allowable bounds (Sternberg, 2023c). Educators in free countries, therefore, have a responsibility to try to reach, as best as they can, students and others in unfree countries at least to make them aware of their situation and how it compares with situations in other countries. And we need to remember that countries labeled as “free” are only partly free. Reaching those students may be hard or even impossible. At worst, it may expose anyone who listens to risk. But somehow, students need to learn that there is hope, even if only in the long-term. That may be the best we can offer, and little though it may be, it is something we should try to offer to them and to the world.
Footnotes
Declaration of Conflicting Interests
The author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.
Funding
The author(s) received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.
