Most psychologists agreed that Spearman’s subdivision of abilities was too narrow, but not all agreed

that the subdivision should be hierarchical. The American psychologist Joy Paul Guilford proposed a
structure-of-intellect theory, which in its earlier versions postulated 120 abilities. In The Nature of
Human Intelligence (1967), Guilford argued that abilities can be divided into five kinds of operation, four
kinds of content, and six kinds of product. These facets can be variously combined to form 120 separate
abilities. An example of such an ability would be cognition (operation) of semantic (content) relations
(product), which would be involved in recognizing the relation between lawyer and client in the analogy
problem above (lawyer is to client as doctor is to __). Guilford later increased the number of abilities
proposed by his theory to 150.

Eventually it became apparent that there were serious problems with the basic approach to
psychometric theory. A movement that had started by postulating one important ability had come, in
one of its major manifestations, to recognize 150. Moreover, the psychometricians (as practitioners of
factor analysis were called) lacked a scientific means of resolving their differences. Any method that
could support so many theories seemed somewhat suspect. Most important, however, the
psychometric theories failed to say anything substantive about the processes underlying intelligence. It
is one thing to discuss “general ability” or “fluid ability” but quite another to describe just what is
happening in people’s minds when they are exercising the ability in question. The solution to these
problems, as proposed by cognitive psychologists, was to study directly the mental processes underlying
intelligence and, perhaps, to relate them to the facets of intelligence posited by psychometricians.

The American psychologist John B. Carroll, in Human Cognitive Abilities (1993), proposed a “three-
stratum” psychometric model of intelligence that expanded upon existing theories of intelligence. Many
psychologists regard Carroll’s model as definitive, because it is based upon reanalyses of hundreds of
data sets. In the first stratum, Carroll identified narrow abilities (roughly 50 in number) that included the
seven primary abilities identified by Thurstone. According to Carroll, the middle stratum encompassed
broad abilities (approximately 10) such as learning, retrieval ability, speediness, visual perception, fluid
intelligence, and the production of ideas. The third stratum consisted solely of the general factor, g, as
identified by Spearman. It might seem self-evident that the factor at the top would be the general
factor, but it is not, since there is no guarantee that there is any general factor at all.

Both traditional and modern psychometric theories face certain problems. First, it has not been proved
that a truly general ability encompassing all mental abilities actually exists. In The General Factor of
Intelligence: How General Is It? (2002), edited by the psychologists Robert Sternberg (author of this
article) and Elena Grigorenko, contributors to the edited volume provided competing views of the g
factor, with many suggesting that specialized abilities are more important than a general ability,
especially because they more readily explain individual variations in intellectual functioning. Second,
psychometric theories cannot precisely characterize all that goes on in the mind. Third, it is not clear
whether the tests on which psychometric theories are based are equally appropriate in all cultures. In
fact, there is an assumption that successful performance on a test of intelligence or cognitive ability will
depend on one’s familiarity with the cultural framework of those who wrote the test. In her 1997 paper
“You Can’t Take It with You: Why Ability Assessments Don’t Cross Cultures,” the American psychologist
Patricia M. Greenfield concluded that a single test may measure different abilities in different cultures.
Her findings emphasized the importance of taking issues of cultural generality into account when
creating abilities tests.