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Unwrapping Gifts: Understanding the Inner

Workings of Giftedness Through a Panoply of
Paradigms in the Field of Psychology

Robert J. Sternberg

To cite this article: Robert J. Sternberg (2023) Unwrapping Gifts: Understanding the Inner
Workings of Giftedness Through a Panoply of Paradigms in the Field of Psychology, Roeper
Review, 45:2, 84-100, DOI: 10.1080/02783193.2023.2172754

To link to this article: https://doi.org/10.1080/02783193.2023.2172754

Published online: 21 Mar 2023.

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1. How did the author approach and define the construct of giftedness?

2. Are there similarities and differences between the paradigms in the

history of psychology? How?

3. In today's world, what message does the article have for educators to
serve gifted children well?

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ROEPER REVIEW
2023, VOL. 45, NO. 2, 84–100
https://doi.org/10.1080/02783193.2023.2172754

CONCEPTIONS OF GIFTEDNESS

Unwrapping Gifts: Understanding the Inner Workings of Giftedness Through

a Panoply of Paradigms in the Field of Psychology
Robert J. Sternberg

ABSTRACT KEYWORDS
This article reviews the implications of many of the major schools in the history of psychology for associationist; behaviorist;
understanding giftedness and its inner workings: operationist, psychometric, psychoanalytic, asso- biological; cognitive;
ciationist, behaviorist, Gestalt, cognitive, humanistic/positive psychology, functionalist/pragmatic/ constructivist; cultural;
functionalist; Gestalt;
constructivist, cultural, and biological. Each paradigm has elucidated different aspects of human
giftedness; humanistic/
nature and functioning, and each has somewhat different implications for how we can understand positive psychology;
giftedness. No one paradigm can provide complete understanding of giftedness. Rather, the operationist; pragmatic;
paradigms should be viewed as different windows toward understanding giftedness, all of which psychoanalytic;
together tell us much more than any individual one. It is regrettable that so many theorists and psychometric
practitioners have locked themselves into an operationist paradigm, which simply accepts current
measurement operations as sufficient for identifying and developing giftedness. The operationist
paradigm is wholly insufficient to meet the challenges of the world of the 21st century.

What is giftedness, anyway? There are many ways to
understand the concept of “giftedness” and the inner
workings of giftedness. Dai (2018) has provided a very
impressive history of the concept of giftedness as it has
been conceived over the years. My goal in this article is
somewhat different—not to present a history of the
concept in the field of giftedness but rather to under-
stand the construct as it might be interpreted in terms of
different schools of thought—paradigms—in the field
(and history) of psychology. I attempt to show that
there is no unique understanding of giftedness and
that our conceptions of giftedness often tend to be
a result of entrenchment in a particular way of seeing
things rather than a result of reflection on the full mean-
ing of the concept. We view giftedness through the same
narrow window, and believe that because we and, often,
our colleagues, keep seeing it through that same narrow
window, over and over again, therefore there must be
broad support for what we see.
Paradigms are not empirically disconfirmable. They
are not theories, which can be proven to be wrong, or at
least, to be inadequate in the face of empirical data.
Rather, they are ways of looking at phenomena.
Paradigms come and, to some extent, go, or at least
seem to recede, in various fields. They do not “go”
because they are wrong, but rather because investigators
or practitioners become less and less interested in them,
often as a result of the investigators or practitioners
acquiring more interest in some other, new paradigm.
Paradigms emerge as somewhat unified and coher-
ent attempts to understand the world (Kuhn, 1970).
They provide a way for different investigators to have
shared understandings of how problems can be
understood and hopefully solved. Paradigms work
for a while, and then, probably inevitably, prove to
be inadequate to the increasingly broad tasks set out
for them. They are never empirically disconfirmed
because paradigms are not empirically testable.
Rather, as their limitations become more obvious,
some investigators bolt from them and seek other,
new paradigms. Eventually, one or more of those
new paradigms take over, until those paradigms are
in turn found to be inadequate to the tasks set out for
them.
There are many different views of paradigms. It
simply goes beyond the scope of this article to dis-
cuss them all (but see Koch, 2018; Reisch, 2019, for
differing views on paradigms). At the extreme,
Feyerabend (2010) has argued against paradigms
altogether, and instead has claimed that in science,
essentially anything goes if it can win acceptance
from scientists.
The empirical facts discovered under a paradigm that
is, at a given time, out of fashion, are usually not wrong.
They just are not the empirical facts that scientists or
practitioners focus on at a given later time. For example,
the issue of the heritability of giftedness sometimes has
seemed very important, whereas at other times, it has

CONTACT Robert J. Sternberg robert.sternberg@cornell.edu Department of Human Development, College of Human Ecology, Cornell University,
Ithaca, NY 14853.
© 2023 The Roeper Institute

seemed not very important. Galton (1869) thought it to
be of paramount importance and Terman (1925) also
was very much a believer in heritability. But if one reads
modern compendia of thoughts about the gifted (e.g.,
see Sternberg & Ambrose, 2021), the issue gets very little
attention. Rather, interest in it and in other issues waxes
and wanes (see, Kuhn, 1970)—it is more or less fashion-
able at a given time. Paradigms change the substantive
issues that seem to be important.
A problem with paradigms can arise when we become
“locked” into one of them. Instead of viewing the para-
digm as providing one of many windows on
a phenomenon, we may start to view what we see
through the window of the paradigm as all there is to
see, or as the correct vantage point for observing what we
see. In that case, the paradigm actually can fool us. We
see a phenomenon in only one way. The small, fixed
window falsely becomes, in our minds, a large, movable
window that takes into account many vantage points.
We are convinced that we see more than we actually see.
Imagine, for example, a telescope in a park in Paris—
the kind into which a tourist puts in a couple of coins
and a view then appears out the lens. The telescope is
fixed upon the Eiffel Tower. The telescope provides what
seems to be stunning detail about what the Eiffel Tower
looks like. If the telescope is very powerful, we may see
details that we would have thought could be seen only
close up.
If a particular tourist comes to see the view of the
Eiffel Tower every day, the tourist may come to believe
that they are seeing the Eiffel Tower as it really is.
Perhaps other tourists see the same thing, and each
convinces the others that they are seeing all there is to
be seen. Yet, different views of the Eiffel Tower, and
different lenses used to view it, might reveal that the
fixed telescope with the fixed lens only tells tourists part
of what there is to know about the Eiffel Tower. What
the tourists thought they were seeing was much more
limited than they realized. Eventually, they may even
have come to conclude that what they saw was all there
was to be seen.
Using multiple paradigms to understand
a phenomenon is like using multiple telescopes in dif-
ferent positions, and with different kinds of lenses. We
see aspects of a phenomenon that we otherwise might
miss, and eventually even may conclude are not there.
This article is about seeing giftedness through multiple
paradigms, rather than just one that, for historical or
other reasons, happens to dominate. Seeing phenom-
ena through multiple paradigms prevents us from
becoming dogmatic without our even realizing we are
being dogmatic (Ambrose & Sternberg, 2012; Ambrose
et al., 2012).
ROEPER REVIEW 85
In this essay, I will draw in part on the literature on
abilities, because to such a large extent, giftedness has
been viewed through this lens. But I will not limit myself
to abilities because giftedness has aspects that go beyond
abilities (see, Sternberg, Desmet et al., 2021). Rather, in
looking at giftedness through a panoply of paradigms,
we will examine paradigms that encompass personality,
motivation, and environmental factors as well as ability-
based ones.
The purpose of this article is not to argue for the
ultimate validity of any one particular paradigm for
understanding giftedness. On the contrary, its purpose
is to argue that there is no one “correct” or even “opti-
mal” paradigm for understanding giftedness. When one
looks through any one telescope with any one lens, fixed
on a particular target, one sees only a portion of an
object or set of objects, and that view is limited. We
will understand the construct of giftedness best when we
recognize that any one paradigm, just like any one tele-
scope with a single lens fixed on a single view, can
provide only a partial understanding of giftedness.
Gifted children are best served when psychologists
and educators integrate the paradigms, applying the best
from each paradigm to a given child at a particular level
of development of their gifts and in their life. The para-
digms then are used interactively rather than mutually
exclusively. Moreover, although the paradigms reviewed
here have represented different phases in the history of
psychology, at some level, all are relevant today. Fields
tend, at any given time, to shine their spotlights on some
paradigms and to focus those spotlights away from other
paradigms. But at any time, there are worthwhile
insights to be had from almost any paradigm. Often,
what determines the usefulness of a paradigm is not the
paradigm itself as much as how perceptively and sensi-
tively the paradigm is applied. Moreover, the paradigm
will be more effective when applied in a way that recog-
nizes there are wide individual differences not only
among different gifted students, but also among the
same gifted students at different points in their life-
span development. Hence, there is no way that
a paradigm can be applied mechanistically.
Table 1 provides a summary of the various paradigms
and their implications for an understanding of gifted-
ness and its inner workings.
The operationist paradigm
The idea of operationism is that a concept is understood
through the way it is measured. The construct derives
from the related concept of operationalism, an idea from
physics and philosophy of science generally traced back
to Percy Bridgman (1927, 1938), who lived from 1882 to
86 R. J. STERNBERG
Table 1. Major psychological paradigms and their implications for understanding giftedness.
Paradigm Basic Tenet: Giftedness Is . . .
Operationist What existing identification measures
Psychometric Factors underlying identification measures
Psychoanalytic Balance of ego, superego, id
Associationist Association of concepts
Behaviorist Reinforcement of certain behaviors and not
others
Gestalt A whole greater than the sum of the parts
Cognitive In the thought processes underlying
cognition
Humanistic/Positive Psychology One’s psychological integrity
Functionalist/Pragmatic/ How one uses one’s knowledge and skills
Constructivist
Cultural Adaptation to cultural values
Biological Functioning of the brain
1961. A physical concept such as gravity, therefore,
which is difficult to define in the abstract, would be
understood in terms of its method of measurement.
gIn psychology, the related approach came to be
called “operationism,” and is traced back to Edwin
Boring et al. (1945). But the roots of the approach, for
Boring (1886–1968), go back to well before 1945, as
Boring first wrote about the approach in a concrete
instance more than two decades earlier (Boring,
1923). Boring’s idea in 1923 was that conducting
lengthy debates about what intelligence “really is” are
pointless. The optimal way to understand intelligence
is simply as what intelligence tests measure. Constructs
can be understood through their measurements.
The problem with this operationist approach is that
the question is “answered,” in a sense, by begging the
question. Consequently, the idea has some apparent
weaknesses (Sternberg, 1990, 2021). First, it fails to pro-
vide a conceptual definition, as no one is quite sure, even
to this day, what it is that the tests measure. Second, the
definition is circular: A test is created to measure what-
ever intelligence is, and then whatever intelligence is, is
whatever the test measures. Third, the definition is
extremely conservative: Intelligence always will be
defined in terms of what existing tests happen to mea-
sure. If a new test measures something else, then it
cannot be “intelligence.”
What does all this have to do with giftedness? I would
suggest that, historically, much of the field of giftedness
has relied on operational definitions. Schools have
drawn heavily on Lewis Terman’s (1916, 1925) now
century-old operation of defining giftedness in terms
of whatever it is that intelligence tests or their proxies
(tests measuring conventional intelligence, but with dif-
ferent names, such as SAT, ACT, GRE, or whatever)
measure, plus, sometimes, some other skills and accom-
plishments as well. I have worked even with what
I considered to be fairly sophisticated administrators of
Major Characteristics of a Gifted Person
Excellence in whatever current measures measure
Elevated factor scores for intelligence, creativity, or other constructs
Extensive sublimation, Regression in service of the ego
Plentiful, useful associations between concepts
Excellence of reinforced behavior that society values
Insightful problem solving
Superior strategies, mental representations, process speed and accuracy
Superior self-actualization, connections with others
Excellence in self-constructed learning, common sense, environmental
adaptation
Excellence in whatever a culture values
Quality and quantity of cerebral connections and speed of neuronal
conduction
programs and schools for the gifted, and often they have
relied exclusively or primarily on an IQ test for identi-
fication; but despite the passage of a century, their ratio-
nale was not much different from that of Terman and his
immediate successors (see commentary in Sternberg,
Chowkase et al., 2021).
The problem with the Terman paradigm, I suggest, is
not in the use of intelligence tests, per se, but rather, in
their exclusive or near-exclusive use. The tests can be
useful measures of accumulated knowledge, much of it
academic in nature, and of abstract analytical skills (so-
called crystallized and fluid intelligence, respectively—
Cattell, 1971). When used for identification, they need to
be used in conjunction with other measures, taking into
account environmental variables that may affect the
socialization and education of children, which may in
turn affect the children’s scores on the tests (Gentry
et al., 2021; Sternberg, 2020b). Recent psychometric
models, such as the CHC model (Maddocks, 2018;
McGrew, 2009) can serve as bases for providing more
information than just a single factor.
Why, exactly, should an IQ test be the identification
procedure, or even part of the procedure, for identifying
giftedness? Presumably, the logic has been that scores on
such tests predict future gifted performance in both
childhood and adulthood. But this logic is extremely
questionable, for reasons discussed in detail elsewhere
(Sternberg, 2022a): In particular, the same tests that are
used to identify the gifted are also the tests that are used
to provide those identified with manifold additional
opportunities for success that those who are not so
identified never receive. The validation procedure there-
fore is itself invalid. Historically, any group given advan-
tages—males, white people, people of state-approved
religions, people of higher caste, people of higher
incomes, whoever—has fared better in terms of socio-
cultural criteria (Sternberg, 1997) than those not given
advantages. It is not exactly shocking that people given

more and better opportunities should fare better than
people given fewer and worse opportunities.
Thus, IQ may predict many things (Deary et al., 2009;
Gottfredson, 1997; Herrnstein & Murray, 1994; Schmidt
& Hunter, 1998; Wai, 2013), but pointing that out is
a little like pointing out that a baseball player starting at
third base can reach home plate faster than a player
starting at first base. Moreover, the validity coefficients
for the tests typically are not the actual validity coeffi-
cients for the tests as they exist, but rather, the validity
coefficients as they would exist under the hypothetical
assumption of perfect reliability and no restriction of
range. But these assumptions never are realized in the
everyday world in which we live.
The psychometric paradigm
The psychometric paradigm builds upon the operation-
ist paradigm but goes well beyond it. In the operationist
paradigm, intelligence is defined as whatever IQ tests
test. The IQ, however, is a single number. The early IQ
tests were atheoretical. Over time, however, researchers
built upon somewhat elaborate models of the nature of
intelligence and produced tests yielding multiple, the-
ory-based scores, as in the most recent versions of the
Stanford-Binet (Roid, 2003) and Wechsler intelligence
tests (e.g., the WISC-V; Wechsler, 2014).
Although Terman used psychometric tests, he is not
remembered as a psychometric theorist. Interestingly,
perhaps, Alfred Binet [1857–1911], upon whose work
Terman drew, had well worked out ideas about the
nature of intelligence, believing it to be centered around
judgment, adaptation to the environment, self-criticism,
and what today we would call executive functioning
(Binet & Simon, 1916). David Wechsler [1896–1981]
(Wechsler, 1975), who became the second “great” in
the intelligence-testing movement, after Binet, had
ideas similar to Binet’s, stressing the importance of sol-
ving real-world problems in everyday life. For Binet,
giftedness is expertise in solving problems that matter,
not merely problems that happen to appear on one test
or another. Binet recognized the importance of develop-
ing thinking and problem-solving skills as they apply to
real-world problems.
The psychometric theorists, such as Charles
Spearman [1863–1945] (1904, 1927), Louis Thurstone
[1887–1955] (1938), and J. P. Guilford [1897–1987]
(1967), and John B. Carroll [1916–2003] (1993),
attempted to understand the structure of intelligence.
Their theories thus give a more variegated view of gift-
edness, or at least, of intellectual giftedness. And their
theories have been incorporated into intelligence tests
ROEPER REVIEW 87
that have a more developed theoretical basis than the
original Stanford-Binet.
For example, Meeker (1969) applied Guilford’s the-
ory of the identification of giftedness. Tests such as
the SRA Primary Mental Abilities (Science Research
Associates, 1947, 1962), which was based directly on
Louis Thurstone’s (1938) theory, were used for gifted
screening, as the CHC (Cattell-Horn-Cattell) theory
(McGrew, 2009) is used today (Maddocks, 2018).
The CHC model, an adaptation of Carroll’s model, is
a hierarchical model of intelligence, usually with gen-
eral intelligence at the top of the hierarchy, and with
factors such as comprehension/knowledge (Gc), fluid
reasoning (Gf), quantitative knowledge (Gq), short-
term memory (Gsm), and long-term storage and
retrieval (Glr) at the middle level.
The CHC model and the other psychometric models
are, in some ways, a great step forward from the opera-
tionist ideas of Boring. At the very least, they provide
a theoretical rationale that is missing from the opera-
tionist view of intelligence as what the intelligence tests
test. The model suggests a structure for understanding
intellectual giftedness in terms of underlying psycho-
metric factors of intelligence.
There are nevertheless three potential weaknesses
with the psychometrically based intelligence-testing
paradigm. First, it limits the conceptualization of gifted-
ness not only to intelligence, but also to a relatively
narrow conception at that, at least in comparison with
the conceptions of broader theories, such as that of
Howard Gardner [1943–] and Robert Sternberg
[1949–] (Gardner, 2011; Sternberg, 2020a, 2021).
The second weakness is that the tests based on CHC
and similar models, when used in gifted identification,
so severely under-identify gifted minoritized students
(Gentry et al., 2021). Students from diverse cultural
groups also are shortchanged (Sternberg, 2020c). The
third weakness, and perhaps the greatest one, is that
the psychometric paradigm limits conceptions of gifted-
ness to the intellectual. In the end, we know that gifted
individuals, certainly highly gifted ones, excel in much
more than the cognitive dimension (Simonton, 1994).
A purely intelligence-based approach to giftedness leads
us to select people with a high level of narrow intellec-
tual skills, but how these people will use those skills later
is an open question.
Other psychometric theorists, such as Guilford and
J. P. Torrance [1915–2003], have focused on creativity
(Guilford, 1967, 1982; Guilford & Hoepfner, 1971;
Torrance, 1974, 2008). Indeed, Guilford’s (1950) article
on creativity, an APA presidential address, is often viewed
as having gotten the modern field of creativity started.
88 R. J. STERNBERG
Guilford’s structure-of-intellect model viewed crea-
tivity within a larger framework for understanding intel-
ligence. In large part, creativity was viewed as having as
its locus, divergent thinking, that is, thinking that leads
to more than one solution to a problem. In Guilford’s
theory, divergent production could be applied in five
content areas—visual, auditory, symbolic, semantic,
and behavioral—yielding six kinds of products—units,
classes, relations, systems, transformations, and implica-
tions. Torrance’s (1974, 2008) test yields creative scores
for verbal and nonverbal content. The test is typically
scored for fluency (the number of ideas), flexibility (the
variety or dispersion of ideas), originality (the unique-
ness of ideas), and elaboration (the number and extent
of details of the ideas). A gifted individual thus would
excel in divergent production, and in fluency, flexibility,
originality, and elaboration of the ideas produced
through that divergent production. There also have
been newer approaches to creativity and its measure-
ment, such as the EPoC Test of Creative Potential
(Lubart et al., 2011), which have breathed fresh life
into creativity measurement.
The divergent-thinking paradigm has yielded a great
deal of theory and research, much of it reviewed in
Runco (2014). A test of divergent thinking can provide
a start toward understanding children’s developed diver-
gent-thinking skills. There have been a number of cri-
tiques of the approach (Amabile, 1996; Sternberg &
Lubart, 1995; see also essays in Kaufman & Sternberg,
2019). For identifying the gifted, it has many of the same
problems as the intelligence-testing movement has had.
First, creativity and especially creative giftedness involve
much more than mere divergent production of ideas,
containing as well, personality, motivational, and envir-
onmental aspects. Second, the items used in the tests
often tend to be rather trivial and a far cry from the
kinds of creativity that real-world tasks demand. Third,
even the cognition involved in creativity and creative
giftedness goes far beyond that measured in the tests, as
it often involves not just solving of given problems (e.g.,
“What are unusual uses of a paper clip?”) but also find-
ing important problems to solve (Abdulla et al., 2020;
Arlin, 1975; Sternberg et al., 2020; Zuckerman, 1983).
In general, the psychometric approach for creativity
as it now stands seems to be based on the notion that
there is a bridgeable gap between identifying people who
can find unusual uses of paper clips and those who can
do world-class or even professionally important creative
works in literature, the arts, science, and elsewhere. The
critics question whether the gap can be bridged. Perhaps
for everyday creativity of mundane consequence—what
Kaufman and Beghetto (2009) called “little-c” creativity,
these tests make contact. But it is hard, at least for some,
to imagine giftedness as little more than generating
unusual uses of a paper clip more rapidly, or with greater
variety, than would be the case for an individual less
creatively gifted.
The psychoanalytic paradigm
The psychoanalytic paradigm is one of the earliest ones,
dating back to the earliest years of the twentieth century.
The psychoanalytic paradigm would have particular
relevance for understanding creative giftedness. On
this view, creative individuals—especially writers and
artists—use creativity to express their unconscious
wishes, whether for money, power, fame, honor, love,
or whatever reward suits them (Freud, 1964). Sigmund
Freud [1856–1939] referred to this process as sublima-
tion—taking urges that are somehow societally unaccep-
table, often sexual urges, and turning them into
something that is societally useful and acceptable.
Creativity, on the psychoanalytic view, is achieved
through adaptive regression in the service of the ego
(Kris, 1952). That is, primary-process thoughts
(thoughts usually associated with dreaming or uncon-
scious thinking) make their way into conscious thinking
and influence secondary or conscious, willful processing
of information. Highly creative people, therefore, can
dip back into the unconscious and select and organize
material that would be unavailable, or at best, extremely
inaccessible to less creatively gifted people.
Preconscious thinking—the thinking that is just out-
side consciousness—also may influence creativity, pro-
viding thoughts that are loosely organized. However, it is
secondary-process thoughts in a creative person that can
make sense of primary-process thoughts, and fashion
those disorganized primary-process ideas into a truly
creative idea or product (Kubie, 1958). The psychoana-
lytic view, therefore, emphasizes the connection between
primary process—the disorganized stuff of dreams,
including daydreams—and secondary process, where
the highly creative person can both draw and use the
primary-process thoughts to create something new
(Noy, 1969; Rothenberg, 1979; Suler, 1980).
According to Alfred Adler [1887–1937] (Ansbacher
& Ansbacher, 1956), feelings of inferiority could be
compensated for and perhaps overcome by creative
acts or even conquests. Carl Jung [1875–1961] (see,
Jacobi, 1973), like Adler (1925), a so-called “neo-
Freudian,” further would have emphasized the connec-
tion between the personal unconscious and what he
referred to as the “collective unconscious”—the uncon-
scious thinking that permeates a society and that deter-
mines, in part, what that society will value as creative
and what it will not so value.

The psychoanalytic paradigm today probably has
only a fraction of the followers it once had. That said,
in parts of Europe and South America, the paradigm is
still actively followed. In much of clinical psychology, it
has been largely, although certainly not totally super-
seded by cognitive-behavioral and biological approaches
to behavioral change. The challenges of the paradigm
are, at this point, well known. First, the concepts in
Freud’s theory are often elusive and hard to pin down.
Second, there is a dearth of hard empirical evidence
supporting the theories of Freud and his successors
regarding efficacy in psychotherapy, or even validity
regarding child development. Third, the therapy was
only weakly connected to the theory, and often could
go on for very long periods of time with results the
outcomes of which would be in doubt. Fourth, Freud’s
theory was formulated during Victorian times and its
application to modern times at times seems forced.
Some neo-Freudians tried to update Freud’s theory
for more modern times. Freud’s theory was based on
psychosexual stages and became vague after early child-
hood, positing a “genital” stage in adulthood that said
little about the challenges adults actually encountered. In
contrast, Erik Erikson [1902–1994] (1993, 1994), a neo-
Freudian, posited a psychosocial stage-based theory,
according to which creativity was a challenge, although
in different ways, at various points in the life cycle.
Between the ages of 5 and 12, in Stage 4, creativity and
other skills are important in achieving industriousness,
and the seeds are planted for those children who will be
gifted in their industriousness and who may make the
greatest contributions to the world later in their lives;
those who cannot find a way to become industrious can
be besieged by feelings of inferiority. In Stage 7, between
the ages of 40 and 65, generativity becomes of key
importance: Some individuals become highly generative
and change the world, on whatever scale; other indivi-
duals stagnate. The most generative ones are those we
refer to as “gifted adults.”
Erikson’s theory, like the psychodynamically oriented
theories that preceded it, has a dearth of hard empirical
evidence to support it. Yet, I would suspect that it is
taught in almost every lifespan-development course, at
least in the United States. It still appears, 50 years later,
in virtually every lifespan-development textbook (as well
as textbooks on development for portions of the life-
span). The reason, I believe, is that people have found it
to be useful. They have discovered that it characterizes
their lives and that it describes at least some of the key
challenges they face in their lives. Others, such as Daniel
Levinson [1920–1994] (1986, 1997) have proposed the-
ories of the lifecycle that attempt to go beyond Erikson’s
theorizing.
ROEPER REVIEW 89
When it comes to follow-up theorizing based on the
psychodynamic approach, developmental scientists have
sometimes been willing to “throw out the baby with the
bathwater.” On the one hand, it seems certain today that
early experiences do not set one’s future life in stone. On
the other hand, we know they are influential. And even
modern scholars, among them, the late Sir Kenneth
Robinson [1950–2020] (Robinson & Aronica, 2016),
have recognized that schools as well as parents can risk
children’s future creativity by robbing them of opportu-
nities for creative play and exploration. The schools can
so emphasize knowledge acquisition that some indivi-
duals who might become creatively or otherwise gifted
may lose the chance because of the environment society
provides that often discourages creativity, including the
extensive use of multiple-choice testing for which crea-
tivity is, at best, irrelevant and, at worst, damaging to the
attainment of high scores (Sternberg, 2010).
The associationist paradigm
The associationist paradigm views human development
in large part through the formation of associations.
Pairs of thoughts become connected to each other
through proximity of experience, and eventually the
network of associations becomes increasingly complex.
Associationism can be traced back to the Greek philo-
sopher Aristotle (384 BC–322 BC), who suggested four
principles of association: contiguity (two things close in
space or time), similarity (two things associated
because they are like each other in certain ways), con-
trast (two things are associated because of one or more
ways in which they contrast with each other), and
frequency of co-occurrence (two things become asso-
ciated because they tend to occur together). John Stuart
Mill [1806–1873], the famous English philosopher, also
became famous as an associationist. In psychology,
a famous early associationist was Edwin Guthrie
[1886–1959] (1935, 1946).
The associationist point of view accounts for gifted-
ness, or at least some of its aspects, through the number,
quality, and remoteness of associations one can form, as
well as the speed of formation and retrieval of those
associations. Tests of crystallized ability (such as voca-
bulary and general information) provide indirect mea-
sures of these skills. The Remote Associates Test of
Sarnoff Mednick [1928–2015] (1962) more directly mea-
sures associative ability. The test is alleged to be a test of
creative thinking. It provides a measure of one’s ability
to generate somewhat remote associations. For example,
one might be presented with the words “cottage/swiss/
cake” and have to realize that the word that ties them
together is “cheese.” A possible limitation of the test is
90 R. J. STERNBERG
that it measures convergent, rather than divergent
thinking.
The associationist paradigm today is not an obvious
“major player,” either in cognitive psychology or in the
field of giftedness. But this may be because its ideas have
become so deeply embedded in our thinking in psychol-
ogy and in everyday life that people do not even recog-
nize its influence anymore. For example, connectionism,
a modern paradigm that seeks to understand how people
build complex mental representations through mental
connections formed through parallel processing, draws
heavily on associationism (Rumelhart et al., 1987). In
connectionism, unlike in traditional cognitive network
models, the connections themselves form the basis for
our knowledge, rather than just the nodes they connect.
Creatively gifted individuals certainly do seek out
remote associations, finding connections that other peo-
ple miss because the connections are so remote. For
example, it was not until recently that mRNA came to
be seen as a basis for lifesaving vaccines against COVID-
19 and other illnesses. Previously, the connection
between mRNA and vaccines was just too remote.
Certainly, creative giftedness entails an individual’s see-
ing connections others do not see.
The behaviorist paradigm
The behaviorist paradigm, an outgrowth of the associa-
tionist paradigm but also a response to the psychody-
namic paradigm, asserts that all of human behavior can
be understood as a response to rewards and punish-
ments. Whereas Freud attempted to probe deeply into
the psyche, behaviorists ignored the psyche altogether.
The implications of a radical version of the behaviorist
paradigm for giftedness were perhaps illustrated best in
the earliest days of behaviorism by John Watson [1878–
1958] (1930) in his famous quotation:
Give me a dozen healthy infants, well-formed, and my
own specified world to bring them up in and I’ll guar-
antee to take any one at random and train him to
become any type of specialist I might select—doctor,
lawyer, artist, merchant-chief and, yes, even beggar-
man and thief, regardless of his talents, penchants, ten-
dencies, abilities, vocations, and race of his ancestors.
Watson and his successors, most notably, perhaps,
B. F. Skinner [1904–1990] (1976, 2006), were radical
behaviorists. They believed that contingencies of the
environment completely shape behavior. B. F. Skinner
(2005) even wrote a book, Walden Two, about an ima-
ginary society built on behaviorist principles. Many of
us, in proposing theories, have our doubts. Skinner
appears to have been a “true believer” in his own theory.
The details of behaviorism are complicated and
described in Skinner’s books, cited earlier, as well as
in other sources on behaviorism (e.g., Staddon, 2014).
The basic idea is that behavior is shaped by positive
reinforcements of various kinds—rewards for certain
kinds of behavior that strengthen those kinds of beha-
vior—and by negative reinforcements, or the removal
of unpleasant stimuli to strengthen a behavior.
Punishments also result in learning but are generally
not as effective as reinforcements because they can
have so many unanticipated consequences, ranging
from physical or psychological harm to causing
aggressive behavior down the road.
The behaviorist paradigm had one great advantage
for those who believe in the power of environment: It
offered hope and a technology that was believed to
enable parents and teachers to shape any child to
become gifted. Some children might learn faster than
others, but the underlying idea was that with enough
behavioral contingencies, and an effective schedule of
reinforcement, as Watson believed, almost any behavior
could be elicited from an individual. It is just a matter of
time and of the effectiveness of the schedule.
Behaviorism was a very popular paradigm in the
1950s and early 1960s but is less so today, in part because
of Noam Chomsky’s [1928–] (1959) damning review of
Skinner’s work on verbal behavior. The review showed
that it was extremely far-fetched to imagine that beha-
viorism could account for the acquisition of language.
But by the 1960s, the cognitive paradigm of Chomsky
and others was taking over much of psychology, partly
as a result of the work of George Miller [1920–2012],
Jerome Bruner [1915–2016], and Herbert Simon [1916–
2001] and his colleagues.
The behaviorist work was extremely influential in
education, and many people of my generation, including
myself, had textbooks that were programmed to reflect
behaviorist principles of instruction. For example,
a textbook I used, English 2600 (Blumenthal, 1962),
had 2600 mini-lessons, with the answer immediately
following each lesson to provide quick reinforcement
for correct answers.
The limitations of behaviorism as a paradigm for
understanding giftedness are more apparent today than
they were in behaviorism’s heyday. First, as noted above,
paradigms eventually exhaust themselves. Scientists,
I believe, tired of a paradigm that attempted to under-
stand psychology without any reference to what went on
in the head. In Skinner’s radical behaviorism, reference
to internal states was pretty much forbidden. But what
kind of science of the human mind utterly forbids refer-
ence to the human mind? As an aside, an introductory
textbook in psychology first published in 1995 used the

term “human mind” in the title (Sternberg, 1995), and
some behaviorists objected to the terminology. That
kind of eschewing of the concept of a human mind just
could not last forever. Second, the work cited above by
Chomsky and Miller and colleagues, as well as by others,
such as that by Newell and Simon (1972) at Carnegie-
Mellon, showed that productive understanding of the
human mind was possible and feasible. If one wished to
understand giftedness, one could understand it in
a deeper way than just through behavioral contingen-
cies. Third, and perhaps most important, the paradigm
just did not fit the empirically derived facts. Children
were able to learn through behavioral principles, but
those principles never were able to eliminate or even
substantially reduce individual differences. They did not
fulfill Watson’s promise of being able to shape anyone
into whomever one pleased.
In more recent times, there also have been extreme
environmentalists, such as Ericsson and Pool (2017),
who, although not behaviorists, argued that, with delib-
erate practice, anyone could attain any level of expertise.
In deliberate practice, a learner reflects on what they
have done in their practice toward expertise; they seek
to understand what they did well, what they did not do
well, and what the road should be to improving upon the
things they have not done well. The research on the pure
deliberate-practice view is not at all persuasive
(Hambrick et al., 2017). For the truth is that it does
not take laboratory or other research to show that
hours, days, weeks, months, and years of practice
alone, no matter how deliberate, did not create
Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart as a composer, Jascha
Heifetz as a violinist, William Shakespeare as
a playwright, Pablo Picasso or Frida Kahlo as painters,
Marie Curie or Albert Einstein as physicists, Charles
Darwin as a biologist, or Mahatma Gandhi or, more
recently, Angela Merkel as world-changing leaders.
The idea that the environment can shape anyone to
become anything, and to be as gifted as they wish to
be, just has not worked in the real world. The behaviorist
paradigm offers realistic hope for improvement and
even for the development of a certain level of giftedness,
but not for unlimited improvement or for the develop-
ment of world-changing giftedness.
The Gestalt paradigm
The Gestalt paradigm is known for illustrating that
a psychological whole is often more than the sum of its
parts, a message that is worth keeping in mind in a field
such as giftedness, where there is sometimes a tendency
to reduce individuals to scores on tests or grades in
school. A Gestalt approach would emphasize that no
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matter how many scores and grades one has to draw
on, those numbers will not characterize the person as
a whole individual.
Major contributors to the Gestalt approach were
Wolfgang Köhler [1887–1967], Max Wertheimer
[1880–1943], and Kurt Koffka [1886–1941]. From the
standpoint of this article, the most important figure may
have been Karl Duncker [1903–1940], whose mono-
graph (Duncker, 1945) on problem solving has become
one of the great classics in the field of psychology.
Duncker was especially interested in how people
solved problems requiring insights. For example, in the
candle problem, participants in his studies had to figure
out how to affix a lit candle to a wall so that it would not
drip wax on a table below it. The table was pushed up
against a wall. On the table there were only a candle,
a box of pins, and a book of matches. In another famous
problem, participants had to figure out how to use
radiation to destroy a tumor in a patient’s body while
leaving the surrounding healthy tissue intact.
Duncker’s main concern was with what is called
functional fixedness, or a tendency to get stuck on look-
ing at a problem in certain set ways. That is, once people
get used to thinking about defining and solving
a problem in a certain way, they have trouble letting go
of that way of looking at the problem. They become
functionally fixated or entrenched. When participants
are given some problems involving three water jugs and
are asked to transfer water between the jugs, they often
arrive at a complex formula that works for the problems,
but that they continue to use, even when subsequent
problems can be solved much more expeditiously using
a simpler formula.
Duncker’s work was a prologue to the cognitive
approach, in that many of the problems he studied
were later studied by cognitive psychologists using
more sophisticated methods (e.g., Atwood & Polson,
1976; Gick, 1986; Gick & Holyoak, 1980; Glucksberg &
Weisberg, 1966). Duncker thus was very influential in
later work. He realized the importance of insight in
problem solving, that is, of seeing solutions that require
a leap of thinking and imagination. This work later
served as a basis for understanding insight specifically
in gifted children (Davidson & Sternberg, 1984;
Sternberg & Davidson, 1983).
The role of insight in giftedness is as important today
as it was many years ago. The serious problems the
world faces all require insight, not just routine problem
solving of the kinds measured by so many tests of abil-
ities and achievement. Moreover, the field of giftedness
itself often could benefit from insights that might rid
itself of its functional fixedness. The field has gotten
used to doing things in certain ways. Many scholars
92 R. J. STERNBERG
believe the time has come to think of new ways to
approach problems of understanding and helping the
gifted (Sternberg & Ambrose, 2021; Sternberg et al.,
2022). Perhaps there is nothing the field needs more
than the insight processes originally studied by the
Gestaltists.
The cognitive paradigm
The cognitive paradigm was one of a number of
responses to both the behaviorist and psychometric
paradigms (e.g., Kovacs & Conway, 2016; Shore, 1986;
Steiner & Carr, 2003; Sternberg, 1981). It further devel-
oped some of the Gestalt ideas about perception and
problem solving. Miller et al.’s (1960) work on plans and
the structure of behavior showed a way that cognitive
psychology could account for how people think and
solve problems.
At one time, the cognitive paradigm seemed to offer
solutions to a number of the woes of some of the earlier
paradigms. For example, Sternberg (1981) suggested
that rather than focusing on individual differences in
structural factors (the psychometric approach), identifi-
cation should focus on how young people process infor-
mation. Using techniques that he referred to as
“componential analysis,” it was possible to identify, for
some kinds of problems, (a) the mental processes that
individuals used to solve problems, (b) the strategies
into which the individuals combined those processes,
(c) the mental representations upon which these strate-
gies drew, (d) the latencies of the individual components
of information processing, and (e) the error rates of the
various processes. At the time, this all seemed like
a major step forward, because the approach was indif-
ferent to the particular levels of abilities in the tested
population. It was possible to identify processes of intel-
ligent and even extremely intelligent thinking, indepen-
dent of the abilities of the participants being studied
(Sternberg, 1981, 1982; Sternberg & Davidson, 1985).
In more recent times, the cognitive focus has moved
elsewhere, for example, to working memory (Ellingsen
& Engle, 2020; Engle & Kane, 2004) and to attentional
control (e.g., Schubert & Rey-Mermet, 2019). But as an
account of giftedness, the cognitive approach perhaps
has not quite lived up to its original promise. First, many
of the tasks that have been studied have tended to be well
structured and well-suited to laboratory conditions; but
they have not necessarily reflected what real-world tasks
require for successful solution. Test-like analogies,
working-memory tasks (such as saying a list of digits
backward), syllogism problems, and various kinds of
series and classification problems are quite far from
everyday real-world tasks. Second, the cognitive
approach seems to look at many of the same tasks as
does the psychometric approach, just from the stand-
point of cognitive processing rather than of individual
differences. But part of the problem with the psycho-
metric approach always was limitations in the universe
of tasks it employed (Sternberg, 1985). Third, it just is
not clear how much of giftedness is cognitive at all.
Certainly, part of it is. But are the failures in the world
today ones of cognitive functioning? For example, IQs
increased 30 points during the twentieth century
(R. J. Flynn, 2012; J. R. Flynn, 2016). But those IQ points
seem to have caused as many problems as they solved. It
took a lot of cognitive ability to create social-media
platforms such as Facebook and Twitter. But are they
solutions to the problems of the world today, or are they,
in some cases, actually the causes of some of those
problems? Do these platforms help bring people
together, or tear them apart in the service of profits?
The humanistic and positive psychology
paradigms
The humanistic paradigm was a response to both psy-
chodynamic theorizing and to behavioral theorizing.
Both earlier paradigms made humans sound as though
they are somewhat mechanistic—either controlled by
inner conflicts that originated in childhood, in the case
of the psychodynamic paradigm, or controlled by envir-
onmental contingencies, as in the case of the behaviorist
paradigm.
Some of the main principles of humanistic psychol-
ogy can be found in the work of Carl Rogers [1902–
1987] (1951, 1995). Although Rogers and his fellow
humanists did not directly address the issue of gifted-
ness, to my knowledge, the implications of their para-
digm are clear. The main ideas are, first, that a gifted
individual would be highly self-aware, or perhaps high
in what Gardner (2011) calls intrapersonal intelligence
—understanding of oneself. Education needs to develop
what Binet and Simon (1916) called auto-criticism and
also self-reflection through experiences that are life-
relevant. Second, a gifted person would wish, and be
able to strengthen interpersonal ties and to know how
to do it effectively—showing themselves to be high in
Gardner’s (2011) interpersonal intelligence or what
sometimes is called “social intelligence” (Kihlstrom &
Cantor, 2020). In both cases, they would have to be high
in the intelligence, but also in the inclination to use the
intelligence in their life. Third, the gifted individual
would have thought hard about their value system and
have come up with a value system for living that is true
to who they are. Fourth, coming especially out of the
hierarchical theory of needs of Abraham Maslow [1908–

1970] (2014; see, also Kaufman, 2021), the gifted person
is self-actualized or close to it. This state represents the
full realization of one’s skills, talents, and potentials.
Fifth, the gifted individual will have reflected carefully
on their purpose in life, including their goals that help to
achieve this purpose—and they will take the steps they
can to fulfill this purpose.
It might sound straightforward that anyone would
seek to reach these goals. But it is far from simple. Not
everyone is readily capable of reaching the goals. They
have to go through a deep process of self-reflection. And
as Erich Fromm [1900–1980] (1961) pointed out, people
often try to “escape from freedom.” Many, if not all
people have buried within them fears of what would
happen if they were totally free. So, they may have a not-
so-secret desire for authoritarianism, something that is
apparent in the United States and around the world
today. Countries that took freedom for granted are los-
ing it because of the match between people’s authoritar-
ian impulses and the impulses of would-be
authoritarians who are eager to exploit people’s urges
toward blind obedience (Milgram, 2009). We are per-
haps further from the ideals of freedom than at any time
since World War II, when so much of the world once
before succumbed to the toxic leadership of authoritar-
ians. Authoritarians no longer need coups d’état.
I view positive psychology as an offshoot of huma-
nistic psychology, although others might well see things
differently. Positive psychology was founded to counter
what its originators, such as Martin Seligman [1942–],
Mihalyi Csikszentmihalyi [1934–2021], and Christopher
Peterson [1950–2012], viewed as the excessive focus of
the field of psychology on negative behavior and beha-
vior viewed as deficient and in need of change (Al Taher,
2021). The movement drew heavily on the work of
Maslow, discussed above, on human motivation.
Positive psychology focuses on human character
strengths and virtues (Seligman, 2012), such as creativ-
ity, curiosity, open-mindedness, love of learning, per-
spective, bravery, persistence, integrity, vitality, love,
kindness, social/emotional intelligence, citizenship, fair-
ness, leadership, forgiveness, humility, prudence, self-
regulation, appreciation of excellence and beauty, grati-
tude, hope, humor, and spirituality (which are the chap-
ters on virtues in Peterson & Seligman, 2004). Positive
psychology, of course, does not deny the existence of
human faults and foibles. Rather, it seeks to right
a balance that its proponents believe got lost in the
history of the field of psychology. At the same time, an
educator needs to recognize that we all are some balance
of positive and less positive, even perhaps negative traits.
A gifted individual, if viewed fully from the standpoint
of positive psychology, might look rather different from
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one selected by many current identification procedures.
Many current procedures put a substantial emphasis on
psychometric criteria, including intelligence and achieve-
ment tests, and measured school performance.
A procedure truly based on positive psychology might
include such criteria, but they likely would be a very
small part of the identification procedure. Rather, the
procedure would emphasize identifying individuals in
terms of the virtues targeted by positive psychology for
study and, where possible, assessment and development.
Humility, self-regulation, patience, prudence, wisdom,
compassion, and other virtues, as mentioned above, all
would be at least as important as the aspects of intelli-
gence measured by contemporary tests.
At one time, this might have sounded like a pipedream:
Haven’t people tried to spot the virtuous since millennia
ago, often ending up with people whose main virtues are
fooling others and then governing for their own benefit?
No doubt, many medieval kings and queens were viewed
as virtuous—or so the music, poetry, and artwork of their
times would suggest—at the same time that they waged
bloody wars and struggles for domination. But today,
positive psychology has given us tools to conceptualize
and, to some extent, implement teaching of virtues.
Humanism today is represented primarily by positive
psychology. The paradigm has been very useful in refocus-
ing emphases in psychology toward more positive aspects
of humanity. Nevertheless, several concerns might be
raised. First, in focusing almost exclusively on the positive
side of human nature, positive psychology may be missing
some of the negative sides that are resulting in gifts today
being used for negative rather than positive ends
(Sternberg, 2021). Second, and disappointingly, in an age
when rude aggressiveness has been purposely rewarded by
social media, one wonders when humanity will again
remember that virtues, not just assertiveness sometimes
leading to narcissism and dogmatism, matter for the
future of humanity. Positive psychology might offer
a remedy to those who would use their intellectual gifts
for narcissistic ends. It would suggest that people look well
beyond themselves in thinking about how to live a full life.
Third, instructional efforts geared specifically to gifted
children probably are not yet at a point where they are
ready for prime time in gifted education. Finally, people
today seem to have such varied notions of what counts as
virtue that one wonders how a society can focus on virtues
as a means for identifying giftedness.
The functionalist/pragmatist/constructivist
paradigm
Functionalism and its offshoot, pragmatism, in psychol-
ogy have emphasized understanding human (and other)
94 R. J. STERNBERG
behavior in terms of its adaptation to the environment.
What function does the behavior serve in the environ-
ment? What is its adaptive value?
Functionalism was in large part a response to structur-
alism, an earlier school of thought identified largely in its
most highly developed and later forms by Wilhelm
Wundt [1832–1920] (2018) and Edward Titchener
[1867–1927] (2019), which emphasized content—for
example, what does a person see, in its most basic form,
when they see a tornado coming? According to
a structuralist, people might see a large gray funnel-
shaped mass above the ground spinning in the air and
heading toward them. According to a functionalist, peo-
ple would see a threat from which they might wish imme-
diately to flee to protect themselves before they get caught
up in the funnel. The later versions of the functionalist
school of thought are referred to as “pragmatic” because,
as in this instance, people adapt by figuring out what
needs to be done in response to environmental stimuli,
and then try to act in practical and appropriate ways.
The most influential pragmatist and constructivist was
almost certainly John Dewey [1859–1952] (1997, 2010).
Dewey reacted against the didactic, “drill-and-kill” teaching
that predominated during his time. He believed that young
people should construct their own learning. They learn best
by interacting with the environment. Curriculum needs to
be made relevant to students’ lives. The students need to
learn from it in a way that is meaningful to them in their
lives. Education should instill democratic ideals in students
and lead them to want to participate constructively in their
society. Learning should be exploratory, and students
should essentially construct their own learning. As one
looks at waves of authoritarianism and the seemingly
mindless obedience to authority that characterizes much
of ideological thinking today, in the United States and
elsewhere, just as it did during the times of World War II
(Milgram, 2009), one cannot help but wonder how Dewey
would feel that education is succeeding, or failing, today.
Dewey was a constructivist as well as a pragmatist.
Constructivism—the view of people constructing their
own learning—can be and has been applied to gifted
education (e.g., Cornejo-Araya & Kronborg, 2021;
Graffam, 2003; Shore, 2021). These attempts largely
build on the framework suggested originally by Dewey
and his successors, such as Jerome Bruner. Some mod-
ern theories also can be viewed as functionalist, prag-
matic, and constructivist in nature. For example,
Howard Gardner’s (2011) theory of multiple intelli-
gences, a systems theory (see, Sternberg, 2020d), is prag-
matic in that it views intelligence as required for many
kinds of adaptation to the environment, not just the
more academic kinds directly measured by intelligence
tests. The theory would be consistent with extant
psychometric theories in its positing of linguistic, logi-
cal/mathematical, and spatial intelligences, but would go
beyond these theories in suggesting that adaptation in
the world also involves interacting with the musical,
bodily-kinesthetic, naturalist, interpersonal, and intra-
personal domains. Sternberg’s (2005) WICS theory of
giftedness—positing that giftedness can be in the wis-
dom-based, intelligent, and creative domains synthe-
sized, also takes a pragmatic focus in terms of the skills
as well as attitudes needed to adapt to the world.
In his more recent work, Sternberg (2021) has sug-
gested a broader and, in some ways, even more pragmatic
vision of giftedness. He has suggested that while schools
focus on scores on intelligence tests and their proxies as
well as on scores on achievement tests and grades, the
world as we know it is falling apart, at least for humanity.
Gifted educators, many of them locked into paradigms
established literally a century ago, are failing to take into
account that the skills that mattered in the early twentieth
century are not the ones that will ensure the future
adaptation and even survival of humans (and other spe-
cies) in the current century. We need to worry about
human rights, global climate change, pandemics, massive
pollution of air and water, weapons of mass destruction,
gross inequalities in income (leading to some people not
being able to afford shelter or food while others jet into
outer space), and emerging trends toward authoritarian-
ism in government. These phenomena present problems
that IQ and creativity as traditionally defined not only
have not solved, but, to a large extent, directly or indir-
ectly have caused.
Politicians, celebrities, and cynical promoters are using
creativity, for example, to persuade people not to get
vaccinated, wear masks, or socially distance in a time
when failure to take such precautions literally has resulted
in the deaths of millions of people. Can we afford to keep
identifying as gifted those who use their “gifts” to destroy
life—valuing, for example, reelection or financial gain
over the common good—in a time when the world is in
such mortal peril? Some might say that such individuals
are not gifted, but they might better be characterized as
toxically gifted—as using their gifts for toxic and destruc-
tive ends (Sternberg, 2022b). For example, Hitler had
a gift for being charismatic and for inspiring followers.
However, he used the gift in the most destructive way
possible. Such people use their gifted potential to destruc-
tive ends, often as a result of personality, character, or
motivational misdirections. Perhaps we need to identify
as gifted not only those who excel at the transactions the
educational establishment requires to be identified as
gifted, but also who excel at the skills and attitudes needed
to transform the world into a better place (Sternberg,
2020d; Sternberg, Chowkase et al., 2021)?

The cultural paradigm
The cultural-psychology paradigm in psychology differs
from other paradigms in emphasizing that diverse cultures
may develop their own ways of conceiving the world and of
adapting to it (Heine, 2020). Conceptions of giftedness and
of how to achieve it also may differ widely across cultures
(Phillipson & McCann, 2007; Sternberg, 2007).
The reason this approach is important is that, even with
regard to a construct as basic as intelligence or various
cognitive abilities, cultures have very different ideas about
what it means to be intelligent; even the skills and attitudes
that are required for adaptation are different across cultures
(see, Sternberg, 2020b). Some of the people considered
intelligent in a knowledge-based society like ours today
might not fare so well in a hunting-and-gathering culture,
and vice versa. Being a gifted computer programmer is
simply different from being a gifted hunter. Indeed, in
some cultures, those with the most advanced academic
skills are considered not to be the gifted children, but rather
those who could not succeed in adapting practically
(Sternberg et al., 2001). Further, even within mainstream
U.S. culture, academic (general) intelligence and practical
intelligence are statistically largely distinct (Hedlund, 2020).
This might seem like an accounting that compares
growing up in the United States to growing up in other
countries around the world. But that is not the case at all.
Many countries today, including the United States, are
multicultural and, within the given cultures, have many
subcultures. For example, the differences between poli-
tical conservatives and liberals in the United States and
elsewhere today make it clear that even children who
appear to grow up in the same “culture” may, in fact,
grow up with very different cultural assumptions and
customs. The people who one group calls “stupid”
another group might call “brilliant,” and vice versa. We
simply cannot understand giftedness unless we under-
stand it from a multicultural perspective.
The biological paradigm
The biological (also called “neuropsychological”) approach
has become popular in the study of intelligence (Barbey
et al., 2021; Daugherty et al., 2020; Deary et al., 2010;
Goriounova & Mansvelder, 2019; Haier, 2020; Haier &
Jung, 2007; Jung & Haier, 2007) and creativity (Vartanian,
2019). It has revealed parts of the brain that are associated
with variable levels of intelligence and has also provided
insights about the heritability of intelligence. For example,
in Haier and Jung’s (2007) P-FIT theory, superior integra-
tion of functioning of the parietal and frontal lobes would
be especially important to giftedness. There also is an inci-
pient neuroscience of giftedness (e.g., Geake, 2005, 2009;
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Geake & Dodson, 2005; Mrazik & Dombrowski, 2010;
Wallace, 2008). This work has revealed some exciting
insights into brain functioning. It shows that giftedness is
not located in any one part of the brain but rather is widely
dispersed. Given that space in this article is limited and it is
not clear yet how the biological paradigm can be applied to
identification and instruction, I will pursue it no further in
the context of this article.
Conclusion
The goal of this essay has been to discuss implications of
the major historical schools of psychology for our under-
standing of giftedness and its inner workings. I have not
attempted to review the history of the field of giftedness
(see, Dai, 2018), but rather to review the sweep of the
history of psychology as a field and to analyze what it can
tell us about giftedness. Each approach has had what I, at
least, believe to be an important message about giftedness.
Even paradigms that are no longer in favor in psychology
have important messages. For example, there are few, if any
orthodox Gestalt psychologists to be found today, but the
message of the gifted individual as more than a sum or
average of test scores resonates. Similarly, behaviorism’s
optimism regarding how shaping of the environment can
in turn shape behavior is worth remembering, even if
behaviorists and their cognitively-oriented successors may
have set their sights a bit too high.
Many of the current theories relevant to giftedness
can be understood, in part, as parts of, or as reactions to
the various paradigms discussed in this essay. For exam-
ple, several theories arose as reactions against the psy-
chometric paradigm.
Renzulli (1978) reacted against the psychometric para-
digm by suggesting that just looking at very high levels of
intellectual ability was inadequate to the task of identifying
the gifted. In later work, Renzulli et al. (2006) took a step
toward a more positive-psychological paradigm, incorporat-
ing elements of virtues in an expanded model of giftedness.
Gardner (1983, 2011) also originally reacted against the
psychometric paradigm, suggesting that a person can be
gifted in more ways than the psychometric ones. In parti-
cular, he proposed seven, and later, eight separate multiple
intelligences, most of which, such as musical and intraper-
sonal intelligence, were not incorporated in the psycho-
metric model. His later work, like Renzulli’s (Gardner
et al., 2002), incorporated elements of the positive-
psychological paradigm with the introduction of character
and ethics into his broadly conceived model.
Sternberg (1981) originally adopted the cognitive para-
digm as a reaction against the psychometric paradigm,
and then later reacted against the strictly cognitive view
96 R. J. STERNBERG
by taking a more functionalist view of giftedness as what
is needed to succeed at high levels in the environment
(Sternberg, 2005). But he then later incorporated, as well,
elements of the cultural paradigm in his theory
(Sternberg, 2007). Eventually, he tried to synthesize
these various approaches (Sternberg, 2020d, 2020e,
2020f), and included wisdom as part of a model inspired
in part by positive psychology (Sternberg, 2017). Gagné
(2020) also has incorporated broad elements of giftedness
and talent into his DMGT model.
In the ideal, as mentioned earlier, paradigms would be
combined, and sometimes are. For example, cognitive-
behavioral therapy combines ideas from the cognitive and
behavioral paradigms and is used with gifted and other
children to modify behavior, such as anxiety-linked reac-
tions, which sometimes are due to erroneous thoughts
that lead to feelings of anxiety and the behaviors asso-
ciated with those feelings (e.g., Sokol & Fox, 2019). The
psychometric and cognitive paradigms also have been
combined, for example, in identifying strengths and
weaknesses psychometrically and then recommending
information-processing strategies to maximize effective
and advanced performance (e.g., Gilmore et al., 2018).
If we were to combine the ideas of the various para-
digms of psychology, what might be the messages that
would stand out? I believe there are 10:
(1) There is no one existing conception of giftedness
that fully enables us to understand and appreciate
what giftedness is and what its inner workings are.
The field is held back by the view that we simply
can identify some children as “gifted” and others
as “not gifted” on the basis of narrow measures
that are typically used today (all paradigms and
especially the psychometric one). Some views may
overemphasize both a view of giftedness as dichot-
omous (one is gifted or not) and the role of iden-
tification in our conceptualizing giftedness.
(2) The operationist view—giftedness is whatever
our identification procedures reveal it to be—is
conceptually impoverished, intellectually lazy,
and unworthy in terms of the challenges we
face in the 21st century.
(3) Giftedness is more than the sum of its individual
parts (Gestalt paradigm, biological paradigm).
(4) Development and, where relevant, education for
giftedness require procedures that make contact
with real-world challenges; society’s emphasis,
in the 21st century, largely on academic knowl-
edge and skills is an embarrassment to the field
at a time when, as a result of climate change and
warfare, the world is literally in flames (func-
tionalism/pragmatism paradigms).
(5) Giftedness needs most to help students mean-
ingfully construct their own learning and their
own lives (cognitive paradigm).
(6) Giftedness requires virtues that go beyond intellec-
tual ones in order to serve a good beyond their own
(constructivist and positive-psychology para-
digms). Too many intellectual gifts are being used
in today’s world to bad ends (humanist/positive
psychology paradigm).
(7) Even with all these ideals, we need to ensure we
have ways of developing giftedness on the basis
of broader knowledge, skills, and attitudes, not
just on the basis of narrow academic knowledge.
(8) Development of gifted children also must be
culturally and subculturally sensitive so that it
does not repeat the field’s dubious history of
favoring some groups over others (cultural-
psychology paradigm).
(9) We need to reinforce not only academically
advanced and sophisticated performance, but
also behavior that will help to create a better
world (associationist/behavioral and constructi-
vist paradigms) not only for ourselves, but for
future generations.
(10) Although children’s early lives are not determinis-
tic with regard to their adult behavior, their early
lives do shape later behavior and so society owes it
to gifted children, indeed, to all children to ensure
that young children have the positive home and
educational experiences that will enable them
optimally to capitalize on their gifts and talents
(psychoanalytic and humanistic paradigms).
We, as a society, owe it to ourselves to identify, develop,
and value all the gifts that children can bring to this world.
The paradigms that have developed in the history of
psychology provide windows through which we can do
better, indeed, much better than we are doing now.
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.
ORCID
Robert J. Sternberg http://orcid.org/0000-0001-7191-5169
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