WHAT IS PRACTICAL INTELLIGENCE?

ACCORDING TO A WIDELY CIRCULATED STORY that quickly became an Internet parable— or ossibly a legend—a bricklayer had injured himself while working on a repair project at the top of a low-rise building. On his claim form for medical insurance, he tried to minimize the incident by answering the question,“What caused the accident?” with the brief response, “Faulty judgment.”When pressed by the company’s claims department for a full and detailed description of the accident, he related a tale that could indeed tempt the casual reader to question his common sense. According to his account of the incident, he had been repairing a brick chimney on the roof of an older four-story building.When he finished, he still had a large number of unused bricks and needed to get them back down to the ground. Not wanting to make many trips up and down the service stairwell, he decided to rig a rope and pulley system to lower the bricks to the ground. Spotting a pulley mounted on an existing beam that extended over the edge of the roof, he chose a wooden barrel as a container for the bricks. He passed a rope through the pulley, attached one end to the barrel, and threw the other end down to the ground.Then he went down and attached the bottom end of the rope firmly to a cleat mounted on the wall. Next he went back up, hung the empty barrel over the side of the wall, and proceeded to fill it with bricks. When it was full, he went down and proceeded to lower it to the ground. He wrapped the end of the rope securely around his hand and then released the rope from the cleat.Too late, he realized that the barrel of bricks weighed a lot more than he did. He suddenly shot upward, hanging onto the rope, as the barrel rapidly descended. He met the barrel on its downward trajectory, getting severely bruised in the process.As he arrived at the pulley, the barrel hit the ground. Unfortunately, the weight of the bricks tore the bottom out
of the barrel, which—now empty—weighed much less than he did. Now the barrel shot upward as he descended rapidly, still attached to the rope. He met the barrel a second time, sustaining additional bruises. He hit the ground as the barrel hit the pulley. By then, he had become disentangled from the end of the rope and, as he lay on the pile of bricks looking upward, he saw the barrel on its third trip, now 40 Practical Intelligence heading straight for him. Before he could get up and move out of the way, the barrel landed on him, inflicting a final humiliating insult. No, it’s not inhuman to laugh at this incident; we’re laughing at the human condition, not the condition of any one human. If you have guilt feelings about laughing at the slapstick nature of the incident, just imagine that it might not be true. But . . . we all know that it could be true, don’t we? There’s something primal and archetypal about incidents like these. They’re the stuff of comedy, cartoons, and jokes. Failure of common sense is a common theme in theater, movies, and even songs. And if we’re honest with ourselves, we have to admit that we’ve all had similar lapses of “common sense.” My neighbor’s teen-age son, while drilling a hole in the fender of his bicycle to mount a headlight, vigorously drilled down through the metal fender and straight into the front tire. It’s a necessary part of the experience of being a teen-ager—it comes with the territory. I’m a fan of definitions; I often find that I can clarify my understanding of an issue, a topic, or a concept if I can frame it succinctly into a concise definition. And sometimes trying a variety of definitions helps us understand a concept from multiple angles. What counts as practical intelligence, common sense, or wisdom depends on the context in which we hope to find it. It’s situational. A person might be wise in the ways of business, but not at all wise in his or her dealings with fellow human beings. Someone might be considered wise in the practice of some scientific specialty, but not wise in managing his or her personal finances. Practical intelligence, perhaps more than the other intelligences in the MI framework, needs a view through a wide-angle lens. It incorporates a wide range of mental processes, skills, and habits.We understand that it isn’t “IQ,” and in fact that it’s more than IQ, but:What is it? Moving on from this simple definition, we begin a fairly broad investigation of human mental competence, in its many dimensions.