BUILDING OUT: APPLYING THEORIES TO EVERYDAY LIFE

Each of the primary intelligences deserves attention in its own right. Interested experts will eventually “build out” each of the dimensions with diligent study and clear conceptualization. This book will attempt a fairly systematic build-out of only one of them, the PI dimension.To guide our exploration, it may be worthwhile to learn from the progress of the build-out of two of the other important dimensions, emotional intelligence and social intelligence. My friends in the academic community are quick to remind me that the study of the broad field of “intelligence” has been going on for a very long time, and that very few of the key concepts and theories can be fairly attributed to only one individual expert. Even the concept of multiple intelligences has been foreshadowed in earlier research, and certainly the component intelligences such as emotional and social have been specifically identified in the past. Researchers have at least speculated about most of them at some time and to some extent. Books such as Professor Daniel Goleman’s Emotional Intelligence and my Social Intelligence have made these topics accessible to a broader populace outside of the academic community, but don’t necessarily advance the theoretical frontiers of their study.The contribution of the “popularizers,” while not always regarded with admiration by academic researchers, can also be to lend clarity by bringing together a number of scattered concepts into a useful body of knowledge. This is largely what I mean when I refer to the “build-out” phase in the life cycle of a concept like any one of the intelligences.