According to Dr. Robert Sternberg, Professor of Psychology and Education at Yale University, stupidity and intelligence has almost a parallel existence within each other. He is probably one of the handful of researchers to examine the Theory of Stupidity and has made it a science. “Negative intelligence” and “foolishness” is what he calls stupidity.

It is not like cold and heat, where the former is simply the absence of the latter. Stupidity might be a quality in itself, perhaps measurable, and it may exist in dynamic fluxion with intelligence, such that smart people can do really dumb things sometimes and vice versa.

Harvard Professor David Perkins sums up stupidity as “the failure of adaptiveness” and is something that can be cultivated. He goes on to say that it is a folly (i.e. a strong sense involving recurrent foolishness that seems, in principle, within the intellectual reach of the person to discern – a matter of faulty switching in one’s mental processes). Basically, Perkins says, you can be really smart but not know when to engage your smartness, and the extent to which this happens is “stupidity”. The term “Street-smart” comes to my mind here.

According to him, there are 8 sins that makes a smart person stupid: impulsiveness (doing something rash), neglect (ignoring something important), procrastination (actively avoiding something important), vacillation (dithering), backsliding (capitulating to habit), indulgence (allowing oneself to fall into excess), overdoing (like indulgence, but with positive things) and walking the edge (tempting fate).

Sternberg in his edited book Why Smart People Can Be So Stupid, tells of a boy who was found to score low on IQ tests and was shunted into the slow classes – yet went on to do intelligence research in grade school, eventually becoming a Professor, authoring over 60 books and being a pioneer in Mental Aptitude tests. That story, he says, is that of himself – a boy that was held back but thrived to be achieve more than he was perceived to be.

It seems like intelligence/ stupidity is quantitative and relative to the person itself and the surroundings. To me, I rate super intelligence as being Albert Einstein or Stephen Hawking, only because of my society, culture and the surroundings I have been raised in but to someone else, intelligence and smartness may be measured differently e.g. within African tribal group, where they do not have a clue who Einstein is, their measure of high intelligence may be the oldest man in the tribe or their tribal leader. Is intelligence measured by how much you know? To a certain extent, but there is a fine line between being intelligent and being knowledgeable. My yard stick for being intelligent is knowing a lot yet being able to use that knowledge to think for one’s self.

Sternberg is probably in a long line of people who’s teachers or surroundings failed him because they thought he wasn’t smart enough. OR was it that he was too smart for them? Einstein, I may add, is another classic example – where his teachers actually said that he was stupid and won’t go far in life. I believe that within this world, some educators, our society and cultures tend to be quick to deem someone stupid or unintelligent just because he/ she failed a test or he/she didn’t do well in their schoolwork – such is the common perception and how they have been taught to feel. What if that very boy had another talent or skill set of his own – did we just suppress that boy’s mental growth or ability to think just because he was perceived to be unintelligent?

Think about it in this scenario. Those guys on TV that strip a car apart, modify it, put them back together again – are they intelligent or just knowledgeable? Being the best mechanic/ builder out there and being able to think outside the box, would you deem them intelligent although they don’t have a PHD in Physics? To me, I would say yes – they are indeed the Einsteins of their particular trade. As Einstein was the best in his field of Physics – those car builders are the best at building/ modifying cars and in a lot of ways more intelligent than Einstein. You would have to ask the question, would Einstein be able to do what they do (and likewise if the roles were reversed). This is a good case of where intelligence is a relative word – intelligence can be classed differently and when looked at from another context.

So you can be smart but stupid and stupid yet smart. I believe that we as a society are often closed minded when it comes to judging intelligence and smartness – again I think we are a product of someone telling us how to feel and being taught to think that way. I must admit that to a certain extent, I am one of those people i.e. at times I am very quick to judge someone’s intelligence based on my perception – one has to remember that he or she may yet be more intelligent (but in a different way).

Einstein once said, “Nature shows us only the tail of the lion”. I think we owe it to ourselves to make our lives more fulfilling by trying to find out how the other half of the lion looks like.

(Source Gavin McNett, Salon.com)