The Psychology of Thinking and Intelligence

Contents: Preface. 1. The Psychology of thinking and intelligence. 2. The meaning and assessment of intelligence. 3. The Status of instinct. 4. IQ: The misconstruction of intelligence. 5. Does biology hold the key? Searching biology for intelligence. 6. Computations and connections. 7. Intelligent systems. 8. Constructive intelligence. 9. Social intelligence. 10. The intelligent brain. 11. The interpretation of intelligence test results. Bibliography. Index.

"Only in recent years has the psychology of thinking, which momentarily held the stage in the first decade of this century, revived as a serious and active interest for a considerable number of psychologists. Elsewhere (Hearnshaw, 1954) the author have suggested that there were a number of reasons for this trend, and that contemporary work in psychopathology, child psychology, and the experimental investigation of learning and perception, together with various developments in physiology, biology and philosophy were all converging in a way that almost forced psychologists to reconsider the whole question of thinking. He has chosen this topic because there is among psychologists and others a growing sense of its importance, a growing sense that, however complex and difficult, and indeed must be investigated if progress in other areas of psychology is not to be held up. The author\'s aim is to present a sort of interim report on some of the more recent work and speculations of psychologists in the field of normal psychology, and tentatively to pick out certain trends which may possibly be significant.

The basic contention of the psychologist is simply this: Thinking is the activity of an organism and does not occur in vacuo. It is indeed an extremely high level activity in the sense that it depends upon the organized co-ordination of a vast number of subordinate activities. This high-level activity is rendered possible only as the result of a long period of evolutionary and individual development, and it depends on the co-operation of favourable organic and environmental conditions. The two major aims of the psychologist are, therefore, first to study in detail the development of thinking, and if we may regard abstract, logical or mathematical thinking and artistic creation as the two most highly evolved types of thinking, to reveal the genetic foundations upon which these types of thinking rest." (jacket)