CONCEPTUALIZING INTELLIGENCE: FROM AN INTERNAL STATIC ATTRIBUTION TO THE STUDY OF THE PROCESS STRUCTURE OF ORGANISM‐ENVIRONMENT RELATIONSHIPS

The concept of intelligence is analyzed in this article from the standpoint of social attributions, related to the meanings of intelligence‐terms in language. In various non‐Western cultures, the meaning of “intelligence ”includes characteristics of social transaction, along with cognitive characteristics. This cultural relativity of the meaning of “intelligence ”pinpoints the difficulties in the building of a general theory of intelligence on the basis of the meaning of “intelligence ”in the common sense of a given culture. Psychology's task is to transcend the limitations of the common sense of the background culture of the psychologists, instead of proposing theories based on the culture‐specific common sense. The article outlines three types of causal attributions (internal, external, relationship) and two ways of conceptualizing the causes (static and dynamic). In psychology, as well as in the common sense of laymen from different cultures, intelligence has been traditionally conceptualized in terms of static internal causal attribution. At times, cultures' folkways have provided the basis for attributing intelligence to the personified environment of the person. An ecological reconceptualization of intelligence in terms of a dynamic person‐environment causal attribution is proposed in the paper. If intelligence is conceptualized as a dynamic relationship between the actor and the environment, in the activity of goal‐directed problem‐solving, then it cannot be attributed to either the person, or the environment. This ecological conceptualization of intelligence is based on the theoretical heritage of Lewin, Brunswick, Vygotsky and Köhler. The article emphasizes the necessity of thinking about intelligence within a comparative‐cultural perspective.