5. The role of practical cognition in everyday settings

Our program of research is based on the notion that there is more to successfully predicting performance than just measuring the so-called general factor from conventional psychometric tests of cognition (see Sternberg and Wagner, 1993). We propose that tacit knowledge, as an aspect of practical cognition, is a key ingredient of success in any domain. Of course, there are those who disagree with this position (see Jensen, 1993; Ree and Earles, 1993; Schmidt and Hunter, 1993, 1998), suggesting that individual differences in performance are explained primarily by general cognitive skill. Some proponents of using general cognitive skill tests argue further that the value of these tests are that they are applicable for all jobs, have lowest cost to develop and administer, and have the highest validity (e.g., Schmidt and Hunter, 1998). But even Schmidt and Hunter acknowledge that alternative measures such as work sample tests and job knowledge tests have comparable and perhaps even higher validities than general skill tests, and provide incremental prediction above the latter.

A program of research by Sternberg and his colleagues has conducted tacit-knowledge research with business managers, college professors, elementary-school students, sales people, college students, and general populations. This important aspect of practical cognition, in study after study, has been found generally to be uncorrelated with academic cognition as measured by conventional tests, in a variety of populations, occupations, and at a variety of age levels (Sternberg, et al., 1993; Sternberg et al., 1995; Wagner, 1987; Wagner and Sternberg, 1985). A major task of this tacit-knowledge research has been to identify the content of tacit knowledge and develop ways to measure the possession of tacit knowledge. Tacit-knowledge tests present a set of problem situations and ask respondents to rate the quality or appropriateness of a number of possible responses to those situations. (The format and development of tacit-knowledge tests were discussed in the previous section.) In this section, we review the tacit-knowledge studies that have been conducted in civilian settings and in the next section, we present a specific example of a tacit-knowledge project with military leaders.

5.1 Academic psychologists

One of the first studies in the program of tacit-knowledge research was conducted by Wagner and Sternberg (1985) with academic psychologists. Wagner and Sternberg developed a test of tacit knowledge for academic psychologists based on interviews with five full professors and administered the test to three groups. The first group consisted of 54 faculty members from 20 psychology departments, identified as either among the top fifteen nationally ranked colleges or outside the top fifteen. The second group consisted of 104 psychology graduate students from the same departments as the faculty members. The third group consisted of 29 Yale undergraduates. Each participant was given 12 work-related situations, each with from 6 to 20 response options. For example, one questions described a second-year assistant professor who in the past year had published two unrelated empirical articles, who had one graduate student working with him, and who had not yet received external funding. His goal was to become a top person in his field and get tenure in his department. Participants were asked to rate on a scale from 1 to 9 the value of several pieces of advice regarding what the professor could do in the next two months. Examples of advice include: (1) improve the quality of his teaching, (2) write a grant proposal, (3) begin a long-term research project that might lead to a major theoretical article, (4) concentrate on recruiting more students, (5) serve on a committee studying university-community relations, and (6) begin several related short-term projects, each of which may lead to an empirical article.