(Washington, DC) According to experimental studies collected by Gregory M. Walton*:

• You can explain to seventh-graders that people build their intelligence by working and learning, and their grades on math will be better for the whole school year.
• You can give 7th graders a writing exercise designed to affirm their personal values, and as a result, the Black students will be half as likely to receive a D or an F on the whole course (even though their teacher is blind to whether they did the exercise).
• You can give fifth graders a test and tell them they scored well because they are smart, they scored well because they worked hard, or just give them their scores. Then give them a very hard test on which they all score poorly. Then give them a third test. Those who were told that they scored high the first time because they were smart will do 30 percent worse on the final assessment–their confidence in their innate ability shaken.
• You can tell African American college students that items from the GRE are just a puzzle and they will perform as well as white students, but tell them the same items are an intelligence test, and they will score much worse.

As Walton argues, your height won’t change depending on the context, but your score on tests will. That implies that intelligence is–to a significant if not complete degree–relational. It is a measure of how you relate to the immediate environment and the other people in it. Much as I would be far more confident, motivated, secure, and competent in my own living room than on a sound stage, I will be more “intelligent” in some settings than others.

These studies have profound implications for how we should test aptitude, whom we ought to promote and admit in school, college, and work, and how we should design educational institutions.

*Gregory M. Walton, “The Myth of Intelligence: Smartness Isn’t Like Height,” in Danielle Allen and Rob Reich, eds., Education, Justice & Democracy (University of Chicago Press, 2013), pp. 155-172.