Variations in Psychological Attributes

This is the first chapter of NCERT's Class 12 Psychology textbook. It opens with individual differences and how psychological attributes are assessed, then spends most of its length on intelligence — what it is, the main theories, heredity and environment, how it is measured as IQ, the two extremes, types of tests and their misuse, and how culture (including the Indian idea of buddhi) shapes what counts as intelligent. It closes with three related abilities: emotional intelligence, aptitude and creativity. It has three activities, Figures 1.1–1.3, Tables 1.1–1.2, Boxes 1.1–1.2, twelve review questions and two project ideas.

• Builds on the live Class 11 chapter What is Psychology? — its Box 1.1 dated Binet and Simon's intelligence test to 1905, the starting point here; its account of Vygotsky's cultural constructivism returns in ‘Culture and Intelligence’; and its psychometric ‘how we study’ theme becomes the assessment methods of this chapter.
• Leads into Chapter 2 of this book, Self and Personality (personality assessment and projective tests, which this chapter promises), Chapter 4 (Psychological Disorders, where intellectual disability returns as a neurodevelopmental disorder) and Chapter 6 (Attitude and Social Cognition).
• UPSC: psychology has no GS paper of its own; its main use is GS4 Ethics, whose syllabus names emotional intelligence (‘concepts, and their utilities and application in administration and governance’) and aptitude and foundational values for civil service. UPSC has asked about emotional intelligence in 2013, 2017, 2019, 2020, 2021 and 2023 (the 2023 question sets EQ against IQ directly), and about creativity in public officials in 2021 — all taught here. Essay topics on creativity (2023) and talent, and GS1/GS2 themes such as disability, education and testing (e.g. how examinations sort students), also draw on it.

• People differ on five domains — intelligence, aptitude, interest, personality, values — assessed by tests, interviews, case studies, observation and self-report; situationism says circumstances can override traits.
• Psychometric theories: Binet (one factor), Spearman 1927 (g + s), Thurstone (7 primary abilities), Jensen (Levels I, II), Guilford (6 × 5 × 6 = 180 cells).
• Gardner: 8 independent intelligences · Sternberg (1985): componential, experiential, contextual · PASS (Das, Naglieri, Kirby 1994): planning, arousal-attention, simultaneous-successive; tested by CAS (ages 5–18).
• Identical twins together 0.90, apart 0.72; heredity sets a range, environment shapes development. IQ = MA ÷ CA × 100 (Binet–Simon 1905/1908; Stern 1912); mean 100; below 70 disabled, above 130 gifted (~2% each).
• Tests: individual/group, verbal/non-verbal/performance (Raven's, Kohs' blocks), culture-biased/culture-fair; Box 1.1 on misuse. India: Mohsin, Rice, Mahalanobis; NLEPT at NCERT.
• Culture: technological vs integral intelligence, buddhi. Emotional intelligence (Salovey and Mayer; EQ). Aptitude = potential with training (DAT, 8 subtests). Creativity: divergent; needs a minimum intelligence, not guaranteed by it.

Variation is a fact of nature: imagine a world in which everything is one colour, NCERT says — hardly beautiful. People vary physically (height, weight, strength) and psychologically — intelligent or dull, dominant or submissive, creative or not, outgoing or withdrawn — and each trait exists in varying degrees, so each person is a unique combination. For psychologists, individual differences mean distinctiveness and variation in people's characteristics and behaviour patterns. Many psychologists hold that behaviour flows from traits; others, the situationists, hold that situations matter more — a generally aggressive person may be submissive before a top boss, and strong situations can make people with different traits respond almost alike.

Assessment is the first step in understanding any attribute: measuring it and evaluating it against standards of comparison, often with several methods. NCERT goes as far as saying an attribute can be said to exist in a person only if it can be measured by scientific procedures. Saying ‘Harish is dominant’ is already an assessment. Informal assessment varies with the case and the assessor and is open to subjective reading; formal assessment is objective, standardised and organised, and psychologists are trained in it. Which attribute is chosen depends on the purpose: intellectual strengths for a weak student, personality for someone who cannot adjust with family and neighbours, interests for a poorly motivated person.

Psychological attributes are not one-dimensional. A point has no size, a line is many points, but a box needs length, width and height to be described; likewise a complete assessment covers several domains — cognitive, emotional, social. NCERT groups attributes by the kinds of tests used for them:

The psychological idea of intelligence differs from the everyday one (mental alertness, ready wit, quick learning, grasp of relationships); the Oxford Dictionary's ‘power of perceiving, learning, understanding and knowing’ is close to how early theorists put it. Definitions changed over time:

Theories fall into two broad groups. The psychometric (structural) approach sees intelligence as an aggregate of abilities and expresses a person's performance as a single index. The information-processing approach describes the processes people use in reasoning and problem solving — how an intelligent person acts — rather than the structure or dimensions of intelligence.

Howard Gardner's theory of multiple intelligences holds that intelligence is not one entity: distinct intelligences exist, each independent of the others — being high on one says nothing about the rest — yet they interact and work together to solve a problem. Gardner studied exceptionally talented people and described eight types.

Robert Sternberg (1985) proposed the triarchic theory, defining intelligence as the ability to adapt to, shape and select environments to reach one's own goals and those of one's society and culture. It has three parts. Componential (analytical) intelligence analyses information to solve problems; such people think critically and succeed in school; it has three components — knowledge acquisition (learning how to do things), meta or higher-order (planning what to do and how) and performance (actually doing it). Experiential (creative) intelligence uses past experience creatively on novel problems, integrating experiences in original ways and spotting which information is crucial. Contextual (practical) intelligence handles everyday demands — ‘street smartness’ or ‘business sense’; such people adapt to their environment, select a better one, or modify it, and so succeed in life.

The PASS model — Planning, Attention-arousal and Simultaneous-successive processing — was developed by J.P. Das, Jack Naglieri and Kirby (1994). Intellectual activity involves the interdependent working of three neurological systems, the functional units of the brain, responsible for arousal/attention, coding (processing) and planning. Arousal is basic to all behaviour; an optimal level focuses attention on the relevant parts of a problem, while too much or too little interferes. Information is then coded either simultaneously — seeing relations among concepts and integrating them into a pattern, as in Raven's Progressive Matrices, where a missing part of a design must be chosen from six options — or successively, in serial order so that recalling one item cues the next, as in learning digits, alphabets and multiplication tables. Planning then generates courses of action, carries them out, evaluates them and changes the plan if it fails. The processes work on a knowledge base built formally or informally. Das and Naglieri also built the Cognitive Assessment System (CAS), a battery of verbal and non-verbal tasks for ages 5 to 18 that is meant to be independent of schooling and is used to remedy cognitive deficits in children with learning problems.

Evidence for heredity comes mainly from twin and adoption studies. NCERT reports these correlations of intelligence: identical twins reared together about 0.90; identical twins reared in different environments 0.72; fraternal twins reared together about 0.60; brothers and sisters reared together about 0.50; siblings reared apart about 0.25. Twins separated early also show considerable similarity in intellect, personality and behaviour, and adopted children's intelligence is more similar to their biological than to their adoptive parents.

Evidence for environment: as adopted children grow older, their intelligence moves closer to that of their adoptive parents; children from disadvantaged homes adopted into higher socio-economic families show a large increase in scores; deprivation lowers intelligence, while rich nutrition, a good family background and quality schooling raise it. NCERT reports a general consensus: intelligence is the product of a complex interaction of heredity (nature) and environment (nurture). Heredity sets a range; within it, development is shaped by the support and opportunities the environment provides.

In 1905 Alfred Binet and Theodore Simon made the first successful attempt to measure intelligence formally. Revising their scale in 1908, they introduced mental age (MA) — a measure of intellectual development relative to one's age group: a mental age of 5 means performing like an average 5-year-old. Chronological age (CA) is age from birth. A bright child's MA exceeds her CA; a dull child's is below it. Binet and Simon defined retardation as being two mental-age years below chronological age. In 1912 the German psychologist William Stern devised the intelligence quotient (IQ): IQ = MA ÷ CA × 100, the 100 removing decimals. MA = CA gives IQ 100; MA above CA gives more than 100; below gives less. A 10-year-old with MA 12 has IQ 120; with MA 7, IQ 70. The average IQ in the population is 100, irrespective of age.

IQ scores cluster in the middle, with few very high or very low scores; their frequency distribution approximates a symmetrical, bell-shaped normal curve around the mean. The mean IQ is 100; people scoring 90–110 have normal intelligence; below 70 intellectual disability is suspected; above 130 people are considered exceptionally talented. Table 1.1 gives the shares:

One practical use of tests is to identify people at the extremes. About 2 per cent have IQs above 130 — the intellectually gifted — and a similar share below 70 — the intellectually disabled. Both groups differ considerably from the general population in cognitive, emotional and motivational characteristics.

The American Association on Mental Deficiency (AAMD) describes intellectual disability as significantly sub-average general intellectual functioning, existing together with deficits in adaptive behaviour, and showing up during the developmental period. That gives three features, all required:

Giftedness. The study of gifted individuals began, NCERT says, in 1925, when Lewis Terman followed the lives of about 1,500 children with IQs of 130 and above to see how intelligence related to occupational success and life adjustment. Giftedness is exceptional general ability shown across many areas; talent is remarkable ability in a specific field (spiritual, social, aesthetic and so on); the highly talented are sometimes called prodigies. From a teacher's point of view, giftedness combines high ability, high creativity and high commitment. Gifted children show early signs — longer attention span, good recognition memory, preference for novelty, sensitivity to change and early language — but giftedness is not the same as brilliant academic performance: athletes with superior psychomotor ability are gifted too.

Intelligence tests can be classified three ways: by administration (individual or group), by the nature of items (verbal, non-verbal or performance) and by how far they favour a culture (culture-biased or culture-fair). The choice depends on the purpose.

Culture-fair or culture-biased? Many tests show bias towards the culture in which they were developed: tests made in America and Europe reflect an urban, middle-class ethos, so educated middle-class white subjects tend to do well; items ignore Asian and African perspectives, and norms come from western groups. It is nearly impossible to design a test equally meaningful in all cultures, but psychologists have tried to build culture-fair tests whose items rest on common experiences or need no language; non-verbal and performance tests reduce the bias of verbal tests.

Intelligence testing in India. S.M. Mohsin made a pioneering attempt to build an intelligence test in Hindi in the 1930s. C.H. Rice tried to standardise Binet's test in Urdu and Punjabi and, about the same time, Mahalanobis in Bengali. Indian norms were developed for western tests such as Raven's matrices, the WAIS, Alexander's Passalong, Cube Construction and Kohs' Block Design. Long and Mehta's Mental Measurement Handbook listed 103 intelligence tests available in India in various languages. The National Library of Educational and Psychological Tests (NLEPT) at NCERT documents Indian tests and publishes critical-review handbooks on intelligence, aptitude, personality, attitudes and interests.

Intelligence helps people adapt to their environment, and the cultural environment provides the context in which it develops. Vygotsky, a Russian psychologist, argued that culture provides the social context in which people live, grow and understand the world; in less technologically developed societies social and emotional skills in relating to people are valued, while in technologically advanced ones personal achievement founded on reasoning and judgement counts as intelligence. Culture — a collective system of customs, beliefs, attitudes and achievements in art and literature — tunes a person's intelligence. Many theorists treated intelligence as person-specific without regard to culture, but culture now finds some place in theories: Sternberg's contextual intelligence implies intelligence is a product of culture, and Vygotsky held that cultures, like individuals, have a life of their own and specify what successful intellectual development looks like. For him, elementary mental functions (crying, attending to the mother's voice, sensitivity to smells, walking, running) are universal, but higher functions such as problem solving and thinking are largely culture-produced.

Technological intelligence: technologically advanced societies rear children to develop generalisation and abstraction, speed, minimal moves and mental manipulation, and value attention, observation, analysis, performance, speed and achievement orientation — precisely what western tests look for. It is less valued in many Asian and African societies, where — though boundaries are fading under western influence — skills of relating to others, self-reflection and a collectivistic orientation count for more than personal achievement and individualism.

Intelligence in the Indian tradition can be called integral intelligence: it stresses connectivity with the social and wider world, and pays equal attention to cognitive and non-cognitive processes and their integration. The Sanskrit word buddhi, often used for intelligence, is far wider than the western concept. According to J.P. Das, buddhi includes mental effort, determined action, feelings and opinions along with cognitive competence (knowledge, discrimination, understanding); among other things it is knowledge of one's own self based on conscience, will and desire. So buddhi has affective and motivational components as well as a strong cognitive one. NCERT lists four facets of intelligence in the Indian tradition:

Emotional intelligence widens intelligence beyond the intellectual domain to include emotions; NCERT notes that it builds on the concept of intelligence in the Indian tradition. It is a set of skills underlying the accurate appraisal, expression and regulation of emotions — the ‘feeling side’ of intelligence. A good IQ and school record are not enough: many academically talented people struggle in family, work and relationships, and some psychologists trace this to low emotional intelligence. The concept was first introduced by Salovey and Mayer, who described it as the ability to monitor one's own and others' emotions, to discriminate among them, and to use that information to guide thinking and action. Emotional Quotient (EQ) expresses emotional intelligence as IQ expresses intelligence. Simply put: the ability to process emotional information accurately and efficiently.

Educators pay growing attention to emotional intelligence for students affected by outside stresses. NCERT reports that programmes to improve students' emotional intelligence benefit academic achievement, encourage cooperative behaviour and reduce antisocial activities, preparing students for life outside the classroom.

Aptitude. Intelligence tests measure general mental ability; aptitude refers to special abilities in a particular field — a combination of characteristics indicating capacity to acquire specific knowledge or skill after training. People of similar intelligence differ widely in acquiring particular skills: you may turn to Aman for mathematics, Avinash for literature, Shabnam to sing at the annual function and John to fix your bike. Training can considerably enhance these abilities. Success needs both aptitude (potential to perform) and interest (preference for the activity): interest without aptitude, or aptitude without interest, gives unsatisfactory results; high mechanical aptitude plus strong interest in engineering is likely to make a successful mechanical engineer.

Creativity. People differ in their potential for creativity and in how they express it — in writing, dance, music, poetry, science; in a novel solution, an invention, a poem, a painting, a new chemical process, an innovation in law or a breakthrough against disease. The common element is producing something new and unique. We think of Tagore, Einstein, C.V. Raman and Ramanujan, but creativity is not limited to a few: potters, carpenters and cooks can be creative, though not at the same level. The highest level — Einstein's relativity — brings out altogether new ideas, facts, theories or products; another level modifies what exists, puts it in new perspective or to new use. Children develop imagination early but express creativity mostly through physical and non-verbal activity; verbal creativity follows once language, intellect and knowledge mature. Some reveal its direction through self-chosen activities; others need opportunities first.

Creativity and intelligence. NCERT's two students make the point: Sunita works on time, tops the class, listens carefully, grasps quickly and reproduces accurately but rarely has ideas of her own; Rita is average in marks, prefers to learn on her own and keeps finding new ways to help at home and do her assignments. The first is seen as more intelligent, the second as more creative. Terman found in the 1920s that people with high IQ were not necessarily creative, and creative ideas could come from people without very high IQs; other research found that none of a group identified as gifted and followed through adult life became well known for creativity; high and low creativity occur among both highly intelligent and average children. Yet the relationship is positive: every creative act needs some minimum ability to acquire, comprehend, retain and retrieve knowledge — the writer needs language, the artist technique, the scientist reasoning. So a certain level of intelligence is required, but beyond it intelligence does not correlate well with creativity.

Creativity tests assess the potential for creativity, in contrast to intelligence. They are open-ended: no fixed answers, freedom to use imagination and go in different directions. They involve divergent thinking — producing a variety of off-the-beaten-track ideas, seeing new relations between seemingly unrelated things, guessing causes and consequences, putting things in new contexts, thinking of unusual uses of common objects, asking unusual questions. Intelligence tests mostly involve convergent thinking — finding the one right answer, with stress on memory, logical reasoning, accuracy, perceptual ability and clear thinking, and little room for spontaneity, originality or imagination. Creativity tests use words, figures, actions and sounds; some target literary, scientific or mathematical creativity. Psychologists who developed creativity tests include Guilford, Torrance, Khatena, Wallach and Kogan, Paramesh, Baqer Mehdi and Passi; each test has a standard procedure, manual and interpretation guide, and needs extensive training to use.

The chapter has three activities, a few questions put to the reader in the text, and two project ideas. Short outlines follow.

The twelve review questions at the end of the chapter (page 21). Try each first, then open the outline.

Numbers

One-liners

• Individual differences: distinctiveness and variation in people's characteristics and behaviour patterns.
• Situationism: situations can shape behaviour more than traits.
• Formal assessment is objective, standardised and organised.
• Psychometric approach: intelligence as an aggregate of abilities; information processing: how intelligent people act.
• Spearman: g + s; Thurstone: seven primary abilities; Guilford: 180 cells.
• Gardner: eight independent intelligences that work together.
• Sternberg: componential (analytical), experiential (creative), contextual (practical).
• PASS: arousal-attention, simultaneous-successive coding, planning — interdependent brain units.
• Heredity sets a range; environment shapes development within it.
• IQ = MA ÷ CA × 100 (Stern, 1912).
• Intellectual disability needs low IQ, adaptive deficits and onset before 18.
• Giftedness is general; talent is field-specific.
• Integral intelligence and buddhi: cognition with feeling, will and social connectedness.
• Emotional intelligence (Salovey and Mayer): monitor, discriminate and use emotions to guide thought and action.
• Creativity needs some intelligence, but intelligence does not ensure creativity.

Traps to avoid

• IQ was Stern's (1912), not Binet's; Binet and Simon gave mental age (1908).
• PASS units work interdependently — Review Question 5's ‘independent’ is an NCERT slip.
• Identical twins together 0.90, apart 0.72 — do not swap.
• Text says 90–110 is normal; Table 1.1's average band is 90–109.
• Each tail of the IQ curve is 2.2 per cent; the two tails together are 4.4 per cent.
• Gardner's intelligences are independent yet interact — both halves.
• Sternberg's experiential = creative; contextual = practical.
• Raven's = non-verbal (simultaneous processing); Kohs' = performance.
• Spearman's g dates from 1904; NCERT's 1927 is his fuller statement.
• Terman's study is usually dated from 1921 (1925 is the first volume); most children had IQs of about 135+.
• EI was introduced by Salovey and Mayer; Goleman popularised a broader model (the summary's wording).
• Creativity tests are divergent and open-ended; intelligence tests convergent.
• Aptitude is potential with training; interest is preference — success needs both.

Prelims — what UPSC asks

• No Prelims question in the question bank comes directly from this chapter. If one appears, it is likely to be a matching item: theory ↔ theorist (g-factor–Spearman; primary mental abilities–Thurstone; structure of intellect–Guilford; multiple intelligences–Gardner; triarchic–Sternberg; PASS–Das; emotional intelligence–Salovey and Mayer; IQ–Stern), or a numbers item (IQ formula, 180 cells, 8 intelligences, 8 DAT subtests). Learn the trap list.

Mains — where it appears and how to answer

• GS4 Ethics — emotional intelligence: asked in 2013 (what is it, how to develop it, how it helps ethical decisions), 2017 (applying it in administration), 2019 (‘make your emotions work for you’), 2020 (components; can they be learnt?), 2021 (does it help in a crisis of conscience?) and 2023 (is EQ more important than IQ?). Build one master answer from this chapter: Salovey–Mayer definition → Box 1.2's five characteristics (or Goleman's five, attributed) → evidence it can be learnt (NCERT's school programmes) → an administrative example → a balancing line (EQ complements, does not replace, IQ and integrity).
• GS4 — creativity and aptitude: 2021 asked why officials need ‘innovativeness and creativity of a high order’ besides domain knowledge to resolve ethical dilemmas — use convergent vs divergent thinking and Sternberg's creative and practical intelligence. ‘Aptitude’ in the GS4 syllabus (‘aptitude and foundational values for civil service’) can open with NCERT's definition: potential, developed by training, which must be matched by interest.
• Essay: 2023 ‘Inspiration for creativity springs from the effort to look for the magical in the mundane’ — NCERT's ordinary creators (potters, carpenters, cooks), levels of creativity, and the role of environment and effort. Topics on talent, merit and examinations can draw on the nature–nurture interplay and Box 1.1's misuses of testing.
• GS1/GS2: disability (AAMD criteria, adaptive behaviour; the 2016 Act, Beyond NCERT), inclusive and gifted education, nutrition and schooling as raisers of measured intelligence, and fair testing across languages and classes.
• Answer frame for a GS4 theory question: define with the psychological term → name the scholar or model (attributed) → an administrative example → a limitation or rival view → a one-line conclusion on practice.

Tap an option. NCERT's own exercise questions come first; the rest test the figures and common confusions.

Open any question to attempt it in the Question bank — your attempt is saved to your progress.