Technology and the Development of Intelligence: From the Loom to the Computer

The nature of a culture’s tools at a particular time influences that culture’s operational definition of intelligence. That is, the cognitive skills required to develop and utilize a culture’s tool set become an important component of a group’s implicit definition of intelligence. The major thesis of this chapter is that using a particular tool set develops the cognitive skills that are part of a group’s implicit definition of intelligence. Just as we embed cognitive skills that are important in utilizing our own culture’s tools in our own intelligence tests, so too we can imagine that the intelligence tests of other cultures might reflect their own cultural tools (Greenfield, 1998). This chapter will show that different tools in different cultures not only utilize, but also develop, particular sets of cognitive skills. Tools themselves evolve through historical time and thus reflect the social and cognitive developments at a particular point in history in a particular place, and at the same time they influence these developments. Therefore, when cultural tools change, it follows that cognitive skills and valued forms of intelligence should change as well; and such cultural change will be one focus of this chapter.