Robert Sternberg

Robert J. Sternberg was born on 8 December 1949 to a Jewish family in New Jersey. Neither parent had finished high school, and his attendance at Yale was made possible by a National Merit Scholarship and substantial financial aid. He has written candidly that as a child he suffered acute test anxiety, scored badly on the standardised intelligence tests then used to track elementary school children, and decided that the score was not a fair representation of what he knew or could do. When he later retook a test surrounded by younger children, in a setting where he no longer felt judged, he felt at ease and his scores rose sharply. From that experience he built the Sternberg Test of Mental Ability while still in junior high, the first concrete sign of what would become a life's work against single-score IQ.

He took his BA at Yale summa cum laude in 1972, was elected to Phi Beta Kappa with distinction in psychology, and earned his PhD at Stanford in 1975 under the supervision of Gordon Bower. He returned to Yale as an assistant professor that same year and stayed three decades, ending as IBM Professor of Psychology and Education and founding director of the Center for the Psychology of Abilities, Competencies and Expertise (PACE). In 2005 he moved to Tufts as Dean of Arts and Sciences, where he ran the Kaleidoscope experimental admissions process designed to test creativity, practical skill and ethics alongside the SAT, the first time a major research university had tried such a departure. He was provost at Oklahoma State University from 2010, where he piloted a similar process called Panorama, and in early 2013 he was inaugurated as the 24th president of the University of Wyoming, with a stated mission of pushing the development of ethical leadership and replacing test-based admissions with an ethics-based process. The Wyoming presidency lasted 137 days. Three weeks in he forced the resignation of his provost; within four months three associate provosts and four deans had resigned or been pushed out, many citing disagreements with Sternberg's approach explicitly; the Dean of the College of Law publicly accused him of unethical treatment of staff; and after over $1.25 million in administration-related costs (including $377,000 in severance for himself) he resigned. Late in 2013 he joined the Human Development faculty at Cornell University, where he has remained as professor.

His core theoretical contribution is the triarchic theory of human intelligence, set out in Beyond IQ: A Triarchic Theory of Human Intelligence (Cambridge University Press, 1985). Intelligence has three complementary components: analytical intelligence (the school and IQ skills of well-defined problem solving), creative or synthetic intelligence (handling novel and unusual situations by transferring existing knowledge), and practical intelligence (adapting to and shaping the everyday environment, drawing on tacit knowledge that academic tests miss). Successful Intelligence (1996) argued that people who succeed by their own standards combine all three rather than relying on the inert intelligence schools reward. The Sternberg Triarchic Abilities Test (STAT) operationalised the theory; Tufts under his deanship piloted admissions criteria based on it. In parallel he published the triangular theory of love in Psychological Review in 1986, decomposing love into intimacy, passion and decision/commitment and yielding eight forms by combination — empty love, fatuous love, romantic love, companionate love and consummate love among them; this became a fixture in consumer research, marriage counselling and cross-cultural psychology. He proposed an investment theory of creativity with Todd Lubart in 1995 (creative people buy low and sell high in the marketplace of ideas), a propulsion theory of creative contributions, a theory of mental self-government modelled on the branches of government, and a balance theory of wisdom. His output is extraordinary: more than 2,000 papers and chapters, an h-index above 200, and the editorship of major handbooks of intelligence, creativity and giftedness.

The shadow side appears with his term as editor of Perspectives on Psychological Science from 2015. He published eight commentaries in his own journal between 2016 and 2018 without peer review. In 2018 Brendan O'Connor and Nick Brown analysed those pieces and showed self-citation rates of 42 to 65 percent. A letter of concern signed by more than 100 psychologists, sustained criticism on social media, and a British Psychological Society research-misconduct review followed. He resigned the editorship in April 2018, more than a year before his term was to end, and several of his published papers were subsequently retracted for duplication. Bobbie Spellman, Brian Nosek and others have argued that data reuse and self-plagiarism were systemic across his publication record, not isolated. The episode is still being debated in the 2020s literature on research integrity as a major case alongside Diederik Stapel and the Bem precognition controversy.

The honours sit alongside that record. He holds thirteen honorary doctorates from universities in Europe and the United States and an honorary professorship at Heidelberg. He won the Cattell Award from APS, the Sir Francis Galton Award from the International Association of Empirical Aesthetics, the E. L. Thorndike Award from APA, and the Grawemeyer Award for Psychology in 2018. He is a fellow of the National Academy of Education, the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and the AAAS, and a past president of the American Psychological Association, the Eastern Psychological Association and the Federation of Associations in the Behavioral and Brain Sciences. ISI places him in the top 0.5 percent of cited authors in psychology and psychiatry. He remains an unusually visible figure in his field: the work and the controversy live together in every account.