Evolving Implicit Metaphors for Understanding Giftedness: From Banks to Foundations

ABSTRACT

Two implicit metaphors can be seen as having dominated the study of the gifted—the savings bank and the investment bank. In the savings-bank metaphor, people have differential levels of IQ or general intelligence, which is viewed as determining whether they are gifted. Their cognitive ability is their metaphorical “money in the bank.” In the investment-bank metaphor, people are seen as having differential investments in varied kinds of abilities and talents. Their pattern of abilities is their metaphorical portfolio of investments. A better implicit metaphor might be the foundation, however, whose effectiveness is judged by the worthiness of the transformational causes to which it contributes and the effectiveness of the use of the foundation’s assets toward these causes. A person is gifted by virtue not merely of the assets they have but of how they transformationally deploy those assets.

KEYWORDS:

• foundation
• giftedness
• investment bank
• savings bank
• transactional giftedness
• transformational giftedness

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No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

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Notes on contributors

Robert J. Sternberg

Robert J. Sternberg is Professor of Psychology at Cornell University and Honorary Professor of Psychology at the University of Heidelberg, Germany. His PhD is from Stanford and he holds 13 honorary doctorates. He is a past winner of the Grawemeyer Award in Psychology and has won the William James and James McKeen Cattell Awards from the Association for Psychological Science. According to Google Scholar, he has been cited over 228,000 times and has an h index of 231. His latest books are Adaptive Intelligence (Cambridge University Press, 2021), and (with Judith Glück) Wisdom: The Psychology of Wise Thoughts, Words, and Deeds (Cambridge University Press, 2022). Email: [email protected]