Unwrapping Gifts: Understanding the Inner Workings of Giftedness Through a Panoply of Paradigms in the Field of Psychology

ABSTRACT

This article reviews the implications of many of the major schools in the history of psychology for understanding giftedness and its inner workings: operationist, psychometric, psychoanalytic, associationist, behaviorist, Gestalt, cognitive, humanistic/positive psychology, functionalist/pragmatic/constructivist, cultural, and biological. Each paradigm has elucidated different aspects of human nature and functioning, and each has somewhat different implications for how we can understand giftedness. No one paradigm can provide complete understanding of giftedness. Rather, the paradigms should be viewed as different windows toward understanding giftedness, all of which together tell us much more than any individual one. It is regrettable that so many theorists and practitioners have locked themselves into an operationist paradigm, which simply accepts current measurement operations as sufficient for identifying and developing giftedness. The operationist paradigm is wholly insufficient to meet the challenges of the world of the 21st century.

KEYWORDS:

• associationist
• behaviorist
• biological
• cognitive
• constructivist
• cultural
• functionalist
• Gestalt
• giftedness
• humanistic/positive psychology
• operationist
• pragmatic
• psychoanalytic
• psychometric

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Additional information

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 222,000 times and has an h index of 230. 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). His textbook with Judith Glück, The Psychology of Wisdom: An Introduction, was published in 2022 by Cambridge University Press. [email protected]