Understanding and Assessing Cultural Intelligence: Maximum-Performance and Typical-Performance Approaches.

Robert J. Sternberg,Anastasia P. Kreisel,Chak Haang Wong

doi:10.3390/jintelligence9030045

Robert J. Sternberg, Anastasia P. Kreisel + Show 1 more

Open Access

https://doi.org/10.3390/jintelligence9030045

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Abstract

Cultural intelligence is one’s ability to adapt when confronted with problems arising in interactions with people or artifacts of diverse cultures. In this study, we conduct an initial construct-validation and assessment of a maximum-performance test of cultural intelligence. We assess the psychometric properties of the test and also correlate the test with other measures with which it might be expected there would be some connection. We found that our test was internally consistent and correlated significantly with maximum-performance tests of abilities but generally less or not at all with typical-performance tests, including cultural intelligence and openness to experience. However, our test appears to be distinct in what it measures from the other tests of cognitive abilities. The results lead us to suggest that cultural intelligence may have both maximum-performance and typical-performance aspects.

Highlights

These results show that the maximumperformance tests (Letter Sets, Figure Classification, Cultural Intelligence—Business (CIB), Cultural Intelligence Tests—Leisure (CIL), Test of Personal Intelligence (TOPI)) loaded on one scale, and the typical-performance tests (CQS, Openness to Experience (OE)) on the other
Our study presents a first step toward construct validation of a new maximumperformance test of cultural intelligence
The results suggest that the test has relatively high internal-consistency reliability, can be scored with exceptionally high inter-rater reliability, and is valid when correlated against aspects of abilities that one might expect to be related to cultural intelligence, such as analytical and practical ones

Summary

Introduction

There was the time he kept moving away from a conversational partner in Venezuela, who kept coming closer in a strange kind of ritual dance, because the senior author felt like the conversational partner was making some kind of unwanted advance rather than realizing that the social distance was less than he was used to in the United States. This occurred soon after he took a walk in a neighborhood that seemed friendly and inviting, only for him to learn later that he had walked alone and unprepared in one of the more dangerous neighborhoods in Caracas.

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