Intelligence, Personality & Prudence

By H.J. Eysenck, a German-born English psychologist (1916-1997)

A broad concept of intelligence is including intellectual personality traits that help people to achieve their goals. These traits can be described as constituting a more comprehensive trait of prudence. Character itself can be evaluated as more or less intelligent.
The concept of  'prudence' is as a bridge between intelligence and personality.
Character is the collection of acquired habits and rules that each person follows. These rules and habits affect our social behavior, our work, the behavior that affects our health (eating, drinking, and physical activity), our responses to negative events, our behavior as citizens, and our thinking. We focus on acquired habits and rules because we are interested in the implications of personal theory of the training of character, through child rearing, education, psychotherapy, or self-planning.
We shall focus here on decision making, broadly construed. Decision making is the thinking, or lack of thinking, that determines what we do when we are faced with more than one option about what to do and when we have time to think. In general, thinking consists of some sort of search process plus some inference that we draw from what the search has found. In decision making, the search is for alternative options, evidence bearing on the advantages and disadvantages of each option, and goals, which are criteria by which we evaluate the options in the light of the evidence. Decisions are typically made according to rules or habits, without much thinking. But the creation of these rules results from earlier decisions, and thinking can come into play at several points in the formation of these rules and habits. It is at these points where character can be influenced most easily. What we eat for breakfast is usually a matter of habit, but it can be influenced by suggestions from others, things we read, or our own thinking. By contrast, eating dinner in a restaurant typically involves a conscious decision each time.

Uncertainty.
Uncertainty is endemic. Therefore, when we say that the normative theory is to maximize utility, we really mean expected utility. This has a formal definition, which is not relevant here. But the fact that life is uncertain has some important general implications. One is that we cannot always evaluate the quality of a decision by evaluating its outcome. Good decisions can have bad outcomes, and vice versa. Another implication is that "calculated risks" are sometimes normatively correct, even when they involve the risk of life itself.

Tradeoffs.
Goals conflict. Those who risk their lives for a cause need not desire to live any less than anyone else. Tradeoffs among goals occur even in the absence of uncertainty. Taking a vacation satisfies the goal of having a break in routine, etc., but impugns the goal of saving money. In making a decision, we must weigh the effects on all relevant goals, normatively. That is, when we evaluate a decision or a method of making decisions, we must take into account all goals.  Other things equal, if one option is best in achieving a limited set of goals and another option is best in achieving all of a person's goals taken together, the second option is normatively better. In particular, we might expect that single-minded pursuit of goals -- neglecting other goals -- is a dangerous way to live. For example, an aspiring athletes who neglect their studies. Normatively, we achieve our goals best if we trade them off consistently. But, although normative decisions imply consistency, consistency does not imply normative decisions. Perhaps he best decision for you is to pay the money in both cases. Telling people to be consistent does not necessarily result in improvements, for they could decide to resolve their inconsistencies in the wrong way.

Addition or removal of goals.
Some of our decisions involve the addition or removal of goals -- or their strengthening or weakening, which can be seen as the addition or removal of parts of goals. The simplest cases of goal addition are subgoals, which are goals that we try to achieve because we believe that they will help us achieve other goals that we already have. You try to accumulate and save money in order to avoid poverty in old age. sometimes subgoals take on a life of their own, surviving after the original goal is no longer in effect. A decision to pursue a subgoal is normative if it maximizes expected utility -- considering all goals -- on the basis of well-founded beliefs.
In other cases, we take on new goals that are not just subgoals. When parents decide to have a child, they know that they will acquire new goals concerning being with the child and looking out for the child's welfare. These goals were not present when they made the decision, and the decision was not made in order to achieve them. Another example of a decision that is expected to lead to new goals is the choice of a career. Going to law school tends to give a person the goals of a lawyer. Likewise, accepting research funds from the military tends to make one concerned about whether one's national defense is adequate.

Intelligence
Intelligence clearly refers to abilities, properties of performance that can be evaluated along a continuum from better to worse. Thus, many personality measures are excluded. It is not clear -- except to extroverts, perhaps -- that extroversion is better than introversion. A qualification is needed here. Certain personality traits can be thought of as virtues, so they do seem to be subject to ordering on an evaluative continuum. But, beginning with Aristotle, many have thought that most virtues were best practiced in moderation. Courage is a virtue because most people are too timid, but if one moves from timidity to courage and continues moving in the same direction, one can become foolhardy. Courage represents an optimal point on a continuum. Likewise, if people are too inclined to defend their initial conclusions, it is a virtue to question these and to consider alternatives. But too much of this can lead to paralysis. So active open-mindedness is also a virtue best practiced in moderation.
With other abilities, like mental speed, one can never have too much. The answer that we can redefine the ability in terms of a departure from the optimum. The important part of an ability is that it is an evaluation. Not all abilities should count as part of intelligence. The abilities in question should be general. they should be defined so that we can make up tests of them, or discover how to cultivate them, in anyone, regardless of the person's culture, and regardless of the person's perceptual and motor limitation. So, "ability to memorize" would count, but "ability to memorize visual patterns" would not.
We might want to say that intelligence consists of those abilities that help people achieve their goals. It is irrelevant that they correlated with scores on IQ tests. Likewise, any character traits that help people to achieve their goals are parts of intelligence. Intelligence, then can be taken to include the virtues of good thinking. IN particular, good thinking is "actively open-minded". Good thinkers avoid the common errors because they consider alternatives to the options they favor, they look for goals that might be subverted by decisions they are about to take, and they seek evidence against a favored option as well as for it. Moreover, when they do not do these things -- for whatever reasons -- they do not have confidence in their tentative conclusions.

It has been suggested that the benefits of active open-mindedness are often in the distant future, while the costs -- in time, effort, and in the pain of discovering that one's initial idea might be wrong -- are typically immediate. Poor thinking, then would be caused by a general tendency to neglect the future relative to the immediate present. Moreover, poor thinking might also cause people to neglect the future, because future effects of options are probably the ones they are less likely to think of first. The virtue of active open-mindedness is both caused by and a cause of neglect of the future. Attention to the future is a central element of prudence.

Following the distinctive elements of a general account of intelligent cognition and behavior which attempts to connect them with broader issues and concerns within psychology.
First, Intelligent action is defined with respect to personal goals, the achievement of which is construed in utility-theoretic terms. Intelligence is a matter of maximizing the satisfaction of multiple goals, among which trade-offs must be made, in the presence of constrained opportunities. Utility is not merely hedonic, nor is it concerned simply with adaptive functions common to all people. Rather, goals are temporally extended prospective aims or ends which may conflict and which vary in their reflective merit.
Secondly, Intelligent behavior is placed squarely within the realm of everyday practical thinking, problem solving, and decision making. Practical cognition is understood to vary in the degree to which it can be expected to meet a person's goals, and aspects of cognitive style are assumed to play an important role in accounting for this variation.
Third, intelligent behavior is considered to be subject, in principle, to comparison with normative models of cognition drawn from decision theory.

Prudence is one translation of the term phronesis, which is alternatively translated as "practical reason" or "practical wisdom".  To refer to behavior as prudent is to make a claim about its advisability with respect to the person's longer-term interests. According to Aristotle, prudence demands not only the farsighted pursuit of personal goals, but also a deliberative concern for the rationality of these goals themselves. Some goals or ends, which Aristotle identified as virtuous, are superior to others in providing intrinsic and developing satisfactions, should be distinguished from other goals whose pursuit is motivated extrinsically and tends to degenerate. This approach to practically wise behavior is clearly distinct from an economic, or Humean, conception of rationality as the instrumentally efficient pursuit of foals about which theory should be agnostic. However, we suggested that the choice of goals can itself be seen as a decision, to be evaluated in much the same ways as other decisions are evaluated in terms of present goals. This suggestion could help to bridge the gap between Aristotelian and Humean views of rationality.

Although our modern concept of prudence is essentially based on long-run self-interest, Aristotle did not think of it that way. For Aristotle, concern for others and concern for oneself in the long run were fully harmonious goals, even in an imperfect world.

Practical intelligence.
Prudence refers broadly to thinking in practical contexts,, rather than in specifically intellectual domains. The kind of intelligence implicit in prudence is distinguished from technical or procedural skill and from abstract theoretical or philosophical cognition. Rather, it is characterized by flexible and applied concern for the practical contingencies of behavior, especially in the fact of uncertainty. Prudence is marked by a cautious attitude to risk and a moderate attitude toward aspiration. It allows a degree of rule-governedness for behavior, but emphasizes the need for flexibility in mediating between rules and the particularities of cases. this flexibility is a mtter of deliberation. Prudence thus amounts in large part to a faculty of good judgment.

Prudence and impulsiveness.
Prudence plainly refers to an ideal of thinking and behaving which is taken to be good in itself and worthy of emulation. It is taken to have an ethical dimension, and it is listed as one of the virtues. Its principal prescriptive recommendation is that it enables the person's resistance to a variety of forms of impulsive ("incontinent") and in temperate behavior, and in its fullest development the person is not even drawn towards these irrationalities. the discrepancy between the prudential norm and the reality of incontinence suggests that the main target of prescriptive efforts is weak-willed or impulsive behavior. Prudence carries prescriptive weight because of this basic self-regulatory deficiency, as well as its derivative consequences for other people, who suffer from the preson's unpredictability and impulsiveness. For Aristotle, impulsive behavior is identified with antisocial vice. Note that the concept of impulsiveness that we refer to here is different from, yet related to, two other concepts. In one sense, impulsive behavior simply involves too little thought. Kagan (1966) measured impulsivity by looking at individual differences in speed and accuracy on problem-solving tasks. Impulsives were those who were fast inaccurate, compared to others. ("Reflectives" were slow and accurate). Baron et al. (1986) argued that Kagan's concept was implicitly evaluative, and Baron et al. made the evaluation explicit by defining impulsiveness as thinking less than the optimal amount. Baron et al. (1991) attempted to show how, at least in principle, this kind of impulsiveness could be measured by calculating an optimum amount of thinking for each subject in each of several anagram tasks.
A second sense of "impulsiveness" is identical to temporal myopia or lack of concern for the future. This is typically measured by tasks in which subjects must decide between immediate and delayed rewards. Impulsiveness is defined either as tendency to choose the immediate reward, relative to on's peers, or as the kind of dynamic inconsistency described earlier.
The sense of 'impulsiveness" that we take as crucial here is an inability to control impulses, that is, an inability to inhibit an initial tendency to act (or to refrain from action). The ability to control impulses is at heart of self-control, for we do not need self-control in order to live from moment to moment. Self-control makes it possible for us to think about what to do, so its a precondition for reflectiveness in Kagan's sense. Likewise, it makes it possible for us to delay gratification for the sake of a later and larger reward, or for the sake of conformity to a moral principle or social norm. But we are not claiming that self-control is a fundamental, unanalyzable, trait. Thought itself may contribute to self-control.
Prudence is motivated by the avoidance and overcoming of failures of self-control and of precipitant giving-in to temptations. These forms of peremptory behavior have in common a failure to adhere to a longer-term plan in the interest of a competing shorter-term opportunity. But prudence also refers to a concern for long-term ends rather than present-centered consequences. It is not enough for people to be free from weakness of will; they must also care about their extended personal futures, have delayed goals that they take into due account in their practical thinking, and think of themselves as beings continuous in time. these requisites amount to having a coherent life-plan. In sum, although self-control is necessary for prudence, it is not sufficient.

Personality.
In several respects, prudence does appear to represent an intermediate step between intelligence and personality. By drawing intelligence out of the circumscribed domain of narrow cognitive abilities and into the domain of goal satisfactions, it becomes more closely linked to more general behavioral dispositions.
Perhaps the most important and distinctive elements of the concept of prudence are its concern for long-term considerations and the associated focus on the self-control of impulse. Imprudent behavior will generally fail either to take more temporally remote consequences or goals into adequate consideration, by failure of foresight or motivation, or it will fail to hold to a prudent plan of action on account of inadequate impulse control.