[Emmons] Is spirituality an intelligence.pdf

THE INTERNATIONAL JOURNAL FOR THE PSYCHOLOGY OF RELIGION, 10 (1), 3–26

INVITED ESSAY

Is Spirituality an Intelligence?

Motivation, Cognition, and the

Psychology of Ultimate Concern

Robert A. Emmons

Department of Psychology

University of California, Davis

This article explores spirituality as a form of intelligence. The evidence for spiritual-

ity as a set of capacities and abilities that enable people to solve problems and attain

goals in their everyday lives is evaluated. Five components of spiritual intelligence

are identified: (a) the capacity for transcendence; (b) the ability to enter into height-

ened spiritual states of consciousness; (c) the ability to invest everyday activities,

events, and relationships with a sense of the sacred; (d) the ability to utilize spiritual

resources to solve problems in living; and (e) the capacity to engage in virtuous be-

havior (to show forgiveness, to express gratitude, to be humble, to display compas-

sion). Evidence that spirituality meets the criteria for an intelligence is reviewed. Im-

plications of studying spirituality within an intelligence framework are discussed.

In this article, I advance the argument that spirituality might be conceived of as a

type of intelligence. Evidence for spirituality as a set of interrelated abilities and

skills is considered. I contend that a serious consideration of the overlap between

intelligence and spirituality may yield previously neglected theoretical and practi-

cal dividends. A spiritual intelligence framework has the potential to both integrate

disparate research findings in the psychology of religion and spirituality and gener-

ate new research yielding fresh insights into the spiritual basis of behavior.

Requests for reprints should be sent to Robert A. Emmons, Department of Psychology, University of

California, One Shields Avenue, Davis, CA 95616–8686. E-mail: raemmons@ucdavis.edu

4 EMMONS

The many meanings of spirituality and religiousness have recently become the

focus of vigorous theoretical and empirical scrutiny. At the same time, emerging

trends in the psychology of religion have yielded an impressive but as of yet

unintegrated account of adaptive functioning, in which spiritual beliefs, commit-

ments, and practices have been associated with a wide variety of criteria of success

in living including physical health, psychological well-being, and marital satisfac-

tion and stability. A concept that has the potential to unite these various literatures

would be serving an important integrative function. Spiritual intelligence might be

one such integrative concept.

SPIRITUALITY AS ULTIMATE CONCERN

Spirituality is the personal expression of ultimate concern. Tillich (1957) con-

tended that the essence of religion, in the broadest and most inclusive sense, is the

state of being ultimately concerned—having a “passion for the infinite,” a passion

that is unparalleled in human motivation. Religion “is the state of being grasped by

an ultimate concern, a concern which qualifies all other concerns as preliminary

and which itself contains the answer to the question of the meaning of our life”

(Tillich, 1963, p. 4). Similarly, Heschel (1955) depicted the search for God as “the

search for ultimacy” (p. 125), and Allport (1950) defined a mature religious senti-

ment as “a disposition to respond favorably … to objects or principles that the indi-

vidual regards as of ultimate importance in his own life, and as having to do with

what he regards as permanent or central in the nature of things” (p. 56). Spirituality

has been defined as that which “involves ultimate and personal truths” (Wong,

1998, p. 364), and spirituality refers to how an individual “lives meaningfully with

ultimacy, his or her response to the deepest truths of the universe” (Bregman &

Thierman, 1995, p. 149).

In a recent book (Emmons, 1999), I described a research program devoted to

studying the presence of ultimate concerns through personal goal strivings. Per-

sonal strivings represent what people are typically trying to do, their “signature”

goal pursuits. There is an intimate connection between religion and goals. One of

the functions of a religious belief system and a religious world view is that it pro-

vides “an ultimate vision of what people should be striving for in their lives”

(Pargament & Park, 1995, p. 15), as providing a guide to “the most serious and

far-ranging goals there can possibly be” (Apter, 1985, p. 69). There is a long his-

tory of using goal language metaphorically to depict spiritual growth. In devo-

tional writings, spiritual growth and spiritual maturity are viewed as processes of

goal attainment, with the ultimate goal being intimacy with the divine. It is, there-

fore, ultimate concern that shapes and gives direction to a person’s ultimate con-

cerns in life. Spiritual strivings, then, as personal goals focused on the sacred,

become the way in which ultimate concerns are encountered in people’s lives. Ul-

timate concerns are bridges linking motivation, spirituality, and intelligence.

PSYCHOLOGY OF ULTIMATE CONCERN 5

The personal striving approach has its roots in cognitive personality theory. The

basic assumptions of the cognitive–motivational approach to personality are the

following. People are intentional, (usually) rational beings who are engaged in a

constant effort to strive toward personal meaningfully defined goals. These goals

emerge as a function of internal propensities such as motive dispositions and basic

needs in concert with cultural demands and situational affordances that shape their

expression across situations and over time. Motivation in the form of goal-direct-

edness is a major component of the cognitive approach, and motivation is a key as-

pect of personality as it lends coherence and patterning to people’s behavior.

Motivational units, such as goals, motives, and values, form a hierarchical system

of which various levels could be activated depending on environmental stimuli.

INTELLIGENCE, PERSONALITY, AND ADAPTIVE

FUNCTIONING

The cognitive–motivational perspective on which the personal striving framework

is situated opened the door for a reconceptualization of the role of intelligence in

personality. A recent volume (Sternberg & Ruzgis, 1994) dedicated to the interface

of intelligence and personality contained contributions from a number of distin-

guished researchers in these respective fields. They explored a number of important

interdependencies between intelligence and personality processes, many of which

also pertain to the study of intelligence and spiritual processes.

Ford (1994) highlighted four basic questions that should be asked about human

functioning. He referred to these as the process question, the content question, the

effectiveness question, and the developmental question. These four questions are

at the heart of personality psychology, and two are directly the focus of this article.

The content question addresses the “what” or the having side of personality—what

is the substance or meaning of a person’s thoughts, goals, and actions? Spirituality

and religion are important domains of goal striving for most people (Emmons,

1999). The effectiveness question deals with how well the person is functioning

according to some criteria of success in life—happiness, life satisfaction, person-

ality integration, and the like. Ford contended that intelligence is the most com-

monly employed construct used to address the effectiveness question.

Intelligence, then, is defined as “the characteristic of a person’s functioning asso-

ciated with the attainment of relevant goals within some specified set of contexts

and evaluative boundary conditions” (p. 203).

Defining Intelligence

There is little agreement over how to define intelligence (Neisser et al., 1996; Stern-

berg, 1997). Many conceptions equate intelligence with adaptive problem-solving

behavior, where problem solving is defined with respect to practical goal attain-

6 EMMONS

ment and some sort of positive developmental outcome. According to Sternberg

(1990), the adaptiveness of intelligent behavior is viewed in light of whether it can

function to meet the goals of the organism. Intelligence was recently defined as “the

level of skills and knowledge currently available for problem-solving” (Chiu,

Hong, & Dweck, 1994, p. 106), “the ability to attain goals in the face of obstacles by

means of decisions based on rational rules” (Pinker, 1997, p. 62), as “a set of abili-

ties that permits an individual to solve problems or fashion products that are of con-

sequence in a particular cultural setting” (Walters & Gardner, 1986, p. 164), and

“mental abilities necessary for adaptation to … any environmental context” (Stern-

berg, 1997, p. 1036). Problem solving is inherently goal-directed—identifying a

goal, locating and pursuing appropriate routes to the goal, and organizing poten-

tially competing goals so as to maximize joint attainment are problem-solving

skills needed for the effective negotiation of one’s adaptive landscape. Goal setting

creates a series of problems to be solved, as it requires the formulation of strategies

and plans to pursue these goals in the face of external obstacles or internal obstacles

such as frustration, depression, anxiety, and conflict with other pursuits. For exam-

ple, the ultimate concern of living a life that is pleasing to God requires an identifi-

cation of and commitment to a lifestyle that is pleasing to God, an identification of

and a commitment to avoid that which is displeasing to God, and inner self-regula-

tory mechanisms to deal with frustrations, temptations, and setbacks that will inevi-

tably occur in trying to live a responsible and accountable life of this type in an envi-

ronment that may lack supports for such efforts.

The central theme behind these definitions of intelligence is a focus on adaptive

problem solving. The issues of what constitutes adaptive functioning and what is

required to function adaptively are important ones. Dweck (1990) specified a set of

three criteria to distinguish adaptive from maladaptive functioning. First, an adap-

tive pattern should minimize the potential for goal conflict. Competing goals com-

promise effective functioning and are a major source of psychological and

physical stress (Emmons & King, 1988). The goal of living a life that is pleasing to

God could easily come into conflict with self-serving goals. Adaptiveness implies,

among other attributes, the coordination of multiple goals in the service of higher

order principles. The second criterion of an adaptive pattern is that it should en-

hance the probability of goal attainment. Third, an adaptive pattern should allow a

person to effectively utilize a maximum amount of available information.

Ford (1994) listed four prerequisites for effective functioning: motivation ,

which determines the content of goal-directed action; skills , which produce the de-

sired consequences of movement toward goals; biological architecture , which

supports the motivational and skill components; and a supportive environment (or

at least one that is nonhindering), which facilitates progress toward the goal. Intel-

ligent behavior, then, requires “a motivated, skillful person whose biological and

behavioral capabilities support relevant interactions with an environment that has

the informational and material properties and resources needed to facilitate (or at

PSYCHOLOGY OF ULTIMATE CONCERN 7

least permit) goal attainment” (p. 203). Intelligence within specific domains is re-

vealed by the following: breadth of knowledge, depth of knowledge, performance

accomplishments, automaticity or ease of functioning, skilled performance under

challenging conditions, generative flexibility, and speed of learning and develop-

mental change.

THE THEORY OF MULTIPLE INTELLIGENCES

One of the most influential and widespread theories of intelligence is Gardner’s

theory of multiple intelligences (MI; Gardner, 1993, 1995, 1996; Walters &

Gardner, 1986). Gardner’s theory is not the only approach to intelligence currently

in vogue (see Neisser et al., 1996, for an overview of some contemporary perspec-

tives). However, I have chosen it here for three primary reasons: (a) because of its

popularity and familiarity among psychologists, educators, and laity; (b) because

of the comprehensive set of criteria Gardner specified to evaluate a candidate intel-

ligence; and (c) because in published articles on MI theory Gardner debated the

merits of spirituality as an intelligence.

As described earlier, Gardner (1993, 1995, 1996; Walters & Gardner, 1986) de-

fined intelligence as a set of abilities that are used to solve problems and fashion

products that are valuable within a particular cultural setting or community. He

postulated a number of relatively autonomous intellectual capacities, eight in all.

They exist as potentials inherent in each person, yet vary genetically in terms of in-

dividual competencies and potential for development. The eight distinct

intelligences are linguistic, logical–mathematical, spatial, musical, bodily–kines-

thetic, interpersonal, intrapersonal, and naturalist. Each intelligence is a system in

itself, distinct from a global, unified entity of generalized intelligence. He argued

that these separate intelligences exist on the basis of their cultural significance and

their correspondence to underlying neural structures. Gardner (1993) presented

evidence for the existence of these separate computational or information process-

ing systems and suggests that cultures differentially structure conditions to maxi-

mize the development of specific competencies in their members.

In order to determine what competencies and abilities qualify as an intelligence,

Gardner (1993) laid out eight criteria for distinguishing an independent intelligence:

1. An identifiable core operation or set of operations.

2. An evolutionary history and evolutionary plausibility.

3. A characteristic pattern of development.

4. Potential isolation by brain damage.

5. The existence of persons distinguished by the exceptional presence or ab-

sence of the ability.

6. Susceptibility to encoding in a symbol system.

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