Abstract
Humanitarian giftedness is the deployment of one’s gifts and talents in a way that, at some level, benefits humanity. Humanitarian giftedness involves sharing one’s gifts with others in a way that makes the world a better place. It is not something people are born with—they develop it in the same way other forms of expertise are developed—through a deployment of abilities as developed by deliberate practice and a focus on giving rather than just receiving. Teachers and parents can develop humanitarian giftedness by being role models, by sharing stories of humanitarian giftedness, and by encouraging it in their students. They also must discourage use of gifts for ends that harm humanity. The road to more humanitarian deployment of gifts is not through tests and other assessments, but through the development of humanitarian gifts as a learned form of expertise—as gifts not from genes, but rather from the interaction of the person with the tasks they confront and the environmental contexts in which they live.
There is giftedness and there is humanitarian giftedness. Although there are many definitions of giftedness, giftedness can be viewed as the possession of special gifts or talents that distinguish one’s mental and other assets from others' (see Plucker et al., 2017; Silverman, 2012; Sternberg & Ambrose, 2021, for various definitions). Humanitarian giftedness, as we are defining it, is the deployment of one’s gifts and talents in a way that benefits humanity, at some level. It is, in part, an enactment of what Chowkase and Watve call “concern for others” (Chowkase, 2022; Chowkase & Watve, 2021). It is not merely within a person, but a response to what one can do in, and for, the environmental context in which one resides (Sak, 2021; Sternberg, 2023a; 2023b). This context includes one’s family, friends, schooling or job, community, state or province, country, the world, and even beyond. It also includes the culture in which one is embedded and the times in which one lives. It includes environmental as well as human context.
Benefiting humanity also involves benefiting the environmental context in which humanity resides, simply because people’s lives are so embedded in and intertwined with the environment in which they live. Humanitarian giftedness goes beyond concern for others, in that it requires one to act, not merely to have concerns, and it requires those concerns to extend beyond particular others to humanity as a whole. It also goes beyond socioemotional giftedness needs and giftedness (Plucker & Dilley, 2016). It is not about how one handles relations with others, but rather, about how one serves the interests of others beyond oneself and the groups with which one identifies, and even beyond the group to which one belongs. High levels of cognitive assets always should be welcome in school and in society: But how much better for the world it would be if those assets, at whatever level, were deployed not only in the service of oneself and others like oneself, but also in the service of humanity, at whatever level the individual can contribute.
High levels of cognitive assets can contribute to humanitarian giftedness, but they are by no means sufficient. They can help one recognize what is going on in the world around one, but cognitive assets are no guarantee of humanitarian impulses. And for those who are determined to contribute to the world, very high levels of cognitive assets are not even clearly necessary.
Some authors have related giftedness to greater ethical sensitivity (Jackson et al., 2009; Tirri, 2022), although unfortunately, this relation does not seem to hold in all cases, as all societies also have gifted people with narcissistic, Machiavellian, and even psychopathic attitudes—the so-called dark triad (Paulhus & Williams, 2002). Simply being gifted provides no guarantee at all of ethical sensitivity. There are many very bright but unethical people. Many of them become leaders in politics and governance of various sorts.
In today’s world, are we even identifying potentially humanitarianly gifted children as “gifted”? Are we developing children to be humanitarianly gifted? Or are we identifying primarily those that are gifted in ways maximally to serve only themselves and their own interests or to satisfy the interests of those who want to profit from the potential of the gifted? Why not develop interest in others and in larger causes in addition to interest in self-enhancement?
In this article, we discuss humanitarian giftedness and its implications. First, we discuss the nature of humanitarian giftedness. Second, we discuss current approaches to identification of the gifted and how the approach described in this article compares with those approaches. Third, we discuss whether moral issues such as we ponder upon here should be considered in the identification of the gifted. Fourth, we discuss why it is important, as in our approach, to go beyond gifts that are “bestowed.” Fifth, we discuss common elements of the humanitarianly gifted. Sixth, we consider humanitarian giftedness in practice. Finally, we draw some conclusions about humanitarian giftedness.
The nature of humanitarian giftedness
Humanitarian giftedness is about helping others on as large a scale as is feasible for the individual. In some ways, it is the opposite of the self-centered and perhaps even narcissistic view of giftedness that, we would argue, has come to encompass the field. This prevalent view is that giftedness is a property of the individual that the individual can use for whatever purpose they choose, or not use at all. This view is a result, in large part, of the individualistic societies in which we live. Even collectivist societies may fail to develop humanitarian giftedness, when the collective is the majority (e.g., people like oneself) or is a disguise for the political party in power (as in many autocratic societies that claim to be collectively oriented but really work primarily to benefit the politically, socially, and economically well connected).
Could anyone who is gifted be humanitarianly gifted? Certainly. Actually, almost anyone could be humanitarianly gifted. Humanitarian giftedness is clearly not an inborn trait—no one has genes that somehow require them to give of themselves to humanity. And it is not a characteristic that is much, if at all developed, through traditional educational systems. Schools around the world continually reward those who are self-serving and look out for themselves. In totalitarian settings, they may serve themselves through blind obedience--by unquestioningly serving, or at least appearing to serve, the state, state-approved religion, state-approved political party, or really, any cult that requires unswerving devotion.
It is perhaps no coincidence that Darley and Batson (1973) found that divinity students who were about to lecture on the Good Samaritan were no more likely to help someone in distress than were those who were not going to give such a lecture—the only thing that affected their likelihood of helping was how much of a hurry they were in, with hurried students less likely to help. Studying divinity does not necessarily make one a more humanitarian person. Doctrinaire religious groups in the world are often not the most humanitarian (e.g., Hall et al., 2010). Relative to population, a religious country, Iran, identified as an “Islamic Republic,” has the highest rate of executions in the world (Death Penalty Information Center, 2021). The State of Texas in the United States has both the highest number of Southern Baptists in the United States (Baptist Press, 2020), and the highest rate, across the years, of executions (Death Penalty Information Center, 2023). Humanitarian giftedness is an individual choice: It does not derive from being part of a society that commends itself for the elevation of its religious or ethical principles. But it can be encouraged by role models, a group, or a society that truly believes in humanitarianism.
There is an aspect of giftedness that is given to one and developed—but there is another aspect of giftedness, perhaps a more important aspect—that is a choice (Sternberg, 2023c). To deploy one’s abilities, talents, motivations, and general goodwill to help others is a choice—it is a gift one bestows upon others, and perhaps way too few people make that choice. Abilities and talents help, but what matters most is how one deploys them (Sternberg, 2021c). Humanitarian giftedness is in large part a choice.
Terman (1925) identified gifted children by IQ and then looked at their accomplishments later in life. Predictably, some of the children gave a great deal back to society, others gave a great deal to themselves, and others did not do much of anything. One view, that of Terman, would be that the individuals who did not do much of anything were under-achievers. An alternative view—that of this article---is that the children were simply mis-identified because IQ is not a sufficient basis for an identification of an individual as gifted (see also Sternberg et al., 2022b). We could even say that IQ is a reductionist evaluation of a person’s talents, which does not take into consideration other characteristics (such as humanitarian aspects) that would allow us to know more globally the type of person he/she will become.
Current approaches to identification
Three of the ways in which children currently are identified as “gifted” are through the use of (a) standardized tests of intelligence and related abilities, (b) standardized tests of achievement, and (c) academic performance in school (see, e.g., Pfeiffer, 2018; Sternberg & Ambrose, 2021). All three of these means of identification have long histories. They provide three different means of assessing giftedness, and thus provide a set of converging operations (Garner et al., 1956) to ensure that identification is not based on just a single kind of measure. The measures are not entirely conceptually independent, as most standardized achievement tests measure in large part what is sometimes called general mental ability (GMA) (Sackett et al., 2020), and thus tend to be at least moderately correlated with each other. Indeed, tests of achieved college preparation show quite high correlations with tests of IQ (Frey & Detterman, 2004; Koenig et al., 2008).
All these means of identification are based on three critical historical antecedent beliefs. The first is that intelligence is a property of the individual. Second is that the property is adequately represented by IQ or a related construct such as general mental ability, as described above (Sackett et al., 2020). Third is that intelligence as measured by scholastic or academic types of tests represents in an adequate way intelligence as it exists in the everyday world. But suppose instead that, first, intelligence is not merely an individual property, but rather a property of the individual and of collectivities as they interact with tasks and environmental contexts (Malone & Woolley, 2020; Sternberg, 2021a). Second, suppose intelligence is broader than just IQ or general mental ability and the abilities hierarchically contained within it (Carroll, 1993), as suggested by a variety of individuals in speaking of multiple intelligences and practical, social, collective, emotional, and adaptive intelligence (Garner et al., 1956; Hedlund, 2020; Kihlstrom and Cantor, 2020; Malone and Woolley, 2020; Rivers et al., 2020; Sternberg, 2021). And third, suppose that intelligence as tested provides only a limited access to what individuals can accomplish in the everyday world (Hedlund, 2020; Nuñes, 1994; Olson, 2005; Sternberg, 2021; Sternberg et al., 2022). Then perhaps we should expect something more than what we find through current methods of identification and instruction.
The somewhat narrow conception of intelligence as IQ dates back at least to Boring (1923). However well this conception may have served in the 20th century—and that is debatable (Gould, 1981; Greenfield, 2020)—it seems not to be serving extremely well in the 21st century. People, including traditionally “gifted” people, are finding ways to manipulate social media to serve corporate profits, to pollute the environment, to establish and maintain autocratic governments and dictatorships, to increase the gap in resources between the rich and the poor, and to fight to be elected to political office by undermining public health. Certainly, we need as many as possible of the gifted to deploy their giftedness to help humanity rather than to harm it. This view may sound like a matter of individual choice, but given that taxpayers fund gifted programs, might they not at least deserve a return that helps them rather than being indifferent to them or actually harming them? They deserve a positive return on investment for society, not just for the individuals that society helps. In a society that has become self-absorbed and often narcissistic, that may sound like an unreasonable request. But is it? Can the world afford to keep going the way it is going?
There is an issue with these three criteria described above for identification, which extends to other criteria like them. That problem is that they measure the extent to which children do as they are told and do it well—in essence, the extent to which the children are intellectually obedient. But gifted children are sometimes anything but intellectually obedient (see essays in Sternberg & Ambrose, 2021).
The problem with the “intellectual obedience” notion can be illustrated by movies such as “The Terminator” series, starring Arnold Schwarzenegger. In the movies, a murderous cyborg seeks to kill a woman named Sarah Connor because her as yet unborn son will lead a battle against an artificial-intelligence system, Skynet, that will spark a nuclear holocaust. The cyborg tries a wide range of innovative ways to kill Connor. But basically, it is following directions---doing what it was told to do. One could argue, perhaps, about its effective level of intelligence in devising ways to assassinate Sarah. But if it was extremely innovative and persistent in going about accomplishing its task, was it thereby “gifted”? Were Nazi officers and soldiers “gifted” by virtue of the number and variety of ways they used to carry out their genocidal mission?
The term “gifted” extends back at least to the Judeo-Christian Bible. In the Bible, gifts come from God (James 1:17), and they are positive in nature. God would not give destructive gifts, according to the Judeo-Christian notion of God. Somehow, the meaning of “giftedness” has changed not only with regard to the origins of gifts, but also with regard to their positivity. Giftedness has become a utilitarian concept, with the subject and the object of the utility, primarily, oneself.
Most instruction is in acquiring a storehouse of knowledge and skills; it is not made clear, usually, who the beneficiary will be, but in an individualistic society, that is rarely in doubt. It is the self, and sometimes those perceived to be like oneself (at the same time that people are sometimes manipulated into not being themselves by believing that they are becoming themselves). This is not to say that there are not many gifted people who use their gifts for the benefit of others—but there are also many who use their gifts for the detriment of humankind. Some of the Russian military and civilian collaborators bombing Ukraine and slaughtering civilians, repeating atrocities of the 20th century that many thought were behind present-day humanity, are almost certainly gifted. Some of the gifted Chinese leaders who 1 day had a complete clamp-down of the society to prevent the spread of COVID-19 and who disappeared a day later to allow COVID-19 to spread through the society were probably intellectually gifted; and some of the Americans who have tried through violence and subterfuge to take over the government of the United States have been graduates of the most prestigious universities in the country. There always will be people like them; but can gifted education encourage more individuals to deploy their gifts for positive rather than for morally indifferent or repugnant ends? Is there a way to educate the gifted in values and ethical sensitivity?
Should moral issues be part of gifted identification?
To some, moral issues should be kept completely separate from the identification of the gifted. But should they be? Should we be indifferent to the education of those who use their skills to create biological or chemical weapons or weapons of mass destruction? Is our notion of giftedness really that nearly amoral that we, as educators, can say that we teach content knowledge and then, what students do with it, is not a matter of concern for us? Ambrose (2022) argues that some kind of moral education is an essential part of gifted education. Dabrowski (1946/2016) recognized the importance of positive disintegration in the development of giftedness. Positive disintegration is a process whereby, through psychological distress and often intense psychological challenges, one grows from one’s former dependent and often doubting self into a more autonomous, psychologically healthy individual. Dabrowsky (1946/2016) argued that in this positive disintegration, there is a progressive development toward a greater ethical conscience, which implies an assumption of responsibility, as well as a greater kindness and altruism toward other human beings, even beyond one’s own culture. But what if the disintegration of self is negative? What if it leads gifted individuals toward negative rather than positive creative or moral ends? Should not educators at least recognize this problem and try to deal with it as early as possible? Some of the gifted may not even “disintegrate,” in Dabrowski’s sense. They may simply become intellectually obedient, recognizing that blindly doing what they are told leads to society’s rewards.
One would have thought that the results of Milgram’s (1974/2009) research would have caused educators to think at least twice about their prizing of intellectual obedience. Milgram found that, when people were told that they would be teachers and that others would be learners, roughly two thirds of participants assigned to the teacher role were willing to deliver what they believed to be extremely high and possibly fatal levels of electric shock. (Unbeknownst to the participants, the shocks were not real but rather simulated.) The participants were more likely to administer what they believed to be the shock when the “experimenter” appeared to be more authoritative, but even with non-authoritative experimenters, the levels of blind compliance were frightening. The work has been replicated many times over an extended period of time and also cross-culturally—the results hold up.
Milgram was motivated to do his research by the blind obedience to the Nazi leaders of so many Germans and others during World War II. We have also learned about blind obedience from the Eichmann case, described by the philosopher Hannah Arendt (2006), as an example of “the banality of evil”; this “banality of evil” occurs, according to Arendt, when blind submission to power is lived as completely normal even if atrocities are committed, because orders are simply obeyed (as Eichmann said about himself when trying to explain his atrocities as a Nazi). One might like to believe that things have changed, but those who thought it would never happen again, or that it never could happen again, were wrong. Something similar is happening right now because of a genocidal dictator in Russia, and other countries, such as but not limited to Syria, Myanmar, Nicaragua, and China, have committed serious atrocities against their own people. Really, little or nothing has changed at all. The racism that led to slavery in the United States continues today, in other forms. What has changed?
Of course, people are discouraged from resisting dictators, in part, by the danger to themselves; but that was true in Nazi times too. The dictators of the 21st century are not, in the end, much different from the worst of those of the 20th century. If they are different, it is with the greater sophistication with which they carry out mass murder, but the result is largely the same. And the selling out of people to dictators, including those who have left their home country to go to other countries and thus should be protected, continues. Whether it is the American priest Father Coughlin in the 20th century or the American supposed television journalist Tucker Carlson in the 21st century, there will always be celebrity pseudo-populists in various positions who are unscrupulous in their actions and appear to care little about the truth, in Carlson’s case, apparently in the pursuit of ratings (Darcy, 2023; Peters & Robertson, 2023). Unfortunately, this behavior is not uncommon. There are very persuasive TV and other journalists around the world who use their podiums to spread the lies of their political party, government, or other group. They are “gifted” in persuading people to believe them but they represent, in some respects, the opposite of humanitarian giftedness. They advance themselves and their interests at the expense of others.
The pseudo-populists who become dictators or their fervent advocates are gifted in their own way. They can be referred to as “pseudo-transformationally” gifted, in that they attempt to appear to be seeking to make the world better when in fact their only major interest is their own self-enhancement (Sternberg et al., 2021), or that their own perceived “tribe” gets more power through a kind of collective narcissism.
There are lots of bad role models around for how not to use gifts in a humanitarian way. Are there outstandingly good ones? If one looks at two of the most gifted young people of current times—Malala Yousafzai, who won a Nobel Peace Prize when she was 17 years old, and Greta Thunberg, who was named Time Magazine Person of the Year at the age of 16—both have been characterized by rather extreme intellectual and other forms of disobedience. Malala, as she is known, was shot in the face for defying authority, and Thunberg went on strike from school to protest adults’ unwillingness seriously to confront climate change.
In terms of current theories, both showed the kind of creative-productive giftedness that Renzulli and Reis (1993, 1994) have distinguished from “schoolhouse” giftedness. We do not know what their school grades or their IQ or achievement-test scores were, and most likely, we do not care. General mental ability is not what catapulted them to the pantheon of some of the most gifted young people in recent history. In terms of Sternberg’s (2021b) theory of adaptive intelligence, both showed adaptive intelligence—the use of their abilities to make the world a better place—and wisdom (seeking of a common good) far beyond their years. Humanitarianly gifted individuals are wise in terms of using their gifts to make a positive, meaningful, and potentially enduring difference to the good of humanity.
Beyond gifts that are “Bestowed”
Often, when young people today are labeled as “gifted,” the label represents the view that they have been, in one way or another, bestowed with one or more gifts. Someone or something—God, genes, parents, good upbringing—has given them a gift, with which they can do, more or less, as they please, so long as they stay within societal legal and ethical constraints. How has that notion of “giftedness” worked out for humanity?
On the one hand, humanity has numerous extraordinary accomplishments to show for itself as a result of gifted individuals—great works of art, literature, music, science, statesmanship, and numerous other domains. On the other hand, and from another point of view, that of the secretary-general of the United Nations, humanity is committing collective suicide (Harvey, 2022). The secretary-general, António Guterres, was referring to the looming catastrophe of climate change. But how many other crises are also paths to collective suicide: nuclear weapons, mentally unbalanced dictators who threaten to use the nuclear weapons, air and water pollution, degradation of the environment, massive inequality in wealth? Oddly, these problems are also caused, in large part, by individuals who are, in a sense, gifted.
It takes some kind of “gift,” or set of gifts, to be chosen as a dictator of a country and to stay alive while, well, dictating; inevitably, other people are interested in your job, and many will stop at little or nothing to get it. It takes a gift to design and build the machines—industrial plants, trucks, cars, massive burn-offs—that fuel pollution and climate change. It takes a kind of gift to accumulate massive (non-inherited) wealth, even if the gift is in deceiving others into giving up their money to benefit you. It is possible that, in using the word “gifted,” societies are looking at the wrong kinds of gifts or have not considered the purpose of these gifts with adequate criteria. Certainly, IQ and school grades provide no guarantee that whatever gifts they are alleged to represent will be used for good purposes rather than bad ones. Indeed, a number of top Nazis had doctoral degrees, and there is no lack in many countries of well-educated individuals, even graduates of Ivy League or other top universities, working in political positions to undermine their societies to enhance their own power and wealth. But do we want to include people who undermine society in our group of people labeled as “gifted,” in effect commending them for their depredations?
“Giftedness,” in a traditional sense, can be used for good or ill. One possibility is to accept this fact as a given—as the way the world works. Another is to reconsider what is meant by “giftedness.” Sternberg (in press) has suggested that giftedness be conceptualized not in terms of the “gifts” an individual has received, whether through genes or environment, but rather in terms of the gifts an individual offers to the world. He likened the difference between his conception and the traditional conception as analogous to the difference between a bank account and a foundation gift. The bank account is evaluated by the total amount of assets accumulated in the account. The foundation gift is evaluated by the magnitude of the gift given but also by the cause to which it is donated.
If we were to evaluate giftedness not in terms of gifts received but rather in terms of gifts given, or at least, potentially given, how might we refer to such giftedness to distinguish it from traditional giftedness? Sternberg (2020b, 2022b) has used the term “transformational giftedness” to refer to giftedness deployed in the service of a common good. And indeed, such gifts would seem to be, metaphorically, the goal of a charitable foundation---to give transformative gifts that will advance a worthy cause. But in everyday life, not every gift that exceptional individuals have to offer will be transformational, at least in any meaningful sense. Indeed, those individuals who are been around for a while in the business of giving gifts sponsored by foundations know that very few gifts turn out to be transformational. One might hope they will turn out that way, but they usually don’t.
If an educator of the gifted wishes to develop giftedness to serve humanity (and other species perhaps as well!), a more realistic goal may be to cultivate the gifted individual’s humanitarian impulses and thus to develop what is being called here humanitarian giftedness, or giftedness in the service of humanity that, at some level, makes the world a better place, whether or not the gift is transformational.
One can argue, and some scholars do, about the extent to which traditional giftedness, for example, as determined by IQ or other measured intellectual abilities, is genetically based. What is being called here humanitarian giftedness is certainly not genetic although it, like any other human trait, can build upon genetic predispositions. However, people are not born somehow ready to contribute to humanity. Giftedness is humanitarian by virtue of the way it is deployed. On this view, much of humanitarian giftedness, like adaptive intellectual functioning, lies in the attitudes of gifted individuals, not just in their abilities (see Sternberg, 2022a). Arguably, it is deployment that matters more than what one metaphorically might have stored inside the head.
What are the characteristics of humanitarian giftedness? Perhaps three stand out: 1. Desire to help humanity. The individual wants to improve the conditions under which humanity lives and to make things better. The desire may be limited to some group that needs help, but it is based on positive universal human values, not just on benefiting oneself and people like oneself—one’s tribe. In part, humanitarian gifted people are distinguished not only intellectually, but also by their having developed great senses of caring, compassion, and concern for others than do those who are intellectually gifted but whose giftedness extends little, if at all, beyond their intellect (see Chowkase, 2022; Chowkase & Watve, 2021). But they not only have these senses: They go beyond that to act upon them. Traits do not make one humanitarianly gifted. Some might view these additional skills and attitudes as beside the point, but in today’s world, perhaps more than any other skills and attitudes, they are the point. What got the world through the COVID-10 pandemic was in part some scientists in laboratories, in part some reflective government officials, but more than anything, front-line workers who were willing to help others, often at great risk to themselves. They had precious gifts to give and were not content just to receive. 2. Creating opportunities to help humanity. Sometimes opportunities to help humanity at some level come beckoning or calling. They present themselves. But most of the time, they do not come calling. One has to create the opportunities, and there often are opportunities to be created. 3. Taking the opportunity to help humanity. Given that one has found a way to create the opportunity, one avails oneself of it. One takes the opportunity that now is present to oneself. Humanitarian giftedness is about action, not just about traits.
There are obvious examples of humanitarian giftedness—the usual cast of characters such as Nelson Mandela, Mother Teresa, Martin Luther King, Harriet Tubman, Mahatma Gandhi, Malala Yousafzai. These wise people used their gifts in the service of humankind, in every case at least somewhat at their own expense. But not everyone who is humanitarianly gifted is quite in their league, at least as an individual. Sometimes, one serves in a gifted way through a group. The 2022 Nobel Peace Prize, for example, was awarded to a single human-rights advocate, Ales Bialiatski from Belarus, but also to two human-rights organizations, the Russian Memorial and the Ukrainian Center for Civil Liberties. The latter two recipients were organizations, but they represented the collective efforts of many individuals who chose to deploy their gifts in the service of humankind. Time Magazine awarded the 2022 Heroes of the Year Award to the women of Iran for their courageous and systematic resistance to the repressive and murderous regime governing their country. These group awards were to people, collectively, who have risked their livelihoods and even their lives to stand up for humanitarian rights. They may or may not have “transformative” impact. The murderous regime in Iran may or may not fall; the genocidal regime in Russia may or may not fall. But the humanitarianly gifted set examples for all of humanity, through their service to humanity. What are their IQs or school grades? Does anyone know? Does anyone care? If one wishes to think of giftedness not just in terms of the resources people have in some mental bank account, but in terms of the resources that people give back to the world in the service of humanity, IQ tests and school grades are not going to provide an answer. Often, however, what people mean by giftedness is what gets the individual into a high-IQ organization rather than what get them into the service of humanity.
Common elements in the humanitarianly gifted
People who deploy their giftedness in a humanitarian way have made very different contributions, but one could argue that they have at least six underlying things in common, which distinguish them not only from more typical children but also from Renzulli and Reis’s (1993, 1994) notion of children with schoolhouse giftedness.
Consider each of these characteristics in turn.
Why that problem?
The most gifted creators are individuals who excel in recognizing what problems are even worth solving (Getzels, 1979; Getzels & Csikszentmihalyi, 1976; Sternberg, 2022b; Sternberg et al., 2022b; Zuckerman, 1983). From the standpoint of the study of gifted creativity, few of the problems presented in schools, including in classes for the giftedness, are transparently worth solving. One of us spent quite a bit of time in high school learning how to solve problems involving secants, cosecants, and cotangents. After high school, they never once came across any problems, at least that they were aware of, that required them to compute any of these quantities. Perhaps certain kinds of engineers use them all the time, but for many of us, cosecants and related terms represent part of what is wrong with schooling today—a focus on knowledge and skills that we do not need and never will need and of which knowledge contributes nothing to improving the world.
Much school learning is far more valuable to the average person than learning about cosecants. And for some people, as noted earlier, learning about cosecants may be valuable in their later life. The problem is that schools often do not seem to make a clear distinction between what is more valuable and what is less valuable. A very bright student who is inclined to ask questions may be particularly susceptible to asking why they are learning what they are learning, or why they are being asked to address the problems they are being asked to address. That is, they will necessarily have to wonder about the purpose or meaning of what they are studying.
Some very bright children are very bright by virtue of doing what they are told to do and doing it well. That skill and the compliant attitude underlying it are essentially what standardized tests measure. The tests measure, in large part, who will do what they are told to do and elicit praise for having done it. Very bright kids who are engaged with the world—and some who are not as “bright” in a traditional sense—may recognize that the real problems that confront them as children and that are likely to confront them as adults do not look like the kinds of problems schools present. Real-world problems are not multiple-choice; they often have no single “correct” answer; they are emotionally involving, and the stakes for solving them often are high; they usually require taking into account the interests of other people as well as oneself (Sternberg, 2020a). Often, the exact problem that needs to be solved changes in the midst of one’s solving it. A gifted child who is as gifted at recognizing important problems as they are at solving problems may rebel at the thought of spending all their academic time on problems that seem not to matter, and that, at some level, many of their teachers also know don’t matter.
Why that answer or way of solving the problem?
Dictatorships as in Russia and China provide extensive “patriotic” education to propagandize (i.e., brainwash) their students into unquestioning acceptance of the dictatorship (Kuang, 2021; Nazrullaeva et al., 2022). This has been a real challenge for Russia lately, as it shifted course when it instigated a genocide against Ukraine and attempted to cut off any external communications that might tell Russian and other people the truth about the barbarism, torture, and killings. But democracies and quasi-democracies, such as the United States, also have their own forms of propaganda, such as the banning of books that do not fit a particular political or ideological agenda. In the U.S., between July 2020 and June 2021, there were at least 2532 instances of books being banned, with two very conservative states, Texas and Florida, accounting for the majority (Friedman & Johnson, 2022). It seems that the most important thing for many educators is more to tame children than to teach them to think for themselves.
Although one usually thinks of sometimes arbitrarily “right” answers being imposed at various levels of government, the same thing, to a large extent, happens in schools and homes. Teachers give assignments and typically grade the resulting student work, in part, on the extent to which the work fulfills the assignment. The senior author had an English teacher who gave each paper two grades, one for the quality of the work and the other for the extent to which it fulfilled the assignment (as conceived of by the teacher—see also Oral, 2013). Mathematics teachers often, at least in these times, require students to show their work, and may grade the students on the extent to which the work shows not only that the answer to the problem was correct, but also on the extent to which the problem was done the way it was supposed to be done. Science lab experiments often are graded on whether the steps of a canned lab are followed and reported the way they were supposed to be reported (Sternberg et al., 2021).
The practices of English, math, and science teachers may seem like a far cry from statewide or countrywide patriotic education, but they have in common that they teach children that there is a right way to think and to answer questions, even ones that have alternative answers. Children, in elementary and middle-school mathematics, sometimes are graded down not because they gave a wrong answer, but because the way they solved a problem was not the way they had been taught and thus were expected to solve the problems. “Show-the-work” tests can have the advantage of ensuring that children know what they are doing, and the disadvantage of enabling children to be graded down because they solved the problems in a way other than the way they were taught.
For gifted students and any other students who are creative learners and thinkers, being forced to solve problems in a particular way not only unfairly penalizes the students, but also teaches the wrong lesson—that there is one right way of doing things and it is the authorities’ way. This is a lesson one does not want to teach in a democratic society or any society that wishes to encourage creative thinking.
Refusal merely to accept authority
If people never accepted authority, the world would be chaotic and perhaps Hobbesian, with people competing for resources without any constraints to control their behavior. But the 2020s, when this article is being written, it is hard to make much of a claim that the future for gifted children is merely accepting authority. In China, a country of almost 1 ½ billion people, inhabitants were forced to accept an extremely strict lock-down procedure that was so poorly executed that people died of hunger from not being able to leave their houses (Hoshur, 2022). Then, when protests gained momentum, China abandoned its lockdown policies suddenly, without any plan for how prevent a massive widespread outbreak among a citizenry that was both under-vaccinated, and where vaccinated, vaccinated with low-efficacy vaccines. At the time we wrote these words, it was estimated that the country may have experienced 112 million symptomatic cases and 1.6 million deaths, with needs for hospitalization outpacing the number of hospital beds by a factor of 15 (Normile, 2022). Presumably, the benefit of living in a 1984-like surveillance state was careful monitoring by the government, but the opposite appears to have happened. In Russia, another brutal dictatorship, a megalomanic dictator unleashed an attack on a neighboring country, Ukraine, for reasons that have been hard to specify because the reasons have kept changing (Kirby, 2022). Meanwhile, people die to satisfy the dictator’s ego or other needs, such as to stay in power for life and thereby escape punishment for war crimes and a criminal charge by the International Criminal Court (ICC).
If it were only a couple of countries, perhaps one would chalk up the current world situation to problems in the East that have spared the West. But on the day these words are being written (December 19, 2022), a former U.S. president has just been referred by a Congressional committee to the U.S. Department of Justice on four criminal charges (Broadwater, 2022). (Note that this is not a political matter, but one of potential criminal liability.) In South Africa, the president of the country, Cyril Ramaphosa, was found to have $580,000 stuffed in a couch (TheEconomist, 2022a). His political party decided not to pursue charges after he explained, perhaps implausibly, that the money had come from the sale of 20 “substandard” buffalo to a Sudanese businessman. In the United Kingdom, a prime minister, Liz Truss, lasted 44 days, and then was forced by the circumstances of her leadership to resign (Landler & Castle, 2022).
There always have been, and probably always will be, inadequate leaders, or simply leaders misplaced in their jobs. But if, literally, billions of people are led by incompetent, mentally unbalanced, and/or venal leaders, why, exactly, would gifted young people—or perhaps, should young people—use their gifts to obey authorities of dubious merit? If leaders at the top are so breathtakingly unqualified for their jobs, is there any reason to believe that leaders at lower levels are much more competent? Those who are most competent in attaining and keeping power are not necessarily, and often are not, those who are in the best position to lead. Indeed, in the case of autocratic governments, being a leader at a lower level pretty much requires the leader to surrender whatever claim to moral authority they may have and to fall into line behind the autocrat, no matter how incompetent or venal he may be (and it usually is a “he”).
In Iran, an uprising led by women, mostly young, is showing that an understudied form of giftedness, courage (Sternberg, 2022a), can shake up, if not uproot, a corrupt and brutal government (Wright, 2022). The gifts of these women are not the kinds of gifts that express themselves in grades and on standardized tests. Nor are the gifts of our most outstanding creators, many of whom were not particularly good students in school (Sternberg, 2018; Sternberg & Lubart, 1995). In many institutions, there is explicit pressure to conform: If one does not, one ends up out of the institution, and perhaps, as in Iran, Russia, or China, in prison or worse. But countries that are quasi-democracies, such as the United States, have their own issues. There is considerable pressure to conform, from both the right and the left of the political spectrum. Those who do not may find themselves attacked from either or both sides, with many people staying out of the fray for fear that they also will be attacked or “canceled” if they enter it (Editorial Board, 2022). In the U.S. Capitol insurrection of January 6, 2021, at least four people died.
These ideas lead to the conclusion that gifted education needs to place much more emphasis than it typically does not on obedience to authority, but rather on defying authority as appropriate and morally justified. Creative people, indeed, are often those who defy authority, as well as their own prior conceptions and the worldly Zeitgeist (Sternberg, 2018). But the kind of creativity educators need to develop goes beyond just the production of ideas that are novel and useful. The ideas also need to have integrity and to be positive in their orientation (Sternberg & Lubart, 2022).
Ideas that have integrity are ones that are based on veridical conceptions of the world and that, at some level, “make sense” and involve the expression of human values. That is, they are not based on invented histories, such as Vladimir Putin’s imagined history of the Russian connection with Ukraine, or, for that matter, the history of the United States one of us was taught as a child, in which relations between different groups of people in the United States were general cordial except when certain groups made “trouble” for the dominant White Protestant power structure. Events such as the “trail of tears”—the forced and brutal expulsion of Native Americans from their habitat--simply never made it into our history books of the 1950s and 1960s, and they are probably absent from many American history books today. The idea of expelling the Native Americans to make room for White Americans may have been novel and useful to White Americans, but it was based on false ideas of the ethnic or racial superiority of the White Americans and of what constituted “positive” developments in society and for whom such developments mattered.
No apology
In the times of Mao Zedong, Chinese courts had elaborate rituals of apology for alleged transgressions of the party line, similar to those of the Stalinist courts in the Soviet Union (Cohen, 2019). In those days, Americans grew up feeling sorry for people who lived in Communist countries and who were exposed mercilessly to propaganda, which they allegedly were forced to accept, or simply believed without being forced to. And yet, the Americans were themselves fed many lies, from the McCarthy “Red” scare (Miller Center n.d.) to the false justification for the invasion of Iraq during the U.S. presidential administration of George W. Bush (Reading-Smith et al., 2014).
Too many gifted individuals are finding their way to jobs that pay well but that are anything but positive for the society in which they live—the military planners for the genocidal invasion by Russia of Ukraine, social-media companies in the U.S. and elsewhere that put profits above people and willfully lead people to harm through their amplification of toxic content, individuals in high-level positions in polluting companies as well as companies that contribute knowingly to global climate change, to give just a few examples. Why would this happen? Because our teaching for gifted education often places a lot of emphasis on academic content but much less emphasis on developing character and critical thinking. And in autocracies, developing character means developing effective stooges for the governments. Even in democracies and quasi-democracies, extremist parties court ignorance. The world needs to do better. Gifted children are the ones who can make the world better. We need to teach them not only academic content, but also how they can use their gifts to make the world a better place.
What can we do differently? We can teach not only for accumulating the knowledge and skills that will lead society to continue to label one as having received gifts, but also for how children can deploy their gifts meaningfully. Earlier during the week we were writing these words (which happened to be Christmas week), one of us passed an elderly woman who was chopping thick ice off her driveway. They were impressed that someone of her age would be doing such a physically demanding and strenuous job. When walking back, the coauthor saw a somewhat different scene. The woman from across the street was walking in the driveway with her two young children—they were certainly in the single-digits in age—each carrying a snow shovel. They crossed the street, approached the woman chopping the ice, and offered to take over. So, who is going to learn more about using one’s gifts, whatever they may be, toward humanitarian ends, those children or children who learn only to shovel their own driveway?
Humanitarian concern
Most important among the characteristics is humanitarian concern—feeling for the humanitarian needs and especially the misfortunes of others. There will be gifted individuals who will see in misfortune an opportunity to advance their own financial or other interests. Such individuals will always be with us, and perhaps the world needs some of them, if in helping themselves, they provide goods or services of use to others. But the world cannot thrive and may not survive if every collective misfortune is seen as an opportunity to be exploited for individual gain (Sternberg, 2021b).
Sense of being united with humanity
Those who are humanitarianly gifted do not see themselves as benefactors or, more egoistically, as saviors. They recognize that they are united with the rest of humanity: They do not merely see the unfortunate as “others.” In the United States today, there is a strong “America First” movement, as there was a metaphorical “British” or “UK First” movement that led, among other things, to Brexit—the vote of the United Kingdom to leave the European Union. Such movements are to be found everywhere, and generally have capitalized on resentment toward perceived “foreigners,” immigrants, and those seeking refuge. Those involved in such movements see people they perceive as different from themselves as “other.” For example, in the United States today, many people see the problems of unfortunate people in Ukraine as the Ukrainians’ problem, not their problem. They see themselves as different, and perhaps as superior in some way. The United States, of course, has a long history of such feelings: It enslaved African people who were forced to come to the United States and then to work under subhuman conditions. Women, roughly half the population of the United States, did not receive the right to vote until 1920, and in some countries, they still cannot vote. Humanitarian giftedness involves overcoming feelings of “otherness” and recognizing and feeling within oneself the interconnection of all humanity.
Humanitarian giftedness in practice
People who are humanitarianly gifted may or may not become eminent. Eminence is not what determines their contribution, but rather, simply determines how well known that contribution becomes.
Eminent humanitarian giftedness
Most people who are humanitarianly gifted will make contributions that, however small, make people’s lives better. What is it about a Malala or a Greta, or a Gandhi or a Mandela, that leads them to achieve a certain level of eminence as being humanitarianly gifted? A clue can be found in an article in The Economist magazine designating Ukraine as the 2022 “country of the year.” The editors (The Economist, 2022b) note that 2022 was the first time since 2013, when the designation was invented, that there was an “obvious” choice. The editors described the country and its citizens as showing four special characteristics that distinguished them and that, as of late December, 2022, enabled them to resist the invasion of a tyrant and his “terminator”-like forces. A country, of course, is simply a geographic entity: It is the collective efforts of the people within the country that result in a country distinguishing itself.
The first characteristic pointed out by The Economist is heroism. It might seem like heroism would emerge only in the presence of emergencies. But eminent humanitarianly gifted individuals recognize the great challenges the world faces and confront them (in their day-to-day lives), such as women’s rights in the case of Malala and the heroic women of Iran, and global climate change in the case of Greta. The world has so many problems—one only has to choose from among them. What makes Malala and Greta and so many citizens of Ukraine heroic is their resistance to oppressors and to oppression. They also resist the temptation to be merely passive spectators watching the disasters others cause.
The second characteristic is ingenuity. There are many people in the world who have confronted the problems that Malala, Greta, and other humanitarian gifted people have confronted. But the gifted individuals have found ways of fighting oppression, from the nonviolence of Gandhi to the Civil Rights marches of Martin Luther King and his associates, to the Fridays for Future of Greta Thunberg. These gifted individuals are ingenious in finding a way to affect public sensibility, which is often indifferent to, or even ignorant of the problems of the world.
The third characteristic is resilience. There is always opposition to anyone who seeks to change the world for the better. The opponents represent many points of view. Some simply do not like change. Others benefit from the current system and do not want to change it. Still others are envious of great achievers. Whatever the task, humanitarian giftedness is not readily accepted by all. Those who display it have to continue in the face of pushback, and as in the case of the Iranian government, ruthlessness and violence.
The fourth characteristic is inspiration. They inspire others by their behavior—not by their scores on standardized tests, not by their grades in school, and not by any behavior that simply represents their doing what authorities tell them to do. They inspire through their courage, ingenuity, resilience, and determination to make the world a better place. These are not characteristics with which any of us are born. They are characteristics that any of can choose to adopt. We learn humanitarian giftedness through inspiration to strive to be our best and noblest selves. If adults provide the examples, not of modeling obedience but of modeling heroism, ingenuity, and resilience, they will inspire young people to reach the level of humanitarianism to which any of can aspire.
Non-eminent humanitarian giftedness
The large majority of humanitarian gifted people are known only by those whom they help. They do what they do not for eminence or even recognition, but because of their commitment to others. They may become eminent, but that was not their goal, or at least, not their primary one. Some are medical doctors with distinguished educational credentials. But others are nurses, teachers, first responders, and all the people who give of themselves, often with little or no financial reward, to make the lives of others better. They do not get to own fancy homes or fly into space, but they do get to see people live who, without their assistance, would have died; or they get to see people educated who, without their assistance, might have remained uneducated.
They come to be who they are through some combination of personal dispositions and a home, school, religious, after-school, or other environment that encourages them to give of themselves in the service of humanity. It is not enough to be in a service profession and get recognition or awards. There are people in such positions who rely on the service of others and rather use the positions for their own personal benefit. The criterion test is whether their efforts have, at some level, made a distinguished difference to the uplifting of humanity, even if no one has heard of them. In some ways, perhaps, it is odd to label as “gifted” people with high IQs who, even as adults, have done little or nothing to help anyone but themselves, but then to write off people who have saved countless lives as “service workers” and then to underpay them because they are only “service workers.” One can, in theory, be “gifted” in a traditional sense by cleverly employing or even exploiting others to become rich and then going on recreational flights into outer space, while not being labeled as “gifted” by saving lives, and as a result not having the time for recreational flights because one is busy earning minimal wages to help others in need. Perhaps we need to think about giftedness more broadly and also more humanitarianly.
Conclusion
Humanitarian giftedness is not something one is born with. It is not something that can be well detected in children, although there may be signs. It is closer to a kind of developing expertise that can be acquired through focus and hard work (Ericsson & Pool, 2017; Sternberg, 1998). Parents and teachers develop it by role-modeling it, teaching about people who have exhibited it, and most of all, by encouraging children to give of themselves to others—as did the mother who took her children to help an elderly woman chop ice on her driveway. So, if we wish to see more people who bestow their gifts not only on themselves but also on others, the way to see it will not be to look for signs from existing tests or to develop new tests. It will be to encourage all children to have as a purpose in life the sharing of their gifts with generosity, whatever the gifts are, with others, and with the world, at any level.
We often think about giftedness as something given to the gifted person. Here, we think of giftedness as something given by the gifted person. Their giftedness depends not on a test score or set of grades or activities that redound to themselves. It depends on a decision they make—to serve humanity, and hopefully, make a difference to others that otherwise would not have been made.
Individuals who are humanitarianly gifted are wise and ethical, but they go beyond being wise and ethical. One can be wise and ethical in one’s interactions with one’s siblings or family or relatives, or coworkers, or whatever. Certainly, wisdom and ethics are foundations of humanitarian giftedness. But humanitarianly gifted individuals go further and choose to deploy their wisdom and ethics to help humanity, at whatever level they can. Often, to do so, they pay a considerable price. Being a humanitarian is close to a kiss of death in many occupations, and certainly it is in the politics of some political parties worldwide, in which leaders seem to vie with each other to show how inhumane, uncaring, callous and even cruel they can be. These days, Vladimir Putin, Alexander Lukashenko, and Xi Jinping, and other malign types seem to be much more common than humanitarian Angela Merkel, Mohandas Gandhi, or Nelson Mandela types. To be humanitarianly gifted is often an expensive choice, as teenage leaders such as Malala Yousafzai and Greta Thunberg have discovered at a very early age, and as Alexei Navalny and others in Russian penal colonies have discovered on a daily basis. Trying to help humanity, in general, runs one up against strong vested interests. Not all of these vested interests are malign in their interactions with the world. Many are simply indifferent.
Humanitarian giftedness is in some ways related to Sternberg’s (2020b, 2022c) concept of transformational giftedness. But people can be transformationally gifted without being humanitarianly gifted. Transformationally gifted individuals may focus on transforming science, or business, or literature, or art, or whatever, rather than humanity. And humanitarianly gifted individuals are not necessarily transformational in what they do. Rather, they are incredibly helpful, beneficent, and altruistic in being willing to give to the world, whether or not they necessarily benefit themselves.
Today we need gifted humanitarians who develop a greater ethical awareness that will lead them use their gifts to make this world a better place. They may or may not make the headlines; they may or may not ever be labeled by today’s society as “gifted.” But they should be labeled as such, because they recognize that “giftedness” is not just in the luck of the draw of what one receives at birth and by upbringing, but also, and more importantly, in the gifts one brings to the world, at whatever level.
Footnotes
Declaration of Conflicting Interests
The author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.
Funding
The author(s) received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.
