Is Intelligence Just A Western Concept?
Russell T. Warne
Jun 4, 2025The group of skills which we refer to as intelligence is a European and American middle-class invention ... It is a kind of intelligence which is especially well adapted for scientific analysis, for control and exploitation of the physical world, for large-scale and long-term planning and carrying out of materialistic objectives. It has also led to the growth of complex social institutions such as nations, armies, industrial firms, school systems, and universities ... Other cultures have evolved intelligences which are better adapted than ours for coping with problems of agricultural and tribal living.
(Vernon, 1965, p. 727)
Ultimately, intelligence will not mean quite the same thing across the cultures, so that one will be in the proverbial position of the person who believes he or she can compare apples and oranges because they are both fruits.
(Sternberg, 1985, p. 53)
The leading figures in intelligence research – both past and present – are individuals who come from Western cultures. Because intelligence research and testing originate in Western cultures, it would be naïve to believe that Western culture does not influence the development of intelligence theories, research, and tests. As a result, many people argue that the perspectives of psychologists who study intelligence – and develop intelligence tests – are ethnocentric (e.g., Berry, 1974; Gardner, 2004; K. Richardson, 2002; Sternberg, 1985). In this viewpoint, intelligence, as understood by Western scientists, is at best too narrow. At worst, the concept is so foreign that it doesn’t even make sense to study or measure intelligence in non-Western individuals. Critics like Vernon (1965, 1969) say that Western views of intelligence are incompatible with views originating in other cultures and that one must consider these groups’ views of intelligence when studying mental abilities. In this chapter, I will explain why this idea is incorrect and why there is strong evidence to believe that intelligence – as defined by g – is a trait that exists in most (probably all) human cultures.
Like many of the incorrect beliefs about intelligence, the idea that intelligence is a culturally bound concept that only applies to Western cultures is not unreasonable. The reality is that different cultures have different ideas about what intelligence is and what intelligent behavior looks like. It is not realistic to expect the word “intelligence” to translate equivalently into all other human languages – or to even exist in every language. Inevitably, there will be differences in meaning, some of which will be major.
The diversity of abilities that different cultures see as being intelligent is impressive. For example, in Chinese cultures, intelligence seems to include knowing how to use one’s knowledge ethically, an idea perhaps akin to “wisdom” (Yang & Sternberg, 1997a, 1997b). In some cultures originating in East Africa, India, and elsewhere, the ability to keep working on a task is a valued cognitive capacity (Berry & Bennett, 1992; B. D. Jones, Rakes, & Landon, 2013; Srivastava & Misra, 2001). In Zimbabwe, many competencies that are “non-cognitive” (in Western perspectives) are seen as vital components of intelligence, especially social competence. Mpofu (2004) reported that caring for one’s family before helping friends or strangers is an important part of intelligence, while Ngara and Porath (2004) claimed that witchcraft and lovemaking were important domains in which Zimbabweans could manifest intelligence within their culture. Meanwhile, the Cree (a First Nations people in Canada) value deliberation, persistence, and patience as part of intelligence (Berry & Bennett, 1992). This brief survey clearly shows that Western definitions of intelligence do not include some abilities and skills that some non-Western cultures value. This is why some psychologists believe that Western definitions of intelligence are too limited, especially when examining the abilities of non-Western individuals (e.g., Sternberg, 2003a, 2004; Yang & Sternberg, 1997a).
However, these contending cultural definitions of intelligence do not prove that Western definitions are limited. A cultural belief that a specific skill is part of intelligence does not make it so. As I have written elsewhere,
The same logic that researchers use to argue that a folk belief regarding intelligence provides evidence of the nature of intelligence could also be used to argue that wide-spread cultural beliefs in elves, goblins, or angels provide evidence of the existence of supernatural beings. (Warne & Burningham, 2019, p. 238)
This fact applies to Western perspectives as well as non-Western perspectives.There will never be any worldwide agreement about what the “correct” definition of intelligence is. (Indeed, there isn’t even complete agreement among Western scholars about the best definition of intelligence.) This is one of the weaknesses of verbal definitions of psychological concepts. Language is – by its nature – inexact; ambiguity and disagreement are inevitable.
Instead of asking whether “intelligence” means the same thing in different cultures, it is much more valuable to examine whether g exists in different cultures (Warne & Burningham, 2019). This is because g is derived statistically – not verbally – through factor analysis and therefore is largely independent of what any particular definition of what skills constitute intelligent behavior. Thus, whether intelligence is a cross-cultural concept is not reliant on similarities in verbal definitions, but rather on whether g exists in different cultures.
My student and I conducted the most rigorous test of whether g exists in non-Western cultures in a recent article (Warne & Burningham, 2019). We searched for archival cognitive test data from groups of examinees in non-Western, non-industrialized countries. We selected these countries because we thought that if g were an artifact of Western culture and philosophy, then these individuals would be the least likely to display g.
We found 97 analyzable datasets from 31 countries in every non-Western region of the world, including Latin America (e.g., Guatemala, Bolivia), Sub-Sahara Africa (e.g., Zambia, Ghana, Ethiopia), and Asia (e.g., Pakistan, Bangladesh, Cambodia). In total, there were 50,103 individuals in the dataset, ranging in age from 2 to the elderly. After identifying the datasets, we then performed exploratory factor analysis on all the datasets to determine whether g emerged from the data.
The results were striking. Of the 97 samples, 71 (73.2%) produced g unambiguously. The remaining 26 datasets produced more than one factor, but when these factors were factor analyzed, 23 of the datasets (88.5%) produced g. Of the remaining three datasets, one produced g under one method of exploratory factor analysis but not another, while it was not possible to do the second-stage factor analysis for two samples. Therefore, 94 of the 97 (96.9%) samples produced g either immediately or after a second factor analysis. Moreover, the g factor is about as strong in the non-Western samples as it is in typical Western samples. All of these findings show that g is not a culturally specific phenomenon confined to Western populations.
In fact, the results were more consistent than even Burningham and I had expected. Our original intention was to examine all the datasets that did not produce g and look for common characteristics that distinguished them from g-producing samples. But this kind of analysis was not possible with only three datasets that failed to produce g. This consistency is remarkable when one considers the diversity of samples in terms of age, education level, lifestyle, and degree of contact with Western cultures.
There was also remarkable diversity in the types of tasks that non-Western examinees performed in these datasets. While some of them resembled Western intelligence tests (often translated into examinees’ native language and/or adapted to their culture), some did not. Other datasets included data from scholastic tests, neurological tests, and even intelligence tests developed by non-Western scholars. Regardless of the collection of tasks administered to examinees, almost all of these datasets still produced g. Moreover, some of these datasets were collected without any intention of producing a g factor, and some of the original data collectors are opponents of theories of intelligence based on g. These people would have been best suited to create datasets that disproved the theory that g is real, and yet they could not (Warne & Burningham, 2019).
Another interesting fact that emerged from this study was how common Western (or Western-style) intelligence and cognitive tests are used in non-Western countries. Despite theorists arguing that Western theories and intelligence tests are too narrow (e.g., Ogbu, 1994; K. Richardson, 2002), non-Western psychologists have adopted these and use them frequently in their countries (though often in translated or culturally adapted versions). These indigenous psychologists rarely see the need to add tasks or subtests that measure the components of intelligence that are important to their culture but which are missing from Western theories. If Western definitions of intelligence are deficient and lack vital components of intelligence, few non-Western test creators and users seem to have noticed.
Skeptics could still argue that g is not synonymous with intelligence and that the presence of g across cultures does not mean that intelligence also exists across cultures. Again, this takes the discussion back to a verbal argument about the meaning of the word “intelligence.” As my co-author and I stated,
Whether “intelligence” exists across cultures or whether the term has the same meaning across cultures is unknowable and probably irrelevant. The term is culturally loaded and will often have a somewhat altered meaning when translated into other languages. However, the statistical abstraction of Spearman’s g is apparent across cultural groups in 31 non-Western, non-industrialized nations. (Warne & Burningham, 2019, p. 266)
There is good reason to explore cross-cultural definitions of the term “intelligence,” and what different human groups think about the skills and mental processes that they find important. But these cultural disagreements say little – if anything – about the nature of intelligence. Rather, what matters is whether g is present in non-Western groups. The research shows that it probably is.
If g is universal, the question then arises of why cultural differences do not seem to obliterate, mask, or change g. My theory is that g originated early in humans’ evolution and that it is a fundamental property of human brain functioning. This theory is supported by research that has shown that other species have a g factor, including dogs (Arden & Adams, 2016), rats and mice (B. Anderson, 1993; Galsworthy, Paya-Cano, Monleón, & Plomin, 2002; Matzel & Sauce, 2017), donkeys (Navas González, Jordana Vidal, León Jurado, McLean, & Delgado Bermejo, 2019), and non-human primates (Fernandes, Woodley, & te Nijenhuis, 2014; Herndon, Moss, Rosene, & Killiany, 1997; Hopkins, Russell, & Schaeffer, 2014; Matzel & Sauce, 2017). All of these are mammal species with a common evolutionary ancestor. It is possible that g originated in the early evolutionary history of mammals and that all of these modern descendent species have g as part of their psychology. If this theory is true, then it would indicate that g cannot be culturally specific because if g can persist across different mammal species, then it is unlikely that the comparatively subtle differences among humans would be sufficient to eliminate g in any group. Even if this evolutionary theory is wrong (which is possible), it does not change the fact that g appeared in over 95% of samples from 31 countries where it would be least likely to be present if g were a culturally specific concept.
If g is universal among humans, it would not mean, though, that one can take an intelligence test developed in a Western nation and give it to people from any culture. (Chapter 10 explains this matter further.) Regardless of who the examinees are, it is still necessary for tests to be culturally appropriate and understandable to test takers. When examinees – from any culture – take an intelligence test, there should be no vocabulary, stimuli, or tasks that are culturally alien. Otherwise, a psychologist is collecting meaningless and uninterpretable data because the manifestations of intelligence – the skills, knowledge, and abilities that are a product of g – may be culturally specific, even though all humans have intelligence. This variability in how intelligence appears across cultures is a product of the cultural environment, such as language, the values of the culture, child-rearing practices, the climate and physical environment, and other characteristics (Ogbu, 1994). Measuring intelligence requires culturally appropriate methods of getting people to demonstrate their abilities, and these tasks may vary greatly from group to group. But the different tasks can (and do) measure intelligence. Chapter 7 discusses this at length.
From Chapter 4 of "In the Know: Debunking 35 Myths About Human Intelligence" by Dr. Russell Warne (2020)
(Vernon, 1965, p. 727)
Ultimately, intelligence will not mean quite the same thing across the cultures, so that one will be in the proverbial position of the person who believes he or she can compare apples and oranges because they are both fruits.
(Sternberg, 1985, p. 53)
The leading figures in intelligence research – both past and present – are individuals who come from Western cultures. Because intelligence research and testing originate in Western cultures, it would be naïve to believe that Western culture does not influence the development of intelligence theories, research, and tests. As a result, many people argue that the perspectives of psychologists who study intelligence – and develop intelligence tests – are ethnocentric (e.g., Berry, 1974; Gardner, 2004; K. Richardson, 2002; Sternberg, 1985). In this viewpoint, intelligence, as understood by Western scientists, is at best too narrow. At worst, the concept is so foreign that it doesn’t even make sense to study or measure intelligence in non-Western individuals. Critics like Vernon (1965, 1969) say that Western views of intelligence are incompatible with views originating in other cultures and that one must consider these groups’ views of intelligence when studying mental abilities. In this chapter, I will explain why this idea is incorrect and why there is strong evidence to believe that intelligence – as defined by g – is a trait that exists in most (probably all) human cultures.
Like many of the incorrect beliefs about intelligence, the idea that intelligence is a culturally bound concept that only applies to Western cultures is not unreasonable. The reality is that different cultures have different ideas about what intelligence is and what intelligent behavior looks like. It is not realistic to expect the word “intelligence” to translate equivalently into all other human languages – or to even exist in every language. Inevitably, there will be differences in meaning, some of which will be major.
The diversity of abilities that different cultures see as being intelligent is impressive. For example, in Chinese cultures, intelligence seems to include knowing how to use one’s knowledge ethically, an idea perhaps akin to “wisdom” (Yang & Sternberg, 1997a, 1997b). In some cultures originating in East Africa, India, and elsewhere, the ability to keep working on a task is a valued cognitive capacity (Berry & Bennett, 1992; B. D. Jones, Rakes, & Landon, 2013; Srivastava & Misra, 2001). In Zimbabwe, many competencies that are “non-cognitive” (in Western perspectives) are seen as vital components of intelligence, especially social competence. Mpofu (2004) reported that caring for one’s family before helping friends or strangers is an important part of intelligence, while Ngara and Porath (2004) claimed that witchcraft and lovemaking were important domains in which Zimbabweans could manifest intelligence within their culture. Meanwhile, the Cree (a First Nations people in Canada) value deliberation, persistence, and patience as part of intelligence (Berry & Bennett, 1992). This brief survey clearly shows that Western definitions of intelligence do not include some abilities and skills that some non-Western cultures value. This is why some psychologists believe that Western definitions of intelligence are too limited, especially when examining the abilities of non-Western individuals (e.g., Sternberg, 2003a, 2004; Yang & Sternberg, 1997a).
However, these contending cultural definitions of intelligence do not prove that Western definitions are limited. A cultural belief that a specific skill is part of intelligence does not make it so. As I have written elsewhere,
The same logic that researchers use to argue that a folk belief regarding intelligence provides evidence of the nature of intelligence could also be used to argue that wide-spread cultural beliefs in elves, goblins, or angels provide evidence of the existence of supernatural beings. (Warne & Burningham, 2019, p. 238)
This fact applies to Western perspectives as well as non-Western perspectives.There will never be any worldwide agreement about what the “correct” definition of intelligence is. (Indeed, there isn’t even complete agreement among Western scholars about the best definition of intelligence.) This is one of the weaknesses of verbal definitions of psychological concepts. Language is – by its nature – inexact; ambiguity and disagreement are inevitable.
Instead of asking whether “intelligence” means the same thing in different cultures, it is much more valuable to examine whether g exists in different cultures (Warne & Burningham, 2019). This is because g is derived statistically – not verbally – through factor analysis and therefore is largely independent of what any particular definition of what skills constitute intelligent behavior. Thus, whether intelligence is a cross-cultural concept is not reliant on similarities in verbal definitions, but rather on whether g exists in different cultures.
My student and I conducted the most rigorous test of whether g exists in non-Western cultures in a recent article (Warne & Burningham, 2019). We searched for archival cognitive test data from groups of examinees in non-Western, non-industrialized countries. We selected these countries because we thought that if g were an artifact of Western culture and philosophy, then these individuals would be the least likely to display g.
We found 97 analyzable datasets from 31 countries in every non-Western region of the world, including Latin America (e.g., Guatemala, Bolivia), Sub-Sahara Africa (e.g., Zambia, Ghana, Ethiopia), and Asia (e.g., Pakistan, Bangladesh, Cambodia). In total, there were 50,103 individuals in the dataset, ranging in age from 2 to the elderly. After identifying the datasets, we then performed exploratory factor analysis on all the datasets to determine whether g emerged from the data.
The results were striking. Of the 97 samples, 71 (73.2%) produced g unambiguously. The remaining 26 datasets produced more than one factor, but when these factors were factor analyzed, 23 of the datasets (88.5%) produced g. Of the remaining three datasets, one produced g under one method of exploratory factor analysis but not another, while it was not possible to do the second-stage factor analysis for two samples. Therefore, 94 of the 97 (96.9%) samples produced g either immediately or after a second factor analysis. Moreover, the g factor is about as strong in the non-Western samples as it is in typical Western samples. All of these findings show that g is not a culturally specific phenomenon confined to Western populations.
In fact, the results were more consistent than even Burningham and I had expected. Our original intention was to examine all the datasets that did not produce g and look for common characteristics that distinguished them from g-producing samples. But this kind of analysis was not possible with only three datasets that failed to produce g. This consistency is remarkable when one considers the diversity of samples in terms of age, education level, lifestyle, and degree of contact with Western cultures.
There was also remarkable diversity in the types of tasks that non-Western examinees performed in these datasets. While some of them resembled Western intelligence tests (often translated into examinees’ native language and/or adapted to their culture), some did not. Other datasets included data from scholastic tests, neurological tests, and even intelligence tests developed by non-Western scholars. Regardless of the collection of tasks administered to examinees, almost all of these datasets still produced g. Moreover, some of these datasets were collected without any intention of producing a g factor, and some of the original data collectors are opponents of theories of intelligence based on g. These people would have been best suited to create datasets that disproved the theory that g is real, and yet they could not (Warne & Burningham, 2019).
Another interesting fact that emerged from this study was how common Western (or Western-style) intelligence and cognitive tests are used in non-Western countries. Despite theorists arguing that Western theories and intelligence tests are too narrow (e.g., Ogbu, 1994; K. Richardson, 2002), non-Western psychologists have adopted these and use them frequently in their countries (though often in translated or culturally adapted versions). These indigenous psychologists rarely see the need to add tasks or subtests that measure the components of intelligence that are important to their culture but which are missing from Western theories. If Western definitions of intelligence are deficient and lack vital components of intelligence, few non-Western test creators and users seem to have noticed.
Skeptics could still argue that g is not synonymous with intelligence and that the presence of g across cultures does not mean that intelligence also exists across cultures. Again, this takes the discussion back to a verbal argument about the meaning of the word “intelligence.” As my co-author and I stated,
Whether “intelligence” exists across cultures or whether the term has the same meaning across cultures is unknowable and probably irrelevant. The term is culturally loaded and will often have a somewhat altered meaning when translated into other languages. However, the statistical abstraction of Spearman’s g is apparent across cultural groups in 31 non-Western, non-industrialized nations. (Warne & Burningham, 2019, p. 266)
There is good reason to explore cross-cultural definitions of the term “intelligence,” and what different human groups think about the skills and mental processes that they find important. But these cultural disagreements say little – if anything – about the nature of intelligence. Rather, what matters is whether g is present in non-Western groups. The research shows that it probably is.
If g is universal, the question then arises of why cultural differences do not seem to obliterate, mask, or change g. My theory is that g originated early in humans’ evolution and that it is a fundamental property of human brain functioning. This theory is supported by research that has shown that other species have a g factor, including dogs (Arden & Adams, 2016), rats and mice (B. Anderson, 1993; Galsworthy, Paya-Cano, Monleón, & Plomin, 2002; Matzel & Sauce, 2017), donkeys (Navas González, Jordana Vidal, León Jurado, McLean, & Delgado Bermejo, 2019), and non-human primates (Fernandes, Woodley, & te Nijenhuis, 2014; Herndon, Moss, Rosene, & Killiany, 1997; Hopkins, Russell, & Schaeffer, 2014; Matzel & Sauce, 2017). All of these are mammal species with a common evolutionary ancestor. It is possible that g originated in the early evolutionary history of mammals and that all of these modern descendent species have g as part of their psychology. If this theory is true, then it would indicate that g cannot be culturally specific because if g can persist across different mammal species, then it is unlikely that the comparatively subtle differences among humans would be sufficient to eliminate g in any group. Even if this evolutionary theory is wrong (which is possible), it does not change the fact that g appeared in over 95% of samples from 31 countries where it would be least likely to be present if g were a culturally specific concept.
If g is universal among humans, it would not mean, though, that one can take an intelligence test developed in a Western nation and give it to people from any culture. (Chapter 10 explains this matter further.) Regardless of who the examinees are, it is still necessary for tests to be culturally appropriate and understandable to test takers. When examinees – from any culture – take an intelligence test, there should be no vocabulary, stimuli, or tasks that are culturally alien. Otherwise, a psychologist is collecting meaningless and uninterpretable data because the manifestations of intelligence – the skills, knowledge, and abilities that are a product of g – may be culturally specific, even though all humans have intelligence. This variability in how intelligence appears across cultures is a product of the cultural environment, such as language, the values of the culture, child-rearing practices, the climate and physical environment, and other characteristics (Ogbu, 1994). Measuring intelligence requires culturally appropriate methods of getting people to demonstrate their abilities, and these tasks may vary greatly from group to group. But the different tasks can (and do) measure intelligence. Chapter 7 discusses this at length.
From Chapter 4 of "In the Know: Debunking 35 Myths About Human Intelligence" by Dr. Russell Warne (2020)
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