17 Early days Sternberg was born in Newark, N.J., and grew up in the suburb of Maplewood. His father had dropped out of high school during the Depression and owned a button store to support his family. His mother had immigrated to the United States from Austria in 1938. Sternberg performed poorly on IQ tests when he was young, and his teachers didn’t expect much out of him as a result. That changed when his fourth-grade teacher saw his potential and challenged him. His grades improved, but his frustrations with how the education system measures intelligence continued. With an amused expression on his face today, he describes the field as sometimes dominated by people who always performed very well on those tests. “So, those tests were kind of a self-congratulatory sort of thing,” Sternberg adds with a wry smile. Over time, he blossomed into someone who couldn’t help but question the status quo. As a seventh-grader, he came up with his own intelligence test after finding a popular intelligence test in his school library, the StanfordBinet scales, an early such exam credited with establishing the field of intelligence testing. The exam he came up with would later become the Sternberg Test of Mental Abilities. But it was the Stanford-Binet that he gave to some of his fellow students as part of a science project he devised — all before his 15th birthday. In one case, he hoped to get a girlfriend by giving her the test — and learned that doing so wasn’t a way to appeal to females. He is quick to note he has never given his beloved wife, Karin, an intelligence test. Mentors’ help At Yale, Sternberg met the man who became his mentor, Endel Tulving. Tulving is one of science’s leading thinkers in the field of memory and a noted contrarian who nurtured Sternberg’s drive to question authority. It was just the help Sternberg needed to enter psychology after receiving a C in the introductory psychology course. “It’s the interaction of who you are with the environment. Someone else might have studied under him, and it wouldn’t have taken. But for me, it really took.” He graduated summa cum laude and went to graduate school at Stanford University, where he studied under another mentor, Gordon Bower. Ever since, Sternberg, a former president of the American Psychological Association and current president of the Federation of Associations in Behavioral and Brain Sciences as well as treasurer of the Association of American Colleges and Universities, has been on the “academic fringes,” studying unpopular things or the things he finds the most challenging to understand. Among his contributions to psychology are several influential theories in thinking, ethical reasoning, love, hate, leadership, thinking styles and creativity, as well as his theory of successful intelligence, which states that intelligent behavior comes from analytical, creative, practical and wisdom-based abilities. He was listed by the American Psychological Association’s Monitor as one of the 100 most influential psychologists of the 20th century. At OSU, he has emphasized that being smart in school does not necessarily mean that someone will be smart in life, and vice versa. Academic and practical intelligence are only weakly correlated. What is most important in life is wisdom and ethical behavior — making the world a better place by making a positive, meaningful and enduring difference to it. Personal style The new Regents professor brings his enthusiasm into his classroom, with a teaching style he calls very personal. He brings material from his job as provost to his leadership class, letting students in on the bigger decisions he made that week and asking what they would have done. He also brings in speakers who discuss their experiences as leaders and how they developed from Oklahoma State undergraduates into important leaders in society. One message Sternberg is quick to drive home is the importance of failure. Often times, someone who has a great deal of success in life has had equally momentous failures. At the OSU graduate commencement last May, he was the keynote speaker and he spoke frankly about many of his failures. It’s a message he drives home to his students in any way he can. A major key to success is resilience in the face of multiple failures. “You have to learn how to take failures and rise above them,” he says. “When you’re young, you don’t see it that way. When you’re young, you sort of plot out a course that you think will help you always succeed; you’re going to be the guy with the lucky charm. I think that’s just really the important thing in life. I feel like I’ve had some bad breaks. And I have had some great breaks. I have wonderful, beautiful children. A fantastic wife. A terrific job. I live in a great house on beautiful land. I live in a wonderful community. But it hasn’t always been that way. You just keep working until you get to where you want to go.” Sternberg lives just outside of Stillwater with his wife, Karin, who has an MBA as well as a doctorate in psychology from the University of Heidelberg, Germany. In addition to their triplets, he has two grown children from a previous marriage — one the CEO of a dot-com business who recently sold it to Google and went to work there, and the other, a doctoral student in sociology at Harvard University. Sternberg enjoys hiking with his family, exercising, reading and collecting coins and watches.
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