Multiple intelligences theory is Howard Gardner's proposal, first set out in his 1983 book Frames of Mind, that people have several relatively independent intelligences rather than one general ability. He named seven and later added an eighth: linguistic, logical-mathematical, spatial, musical, bodily-kinesthetic, interpersonal, intrapersonal and naturalist. The theory has been enormously influential in education. When researchers have tried to measure the intelligences, though, most turn out to overlap substantially with general intelligence, and the theory has little psychometric support.
Both halves of that answer deserve a fair hearing. Gardner was asking a serious question, and the reasons his theory caught on are worth understanding alongside the reasons most intelligence researchers don't accept it.
Gardner's 8 intelligences
| Intelligence | Gardner's description, in brief | Example |
|---|---|---|
| Linguistic | Sensitivity to the meaning, sound and order of words | A poet, a lawyer, a journalist |
| Logical-mathematical | Reasoning with abstract relations, numbers and logical chains | A mathematician or programmer |
| Spatial | Perceiving and mentally transforming the visual world | A sailor navigating, an architect |
| Musical | Sensitivity to pitch, rhythm and timbre; musical composition | A composer or performer |
| Bodily-kinesthetic | Skilled control of body movement and handling of objects | A dancer, athlete or surgeon |
| Interpersonal | Understanding other people's moods, motives and intentions | A teacher, therapist or salesperson |
| Intrapersonal | Understanding your own feelings and using that to guide behavior | Someone with accurate self-knowledge |
| Naturalist | Recognizing and classifying plants, animals and other features of the environment | A field biologist |
The naturalist intelligence was added in Intelligence Reframed (1999). In the same book Gardner considered an existential intelligence, concerned with big questions of life and death, but did not fully add it to the list.
How Gardner decided what counts as an intelligence
Gardner did not derive his list from test scores. He set out criteria drawn from several fields and asked which candidate abilities met most of them. They included:
- The ability can be selectively spared or impaired by brain damage.
- There are prodigies or savants with exceptional ability in that area alone.
- It has an identifiable set of core operations, and a distinct developmental path toward expert performance.
- It has a plausible evolutionary history.
- It can be encoded in a symbol system, such as language, musical notation or mathematics.
- It has support from experimental psychology and from psychometric findings.
This was a deliberate break from the psychometric tradition, which starts from correlations among test scores. Gardner argued that tradition had defined intelligence too narrowly, around the abilities schools reward, and that an engineer, a jazz musician and a skilled nurse each show a kind of intelligence a paper test misses.
Why the theory caught on in schools
Teachers saw something familiar in it. Every classroom has students who struggle with reading and arithmetic yet are clearly capable in other ways, and the theory offered a vocabulary for that. It encouraged teaching topics through several entry points (a story, a diagram, a hands-on project), broadening what schools value, and treating students as having profiles of strengths rather than a single rank. Many educators credit it with making classrooms more varied and more humane, and Gardner's group at Harvard's Project Zero worked on applications for decades.
Those practical benefits don't depend on whether the eight intelligences are separate abilities in the scientific sense. Good teaching often uses varied presentations because varied, well-chosen examples help everyone learn. That distinction matters for the evidence below.
What psychometric testing found
The central scientific claim of the theory is that the intelligences are relatively independent of one another. That makes a clear prediction: tests of linguistic, spatial or logical-mathematical intelligence should not correlate strongly with each other or with a general intelligence factor.
The best-known direct test is Visser, Ashton and Vernon (2006). They gave about 200 adults two tests for each of Gardner's eight intelligences, plus a measure of general ability. The tests for the more purely cognitive intelligences (linguistic, logical-mathematical, spatial, naturalist and interpersonal) correlated substantially with one another and loaded strongly on the general factor. Tests of bodily-kinesthetic, musical and intrapersonal intelligence were less related to g, which the authors interpreted as reflecting sensory, motor and personality factors rather than evidence of separate intelligences.
That pattern fits a century of intelligence research: virtually every test of mental ability correlates positively with every other, a finding known as the positive manifold. It is the basis of the g factor and of the hierarchical models now used by most IQ tests, which do recognize distinct broad abilities, but as correlated parts of one system rather than independent intelligences. Our article on types of intelligence describes that model.
Other critiques go further. In a review in Educational Psychologist, Lynn Waterhouse (2006) argued that the theory lacked validating empirical studies and that neuroscience evidence did not show separate brain systems matching the eight intelligences. Gardner and Moran (2006) published a reply in the same issue defending the theory's empirical basis. Researchers also note a practical problem: Gardner has not produced standardized tests for the intelligences, which makes the theory hard to falsify.
Where Gardner and mainstream research agree
The gap between the two camps is narrower than it is sometimes made to sound. Modern hierarchical models of intelligence also recognize several distinct broad abilities, and some line up loosely with Gardner's list: visual-spatial processing resembles his spatial intelligence, comprehension-knowledge overlaps with linguistic intelligence, fluid and quantitative reasoning cover much of logical-mathematical intelligence, and auditory processing touches parts of musical ability. Both views agree that a single number leaves out real differences in people's profiles.
Where they part ways is on independence. In the psychometric picture, these abilities are correlated parts of one system, with a general factor that accounts for much of what they share. In Gardner's, they are separate faculties. The data so far favor the first view for the abilities that can be tested with pencil-and-paper or computer tasks.
Talents versus intelligences
Much of the disagreement comes down to labels. Few psychologists doubt that musical skill, athletic coordination, or social perceptiveness are real, valuable, and partly independent of IQ. The question is whether calling them "intelligences" adds explanation or simply relabels talents and skills.
Critics argue the relabeling has costs. If everything valuable is an intelligence, the word stops picking out anything specific, and it becomes harder to talk honestly about the reasoning abilities that predict school and job performance. Supporters reply that the word "intelligence" carries prestige, and that reserving it for academic reasoning undervalues other kinds of excellence. Both points have merit. The empirical findings, though, favor the correlated-abilities picture for the cognitive intelligences.
Multiple intelligences are not learning styles
A common classroom version of the theory says each student has a dominant intelligence and learns best when taught through it: a "musical learner" should get songs, a "kinesthetic learner" should move. That is the learning-styles hypothesis, and it is a separate idea.
The evidence on learning styles is clear. Pashler, McDaniel, Rohrer and Bjork (2008) reviewed the research and found almost no studies with the design needed to test the idea properly, and the few that existed did not support it. Matching instruction to a student's preferred style does not reliably improve learning. What does matter is matching the method to the content: you learn geography with maps and pronunciation by listening, whatever your preference.
Gardner himself has rejected the conflation. In public writing, including a widely shared 2013 essay, he stated that multiple intelligences and learning styles are different concepts and that the evidence for learning styles is weak. Treating them as the same thing has arguably done more damage to the theory's reputation than any factor analysis.
How to use the theory today
- As a reminder that people differ in valuable ways that IQ tests don't cover, it is useful and widely accepted.
- As a reason to teach through varied, well-chosen representations, it is consistent with good teaching practice.
- As a claim that the eight intelligences are independent abilities, it is not supported by psychometric evidence.
- As a basis for labeling students by "type" and tailoring lessons to that label, it is not supported and can narrow a child's learning.
The same caution applies to online "multiple intelligences tests." They are self-report questionnaires about interests and preferences, not measures of ability, and their results are best read as a description of what you enjoy. For an evidence-based view of how emotional and social abilities relate to IQ, see IQ vs EQ; for what conventional IQ tests do and don't capture, see what IQ is.