How many gifted people are there?
Just how likely is it that you will run into someone today that is gifted? I mean, we’d certainly know it if we did, right? But, on average, the people I run into in the store, at church, walking on the beach, look… well… average. So, what’s the deal with this gifted thing? How many of “those” people are there?
The short answer is:
Gifted in what?
No, really. Gifted is, in a technical sense, a statistical determination. It is used to refer to the top scoring 2.275% of people at a particular task, the area shaded blue in the graph above. * That’s two standard deviations above the mean, for those of you taking notes. It works out to about 1 in 45 people.
Traditionally, the particular task in question is that of taking an IQ test.
What is IQ? Whatever an IQ test measures, which seems to be language skill, to a large degree, but also things like problem solving, abstract reasoning, spatial reasoning, short term memory, and concentration.
But, I’m pretty sure we’re comfortable using the term gifted also to refer to athletes and artists, people that are outstanding at performing and creating. IQ tests are very valuable tools, but they don’t measure everything.
In the early 80′s Howard Gardner proposed multiple areas in which we should be willing to consider people as gifted. Here are the 8 areas, or ‘intelligences’ that he identified:
- Bodily-kinesthetic
- Interpersonal
- Verbal-linguistic
- Logical-mathematical
- Naturalistic
- Intrapersonal
- Visual-spatial
- Musical
Now, remember the 1 in 45 figure I gave you? Based on a world population of about 6.7 billion, 1 in 45 is about 151 million gifted people. That’s about half the population of the United States. Of course, they are certainly NOT all in the United States.
But, here’s what I think is the interesting part of the equation. Someone who is gifted need not be gifted in all or even more than one of the intelligences mentioned above. Let’s say, for the sake of an interesting argument that all of Gardner’s areas are mutually exclusive; that you can only be gifted at one and one only. I seriously doubt that to be true, but certainly, not every ”gifted” person excels in ALL of them.
That would mean that the 151 million number could really be as high as 8 x 151 million, or 1.2 billion gifted people.
That starts to sound a lot like one in six!
Wow! There are 6 people in my family, so one of us is guaranteed to be gifted! No, it wouldn’t really work that way.
I don’t know if it’s really as high as 1 in 6, but I strongly suspect that it’s greater than 1 in 45. And, this is still while respecting the statistically rare occurrence of giftedness in any particular area.
So, what?
Well, in the very least, it means it might be worth your time to read articles like “What is it like to be gifted?” It means that one or more of those people you saw today that looked so average very well may be gifted in some way. It never hurts to understand those around you better. The person you could understand better may end up being yourself.
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*FYI: This corresponds to an IQ score of 130 and above. Recently, though, some researchers in the paper referenced below, suggest that lowering the limit to 123 might be a better way to identify gifted students.
Falk, R.F., Silverman, L.K., & Moran, D. (2004). Using two WISC-IV indices to identify the gifted. Paper presented at the 51st Annual Convention of the National Association for Gifted Children, Salt Lake City, UT
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