Situational judgment test research: Informing the debate on practical intelligence theory

[Gottfredson, L.S. (2003). Dissecting practical intelligence theory: Its claims and evidence. Intelligence, 31, 343-397.] provided a detailed critique of Sternberg's [Sternberg, R.J., Fotsythe, G.B., Hedlund, J., Horvath, J.A., Wagner, R.K., Williams, W.M., Snook, S.A., Grigorenko, E.L. (2000). Practical intelligence in everyday life. New York: Cambridge University Press.] practical intelligence theory. The current paper seeks to supplement Gottfredson's extensive critique using research and practice in the situational judgment literature in industrial/organizational psychology to inform the debate concerning practical intelligence. This paper makes four major points. First, there is a research and practice tradition in personnel selection that has used the item type that Sternberg uses to assess what he calls tacit knowledge. This item type is called situational judgment in the personnel selection field. There is an extensive literature on situational judgment tests that can inform debate concerning practical intelligence. Second, we present evidence that situational judgment tests do not measure a general factor, whether labeled practical intelligence, or something else. Both the individual test items and the tests are factorially complex and measure multiple known constructs. Third, since the measures assess multiple constructs (g and personality), they are best viewed as measurement methods. Fourth, we compare the validity of the measures with g for the prediction of job performance and examine the incremental validity of situational judgment tests. We conclude that this research can help guide a revision to practical intelligence theory.