ABSTRACT
For more than a century now, psychologists have explored the avenues linking human intelligence to a wide array of personality and conative constructs in an effort to develop comprehensive and scientifically tenable models of human behavior. Thus, researchers have longed to unravel the theoretical and practical interface between personality, motivation, and intelligence, hoping to shed light on how these constructs impact one another (and other variables) in the course of development, day-to-day behavior, and adaptive functioning. By and large, however, the tendency has been to examine the many variables described within each of these broad and sweeping areas more or less separately. Thus, intelligence theory has largely been aimed at assessing a person’s ability to process information, to solve problems and cognitive tasks, and to determine one’s cognitive potential to optimally adapt to the environment, whereas personality and motivational theory have been largely aimed at developing a comprehensive description of the person’s traits, affective reactions, desires, goals, action tendencies, and the like. The distinction between cognitive and conative facets of personality, is, of course, artificial and a convenient means of dividing the scientific problems of psychology into simpler, more manageable chunks. Despite admonitions to the contrary, in much of the earlier work, the message received by subsequent generations of psychological scientists seems to be that the person, as well as the researcher, can be similarly divided (Snow, 1980). However, it is now readily apparent that any theoretical account of adaptive behavior in the real world requires a synthesis of cognitive, affective, and conative facets—what Hilgard (1980) aptly called the “trilogy of the mind.”
