This year (2018) Robert Sternberg is slated to give a distinguished contributor interview at the ISIR meeting to be held in Edinburgh. There’s already tons of material on his behavior:
- Extreme self-citations: https://replicationindex.wordpress.com/2018/04/22/robert-sternbergs-rise-to-fame/
- Extreme text recycling (self-plagiarism): http://steamtraen.blogspot.fr/2018/04/some-instances-of-apparent-duplicate.html
- Editorial role abuse: https://www.insidehighered.com/news/2018/04/30/prominent-psychologist-resigns-journal-editor-over-allegations-over-self-citation
- and more
However, here I want to point out an additional angle. Sternberg is slated to give an interview at a conference he has hardly contributed to. I’ve been to ISIR since 2015 (i.e., 2015, 2016, 2017) and Sternberg wasn’t present at any of them. Maybe he used to be more active? I downloaded every conference program from the ISIR website. The first ISIR was in 2000, so we have data for 18 years. I searched every program for his contributions. I found:
- 2002-2007 he is on the advisory committee
- 2002 he gives an invited talk (1 hour), with title Converging operations in the construct validation of the theory of successful intelligence. i.e. his favorite topic (aside from himself)
- 2001 he gives a regular talk with the title Larger-Scale Empirical Tests of Aspects of the Theory of Successful Intelligence
- nothing else
I do want to note that a number of talks given over the years were highly critical of his model: Afonso 2008, Long and Thompson 2006, McDaniel and Whetzel 2003 (titled The Emperor’s New Clothes), Gottfredson 2001.
So, why was he invited to this conference if he doesn’t have much of a history of contributing to it?