By Coert Visser
Dr. Keith Stanovich, Professor of Human Development and Applied Psychology of the University of Toronto, is a leading expert on the psychology of reading and on rationality. His latest book, What Intelligence Tests Miss: The Psychology of Rational Thought, shows that IQ tests are very incomplete measures of cognitive functioning. These tests fail to assess rational thinking styles and skills which are nevertheless crucial to real-world behavior. In this interview with Keith Stanovich he explains the difference between IQ and rationality and why rationality is so important. Also he shares his views on how rationality can be enhanced.In your book, you say that IQ tests are incomplete measures of cognitive functioning. Could you explain that?
I start out my book by noting the irony that in 2002, cognitive scientist Daniel Kahneman of Princeton University won the Nobel Prize in Economics for work on how humans make choices and assess probabilities—in short, for work on human rationality. Being rational means adopting appropriate goals, taking the appropriate action given one’s goals and beliefs, and holding beliefs that are commensurate with available evidence—it means achieving one’s life goals using the best means possible. To violate the thinking rules examined by Kahneman and Tversky thus has the practical consequence that we are less satisfied with our lives than we might be. Research conducted in my own laboratory has indicated that there are systematic individual differences in the judgment and decision making skills studied by Kahneman and Tversky.
It is a profound historical irony of the behavioral sciences that the Nobel Prize was awarded for studies of cognitive characteristics that are entirely missing from the most well-known mental assessment device in the behavioral sciences—the intelligence test, and its many proxies, such as the SAT. It is ironic because most laypeople are prone to think that IQ tests are tests of, to put it colloquially, good thinking. Scientists and laypeople alike would tend to agree that “good thinking” encompasses good judgment and decision making—the type of thinking that helps us achieve our goals. In fact, the type of “good thinking” that Kahneman and Tversky studied was deemed so important that research on it was awarded the Nobel Prize. Yet assessments of such good thinking—rational thinking—are nowhere to be found on IQ tests. Intelligence tests measure important things, but not these—they do not assess the extent of rational thought. This might not be such an omission if it were the case that intelligence was a strong predictor of rational thinking. However, my research group has found just the opposite—that it is a mild predictor at best and that some rational thinking skills are totally dissociated from intelligence.
Read more
Read more
Tags: book, Dan Gilbert, Daniel Dennett, Daniel Kahneman, David Perkins, Intelligence, Jonathan Baron, Keith Stanovich, Malcolm-Gladwell, rationality, What Intelligence Tests Miss
