| View Larger Image | What Intelligence Tests Miss: The Psychology of Rational Thought | Hardcoverby Keith E. Stanovich (Author)
| List Price: | $30.00 | | Price: | $19.80 | | You Save: | $10.20 (34%) | | | Available: | Usually ships in 24 hours |
| | Binding: | Hardcover | | Publisher: | Yale University Press | | Edition: | 1st Edition | | Page Count: | 328 Pages | | Publication Date: | January 27, 2009 | | Sales Rank: | 110,409th |
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FEATURES | - ISBN13: 9780300123852
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EDITORIAL REVIEWS |
Product Description
Critics of intelligence tests—writers such as Robert Sternberg, Howard Gardner, and Daniel Goleman—have argued in recent years that these tests neglect important qualities such as emotion, empathy, and interpersonal skills. However, such critiques imply that though intelligence tests may miss certain key noncognitive areas, they encompass most of what is important in the cognitive domain. In this book, Keith E. Stanovich challenges this widely held assumption. Stanovich shows that IQ tests (or their proxies, such as the SAT) are radically incomplete as measures of cognitive functioning. They fail to assess traits that most people associate with “good thinking,” skills such as judgment and decision making. Such cognitive skills are crucial to real-world behavior, affecting the way we plan, evaluate critical evidence, judge risks and probabilities, and make effective decisions. IQ tests fail to assess these skills of rational thought, even though they are measurable cognitive processes. Rational thought is just as important as intelligence, Stanovich argues, and it should be valued as highly as the abilities currently measured on intelligence tests. (20080501) |
CUSTOMER REVIEWS (Average Customer Rating: 4.5 based on 6 reviews)
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A closer look at rationality by Coert Visser (Driebergen Netherlands)  5 Stars
October 16, 2009
The book is about the fact that IQ tests are incomplete measures of cognitive functioning. There is, as studies have show, in fact only a low to medium correlation between rational thinking skills and IQ test performance. And because rational thinking skills and IQ are largely independent it is not surprising that intelligent people can easily behave irrationally and hold false and unsupported beliefs. Several things are really interesting about this book. One is the authors insight that we do not need to stretch to non-cognitive domains (to notions as emotional intelligence or social intelligence) to see the lacunae in IQ tests. Another is the very specific and research based analysis of the topic matter. The author presents an elegant and rather comprehensive model of cognitive functioning in which three types of major thinking processes and their interrelations are described: the autonomous mind, the algorithmic mind and the reflective mind.
The autonomous mind refers to rapidly executed, non-consciousness requiring mental processes which are often quick and dirty. The algorithmic mind refers to conscious efficient information processing and is linked to what is usually referred to as fluid intelligence. The reflective mind is linked to rational thinking dispositions and deals with questions such as which goals to choose and why, and what action to take given those goals. Conscious thinking can override unconscious thinking, which is a good thing given the quick and dirtiness of the autonomous mind. The algorithmic mind is required for executing this override and thus very important. But the reflective mind is the process which initiates such an override. People with high IQ may be quite capable of overriding false beliefs and erroneous judgments but it takes the rationality of the reflective mind to initiate such an override.
Although many laymen and psychologists seem to think IQ tests do measure rationality, they actually don't. In fact, intelligence, as measure by IQ tests correlates only low to moderately with rational thinking skills. According to Stanovich, this explains why it is not strange to see intelligent people behave irrationally and hold false and unsupported beliefs. Some real world examples are: intelligent people who fall prey to Ponzi scheme swindlers like Bernie Madoff, a highly educated person who denies the evidence for evolution, a United States president who consults an astrologist, and so forth. Below, I will try to summarize how Stanovich explains rationality and lack of rationality.
What is rationality? Cognitive scientists distinguish two basic forms: 1) instrumental rationality, behaving in such a way that you achieve what you want, and 2) epistemic rationality, taking care that your beliefs correspond with the actual structure of the world. Irrational thinking and behaving is associated with three things.
The first is an overreliance on the autonomous mind which subconsciously and automatically uses all kinds of heuristic to come to conclusions and solve problems. The autonomous mind is fast and very valuable but also very imprecise. It is prone to all kinds ofbiases. Thinking deliberately instead of letting the autonomous mind make judgments cost much more time and energy which is why it is temping no resist.
The second thing which is associated with irrationality is what is called a mindware gap. The term `mindware ` refers to the rules, knowledge, procedures, and strategies that a person has available for making judgments, decisions and solving problems. Lack of such knowledge, etc hinders rationality.
The third thing which is associated with irrationality is something called contaminated mindware, beliefs, rules, strategies, etc that are not grounded in evidence and that are not good for the one who holds them (the host) but which can still spread easily throughout a population. There are several reasons why they can spread easily: 1) they are often packaged in an appealing narrative which promises some kind of benefit to the host, 2) they sometimes ride on the back of other popular mindware which may be more valid by copying superficial characteristics from that mindware, 3) they contain self-replicating instructions (`send this mail on to 10 different people'), 4) they may have evaluation-disabling properties (for instance by claiming that evidence is not relevant or possible, by making belief which is unsupported by evidence into a virtue, by encouraging adherents to attack non-believers, etc). You might think that intelligence would guarantee a good protection against contaminated mindware but this turns out to be wrong. By making narratives complex, highly intelligent people can even become extra attracted to them. Further, studies have demonstrated that intelligent people may be more capable of creating `islands of false beliefs' or 'webs of falsity' by using their considerable computational power to rationalize their beliefs and to ward off the arguments of skeptics.
The last part of the book is devoted to a first attempt by the author to a taxonomy of rationality. Also he makes a plea for shifting the focus in society from intelligence alone to a more balanced attention for intelligence and rationality. He makes it clear that, while discussions about the mutability of intelligence are still going on, there is no doubt at all that rationality is something which can be learned. Also he points at the possibility to design rationality tests and to have institutions take structural measures in order to limit the damaging effects of irrationality.
A very interesting book which deserves to be read by many psychologists and educators.
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Good background on how we think by Dr Cathy Goodwin (Seattle, WA USA)  4 Stars
August 14, 2009
Stanovich raises an important question. When we think of intelligence, we think of just the criteria measured by IQ tests or by other tests that are surrogates for IQ, such as GREs and LSATs. This view of mental skill is limited, he argues, with an amusing but apt illustration of former President George Bush.
As other reviewers pointed out, the second part of the book presents content that's widely available elsewhere. If you've been following recent books that illustrate fallacies in reasoning, much of this material will be familiar. However, it's delivered in a refreshing way that held my interest.
The term "mindware" (which Stanovich did not invent) doesn't capture the fact that illogical reasoning is due to gaps in education that can be fixed. Most high school and college students don't take statistical reasoning courses. Even when they study statistics, they're taught formulas and approaches more suited to research than to everyday life.
Stanovich doesn't go far enough in explaining the implications of irrationality, such as voting and jury duty. He suggests the OJ trial jurors had "contaminated mindware," but we have to remember they viewed a subset of testimony that was different from what viewers saw on television. These jurors mostly disbelieved some key witnesses. Additionally, they had been under extreme stress because they were sequestered during deliberations.
The influence of irrational thinking is pervasive, especially in the justice and health care systems - our most expensive and troubled sectors. Perhaps this book isn't the place to begin a campaign to teach people to think. But the book does show that this type of education is long overdue.
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Pretty good, but a bit formal by Irfan A. Alvi (Towson, MD USA) 4 Stars
May 13, 2009
The subject of "why smart people do dumb things" is becoming pretty hot, with a new book in this genre now seemingly coming out every other day. I think this is actually a healthy trend, since the insights from this literature are genuinely useful and represent perhaps the best that psychology and other human sciences have to offer. This torrent of books may eventually reach the point where separating the wheat from the chaff becomes a challenge, but of course we have these Amazon reviews to help us do that!
Within this crowd of books, I would say that Stanovich's book is among the better ones, and its distinction is that he focuses on the difference between intelligence (as measured by IQ tests) versus rationality ("adopting appropriate goals, taking appropriate action given one's goals and beliefs, and holding beliefs that are commensurate with available evidence"). Coming from Stanovich's cognitive science background, one could roughly say that intelligence is like having good hardware and rudimentary core software (and thus processing power and speed), whereas rationality is like having good application software (and thus ability to effectively perform real-world functions, even if having lesser processing power means that this happens more slowly).
Stanovich spends a lot of time elaborating on the difference between intelligence and rationality, why IQ tests don't measure rationality and in fact divert our attention away from rationality, the various ways in which our software ("mindware") falls short and causes us to act dysrationally (do "dumb things"), how we can become more rational, and why rationality is ultimately important for both individuals and society.
Stanovich covers all of this clearly enough, and I had no difficulty following his arguments and evidence and being convinced by them. But my one main issue with the book is that, while the book topic and content seem aimed at the general reader, the writing style is somewhat stiff and formal, making it seem like Stanovich also felt obligated to cater to the expectations of his academic colleagues. What I mean is that Stanovich tends to spend too much time explaining, justifying, and repeating rather obvious points, and also getting into details which are really only of academic interest, so reading the book can become tedious (the bibliography runs almost 60 pages, with nearly 1000 references which are mostly papers rather than books). Instead, I think the book could and should have been written with a simpler and breezier style, which would have made it just as convincing, but easier to understand and remember and go back to as a reference (not to mention selling way more copies).
Overall, I do think this is a worthy book which I can recommend, but it's best suited for readers who aren't deterred by a somewhat academic writing style.
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Why Intelligent People Behave Irrationally by Historied (UK and USA) 5 Stars
April 20, 2009
I urge you to read this book. I especially strongly encourage you if you have a relatively high measured IQ and are in a position of power. It might start to show you how to be able to exercise this power more effectively. Specifically, it would highlight to you many of the cognitive errors you are undoubtedly prone to, despite your IQ and past education. It might provide the start of a necessary re-education. I would hope that this book soon becomes part of the mandatory curriculum at West Point, Harvard Business School, Yale (see below), Oxford, Cambridge, Sorbonne and other places where intelligence ('smarts') and knowledge has sometimes been emphasised at the expense of rationality and intellectual curiosity.
The book continues to answer the question that has always intrigued me. Why do many of the high IQ fast processing 'smart' people that I have known, actually often have quite stupid beliefs (like astrology) or perform so poorly in their chosen jobs: 'the brightest and the best' that for example gave us the Vietnam War or collateralized debt obligations. Explanations of lack of emotional intelligence or moral failings have seemed partial to say the least. The virtue of Stanovich's book is that he locates a wonderful lode of explanation for this variance in the emerging research on rationality arising out of Kahnemann and Tversky's work on decision making. Indeed he uses a great topical example to get started: George Bush, who it appears probably has a higher than might be thought IQ of around 120 but lacks a whole array of qualities for rational thought: such as willingness to question and test his own beliefs, overconfidence, lack of intellectual curiosity etc. that go a long way to explain the disaster of his presidency. We should be very cautious about the idea that an Obama team of the brightest and best high IQ elite school folk is the answer. There needs to be major cognitive reform across the whole of government, business and military in line with Stanovich's prescription. The greatest danger to the incoming administration is not lack of IQ but lack of rationality as Stanovich so ably defines it.
So use this book to unfreeze your thinking about your own thinking abilities. Use it to develop a check list of the likely shortfalls you are subject to. Use it if you teach to re-shape what you teach. Use it to make better decisions in your personal, financial and business life. And I really mean use it: you will not overcome your natural mental short cuts that Stanovich so mercilessly dissects unless his approach becomes a conscious, overt, disciplined part of how you make the few key decisions each year that determine the future course of your life.
This book is an excellent data driven antidote what I see as the major shortcomings of Malcolm Gladwell's 'Blink' and other books that suggest we follow our gut.
My one worry about this book is how it will reach those it most needs to reach: the overconfident, highly intelligent, highly educated but deeply dysrational? I hope there is a paperback publisher wise enough to speed this book into the mass market and I think the titling should be reversed: what is most profound about this book is not what is missing from IQ tests but the fundamental project of cognitive reform around improved rationality and driving out dysrationalia from public life.
This book is by the way a perfect complement to Richard Nisbett's book Intelligence and How to Get It. Together they reshape the concept of intelligence: its heritability, its malleability and its limitations and the need to stretch far beyond it into true rationality
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How Can Smart People Do Dumb Things? (Dysrationalia?) by Kevin Currie-Knight (Newark, Delaware) 4 Stars
March 18, 2009
We are all familiar with the phenomenon of those who have high IQ's doing things that seem stupid. This leads to the distinction between "book smarts" and "street smarts," but strangely enough, we call BOTH of these things intelligence. We recognize both the absent-minded professor and the low IQed entrepreneur as "intelligent." How, though, can the term "intelligence" apply to two seemingly non-correlated things (being book-smart and street-smart)?
Psychologist Keith Stanovich has an interesting idea: maybe "intelligence tests" measure intelligence (as traditionally defined) but not a wholly different faculty of rationality. To Stanovich, the difference between intelligence and rationality is the difference between the "algorithmic mind" and the "reflective mind," or, the difference between the ability to employ algorithms and the ability to think about and CRITICALLY employ algorithms. (I might say that intelligence may be the ability to map or write a sentence and rationality is the ability to formulate arguments and write a persuasive essay.)
The first half of Stanovich's book is dedicated to showing that while IQ tests are a valid measure of a faculty of general intelligence (he does not deny that IQ tests measure a very real thing), it simply does not measure all that we understand to be good thinking.
Stanovich, though, is also a critic of those like Gardner and Sternberg who want to add to the number of "intelligences" (musical intelligence, naturalistic intelligence, creative intelligence). These things, he says, inadvertently beatify the term "intelligence" to be a be-all-end-all that it is not (by implying that any good mental work must be called an "intelligence" rather than a "talent," "skill" or "proclivity.") Instead, Stanovich makes the point that intelligence is simply one component of good thinking. The other, often overlooked, ingredient is rationality (and he alludes to several studies which show these two faculties are not very positively correlated. One can have high amounts of one and low amounts of the other.)
What I thought and hoped Stanovich would do next - what he did not do - is offer a sense of how we can test for RQ (rationality quotient). While the first half makes the case very well that rationality should be valued and tested every bit as much as intelligence, he does not follow it up by showing how such a thing might be done.
Instead, Stanovich devotes the second half of this book largely to cataloguing and demonstrating "thinking errors" that distinguish rational from irrational thought. For example, humans are "cognitive misers" by nature, who like to make decisions based often on first judgments and quick (rather than thorough) analysis (a likely evolutionary strategy, as ancestors that were quick and somewhat accurate probably did better than those who were slow and very accurate). Also, humans often put more emphasis on verification than falsification, and fail to consider alternative hypotheses in problems, preferring often to go with the most obvious answer.
All of these, while interesting, have been better and more thoroughly documented in other books by decision theorists and psychologists. All Stanovich needed to do was refer us to these, at most, devoting a chapter or two to examples. There is more important work for Stanovich to do then rehash what we can just as soon read elsewhere. Instead, I think he sh old have begun outlining ideas on how to test for rationality. What would such tests look like? How would such tests affect our educational system (focused, as it is, on IQ)? What would test questions even look like and how can they be adjusted for by age/grade level? Are there pitfalls?
None of these questions were answered, and Stanovich's argument is the worse for it. Stanovich himself notes that one big reason for IQ's predominance in the psychometric world is that it is measurable (which is a big strike against many of Gardner's "multiple intelligences"). Ironically, Stanovich's failure to suggest ways to measure RQ will likely have the same effect for his idea as it had for Gardner's.
It is a shame, though. As an educator concerned both with the undeserved predominance of IQ and also the failure of concepts such as Gardner's "multiple intelligence" to offer a serious challenge, I quite like Stanovich's germinal idea. As we all know that rationality is a key component to good thinking, and it is hard to think that it is positively correlated to IQ, it would be interesting to find a way to measure RQ as a valid supplement to IQ. It is simply too bad this book did not explore the practical questions involved with his tantalizing suggestion.
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