Feb 11, 2013
Professor to put rational thinking to the test
Dr. Richard West, professor emeritus of graduate psychology, and his research partner, Dr. Keith Stanovich, have spent more than 15 years studying rationality and how people, even very bright people, sometimes make poor decisions.
Pop quiz:
A bat and a ball cost $1.10. The
bat costs $1 more than the ball. How much does the ball cost?
Many people will answer quickly and confidently: 10 cents. But
that’s wrong. If the ball costs 10 cents, the bat would then have to cost $1.10,
for total of $1.20. The correct answer is 5 cents (and $1.05 for the bat).
Question 2:
In a lake, there is a patch of lily
pads. Every day, the patch doubles in size. If it takes 48 days for the patch
to cover the entire lake, how long would it take for the patch to cover half of
it?
Twenty-four days, you say? Nope. The correct answer is 47
days. (On the 48th day, the patch would double in size to cover all of the
lake.)
If you missed both questions, don’t feel bad. The vast
majority of us, it turns out, are cognitive misers, employing mental shortcuts
that sometimes lead to incorrect conclusions or even foolish decisions. Rather
than carefully evaluating the information presented, we skip to the solution that
requires the least mental effort.
“For most of us, really hard thinking is something we like
to avoid as much as possible. And yet a lot of rational thinking profits from
this type of information processing,” says Dr. Richard F. West, professor
emeritus of graduate psychology at James Madison University.
West and his longtime research partner, Dr. Keith E.
Stanovich, recently received a $1 million grant to develop an assessment of
rational thinking. The funding from the John
Templeton Foundation runs through 2015.
“We’ve been working toward a test of rational thinking for
over 15 years now, but it has been a piecemeal effort and something we have had
to juggle along with other projects in research and teaching and consulting
activities,” said Stanovich, a professor at the University of Toronto. “We have
already collected an enormous amount of data relevant to the project, but much
of this data has been lying unanalyzed. Now we will have time to go back and
work and look into data sets that we have been collecting for about a decade now.”
West and Stanovich’s career-defining collaboration began as
idle conversation between fellow graduate students at the University of
Michigan.
“We were making some important contributions at the time to
the field of reading,” West recalls, “but we found we were spending more and
more of our free time engaging in this sort of nerdy gossip, which centered
around questions of rationality and how people, even very bright people, would
sometimes make poor decisions.”
Human cognition is characterized by two types of processing.
Type 1, whether innate or acquired through extensive practice, is autonomous —
looking both ways before crossing the street, for example — and can be executed
at the same time as other higher levels of processing. Type 2 requires
conscious mental effort. Although either type of processing may underlie
decisions that are rational, many of the most important individual differences
in rational thinking involve problems with Type 2 processing.
Traditional philosophy equates rational thinking with logic,
but most cognitive scientists consider rational thinking in terms of how well
our beliefs map onto the real world and whether our decisions help us fulfill
our goals — in essence, “what is true” and “what to do,” respectively. “If you
think in a way that brings you closer to a true understanding of the world and
helps you get what you want, that’s rational,” West says.
We are all compelled to engage in rational thinking every
day, whether deciding which foods to eat, where to invest our money or how to
deal with a difficult client.
Yet humans are often highly susceptible to cognitive
illusions and thinking biases that can hinder good judgment and
decision-making, West says. These biases have been linked to everything from
Ponzi schemes to medical error.
In addition to being cognitive misers, many people simply
lack the knowledge and strategies needed to think rationally in certain
situations — what psychologists have termed “mindware gaps.” Others, when choosing
between two similar options, tend to rely on the personal testimony of an
individual or small group over a larger sample that may include extensive
research and expert opinion. Still others allow their emotions or prior
knowledge of a subject to cloud their judgment.
We may assume that intelligence and rationality go hand in
hand. But even smart people do foolish things. According to Stanovich, author
of the 2009 book “What Intelligence Tests Miss,” IQ tests are very good at
measuring certain mental faculties, but they often fall short in their assessment
of an individual’s ability to think rationally or override cognitive biases. In
fact, numerous studies by West and Stanovich have shown that so-called
intelligent people may be no less susceptible to many of these pitfalls than
those with lower IQs.
West believes that humans need to be good rational thinkers
to be able to navigate an increasingly complex world. Granted, our culture has
developed tools, such as statistics and probability, to help govern
decision-making. But most people are not natural statisticians, he says.
And that’s where a rational thinking test like the one West
and Stanovich are working on can help.
“If you’re going to train people to become more rational
thinkers, you’re going to need ways to assess whether your efforts are
successful,” West says. “Our hope is to point these things out to people and
help them make better decisions.”
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By James Heffernan ('96), JMU Public Affairs
Feb. 11, 2013
