The following interview was
conducted with Dr. Keith Stanovich. Dr.
Stanovich is the author of What Intelligence Tests Miss: the psychology of
rational thought, the recipient of many prestigious awards, and recognized
as one of the most important cognitive scientists ever. Visit Dr. Stanovich’s site at http://www.keithstanovich.com/Site/Home.html
Congratulations on the three-year grant that you and a
Richard West received from the John Templeton Foundation to develop a
comprehensive test of rational thinking.
Do you think the test will be completed in three years? Will we see it being put to use in three
years?
Thanks very much. We were very
happy and flattered to receive the grant. We are fairly certain that we will
have completed a prototype of a comprehensive test that could be used in
scientific work by the end of the three-year grant. There of course will still be substantial work to do after that
to make it useful in applied settings such as education, business, and
industry. For example, subsequent to us producing the research prototype, there
will be much more standardization work to be done to make it useful in applied
settings. However, I think that it is
totally realistic to think that we will have a comprehensive instrument ready
for scientific use in just two and a half years–we are about six months into
the grant now.
Your work shows that individuals can rate high in
intelligence, and at the same time, rate low in rationality. Is it likely that an individual will rate
low in intelligence but high in rationality?
Yes, that is a very good question.
It is important to realize that those two outlier states will not occur with
equal frequency. By outlier states I
mean people who are low in rationality and high in intelligence, and then also
the converse state, people who are high in rationality and low in
intelligence. The former will be much
more frequent than the latter. For many
types of rational thinking subcomponents intelligence is necessary but not
sufficient. Also, with respect to many
different rational thinking components, there are at least mild to moderate
correlations with intelligence. Only on
a few rational thinking components–myside bias for example–is it the case
that the rational thinking component is totally disassociated from
intelligence. On those few tasks there
will indeed be as many individuals high in rationality and low in intelligence
as there are low in rationality and high in intelligence. But that will be the minority of cases.
Another way to put it is to say
that we already know from the past research that led up to the grant that there
is a profile of associations between intelligence and rational thinking
subcomponents that is quite varied. A
few rational thinking tasks such as belief bias in syllogistic reasoning are
quite highly correlated with intelligence.
Most rational thinking skills are modestly correlated with intelligence. The use of base rates in probabilistic
reasoning would be an example. And
finally there are those like myside bias that are quite dissociated. Those differing profiles will lead to
somewhat different outlier groups.
Rational thinking is quite multifarious, much more so than intelligence,
so any given statement about individual differences may vary quite a bit across
the subcomponents. The answer to your
question here will probably vary quite a bit across the different
subcomponents.
In your excellent book What Intelligence Tests Miss: the
psychology of rational thought you point out the irrational thinking habits of
George Bush. Why did you choose George
Bush as the example? Have you received
any negative comments concerning the discussion of Bush's irrational thinking
tendencies?
I chose Bush because he was such a
surprising example dysrationalia: the
failure to think rationally despite adequate intelligence. He was a surprising
example because most people would not grant his intelligence. But as I point
out in the book, this is because they are confused about what intelligence
is. And that is equally true of his
supporters and his detractors.
Bush’s detractors described him as
taking disastrously irrational actions, and they seemed to believe that the
type of poor thinking that led to those disastrous actions would be picked up
by the standard tests of intelligence.
Otherwise, they would not have been surprised when his scores were high
rather than low. Thus, the Bush detractors
must have assumed that a mental quality (rational thinking tendencies) could be
detected by the tests that in fact the tests do not detect at all.
In contrast, Bush’s supporters like
his actions but admit that he has “street smarts,” or common sense, rather than
“school smarts.” Assuming his “school
smarts” to be low, and further assuming that IQ tests pick up only “school
smarts,” his supporters were likewise surprised by the high pro-rated IQ scores
that were indicated. Thus, his
supporters missed the fact that Bush would excel on something that was assessed
by the tests. The supporters assumed
the tests measured only “school smarts” in the trivial pursuit sense (“who
wrote Hamlet?”) that is easily mocked and dismissed as having nothing to do
with “real life.” That the tests would actually measure a quality that cast
Bush in a favorable light was something his supporters never anticipated.
In the talks that I give on these topics, when I use the
Bush example I tried to head off questions and negative comments by pointing
out that there is an absolute consensus that there was something wrong with his
thinking style and that this fact is not in dispute–that even his supporters
acknowledge this fact. For example, in
a generally positive portrait of the President, David Frum nonetheless notes,
“he is impatient and quick to anger; sometimes glib, even dogmatic; often
uncurious and as a result ill-informed”.
Conservative commentator George Will agrees, when he states that in
making Supreme Court appointments, the President “has neither the inclination
nor the ability to make sophisticated judgments about competing approaches to
construing the Constitution” (p. 23, 2005).
In short, there is considerable agreement that President Bush’s thinking
has several problematic aspects: lack of intellectual engagement, cognitive
inflexibility, need for closure, belief perseverance, confirmation bias,
overconfidence, and insensitivity to inconsistency.
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