What Intelligence Tests Miss

What Intelligence Tests Miss: The Psychology of Rational Thought by Keith E. Stanovich, Yale University Press, 2009. 

Intelligence and Rationality are Not the Same Thing

This is a book about cognitive psychology. Its main points are that: (a) Good thinking requires more than intelligence; it also requires rationality, (b) Intelligence tests do not measure rationality, they measure only intelligence, (c) There is a poor correlation between intelligence and rationality, (d) There is currently no test for rationality, (e) Rationality is a purely cognitive skill and is distinct from emotional intelligence and social intelligence. 

Tripartite

The author describes a tripartite framework of the mind: autonomous mind plus algorithmic mind plus reflective mind.

Autonomous Mind

The autonomous mind is unconscious. There is little difference between individuals in the autonomous mind. The autonomous mind includes: (a) facial recognition, (b) kin recognition (import for inbreeding avoidance), (c) gaze direction detection, (d) reading the intentions of others, (e) depth perception, (f) proprioception, (g) language ambiguity resolution, (h) syntactic processing. 

Algorithmic Mind

The algorithmic mind contains intelligence as measured by intelligence tests. The author argues that it is best to restrict the use of the word intelligence to intelligence as measured by intelligence tests, and then to use the word rationality for the other cognitive skills. Historically, a distinction has long been made between fluid intelligence and crystallized intelligence. Fluid intelligence is cognitive decoupling from ones current surrounding plus the size of working memory. Cognitive decoupling is hypothetical thinking. Crystallized intelligence is declarative knowledge (as distinct from procedural knowledge).

Intelligence Test

Intelligence tests measure mainly fluid intelligence. There are large differences between individuals when it comes to fluid intelligence. 

Rationality

The reflective mind contains rationality, a cognitive ability that is missed by intelligence tests. Stanovich distinguishes epistemic rationality (determining what is real) and instrumental rationality (determining how to achieve a goal). What the author calls instrumental rationality has overlap with Robert Sternberg’s practical intelligence. The reflective mind may override the algorithmic mind. Antonio Damasio has shown that the reflective mind, but not the algorithmic mind, requires emotional input from the autonomous mind. Reflective mind contains thinking dispositions. 

Thinking Dispositions

Examples of Thinking Dispositions: (a) superstition, (b) dogmatism, (ccc) loyalty to beliefs versus loyalty to reality, (d) overconfidence, (e) insensitivity to contradictions, (f) need for closure, (g) thinking about future consequences, (h) hierarchy of goals, (i) reflective versus impulsive personality. 

Cognitive Miser

The cognitive miser is a part of the mind that tries to use the reasoning method that requires the least effort. One example of the cognitive miser is affect substitution, that is, making a choice based upon the emotions associated with each choice. Another example is accepting the given framing of the question, rather than searching for the proper framing. A final example is avoiding the exhaustive enumeration of all possible cases (called disjunctive reasoning) by using the easier serial associative cognition (considering only the cases that come immediately to mind). 

Mindware Gaps

Lack of education and experience are causes of mindware gaps. Examples of mindware gaps: (a) not having a critical thinking strategy, (b) failure to seek falsifiability, (ccc) not considering alternative hypotheses, (d) mistaken causal inferences, (e) not understanding independent probabilities, (f) not understanding conditional (Bayesian) probability, (g) inverting probabilities (confusing A given B with B given A). 

Contaminated Mindware

Some examples of contaminated mindware: (a) Albanian Ponzi scheme, (b) ritual satanic abuse panic, (c) parasitic meme-plexes (cf., Richard Dawkins), (d) faith-based mindware (which disables the critical faculty).