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This is an important but also controversial book, controversial inasmuch as it radically challenges received wisdom. It introduces its central message by discussing the mentality of President Bush. Judging by examination records his intelligence was quite high, yet he made many disastrous decisions. The trouble was that he suffered from 'dysrationalia', i.e. defective reasoning capacity. In seeking to elucidate the nature of this disorder, the author proposes a tripartite model of the mind: a lower level of autonomous functioning, an intermediate algorithmic level tapped by IQ tests, and an upper 'reflective' level IQ tests leave out of account, This basic model is later further elaborated. There follows a detailed discussion of the limitations of IQ tests, and numerous illustrations of stupid behavior by intelligent people. This not surprising since we are 'cognitive misers', that is reluctant to engage in careful thought and apt to take shortcuts. This could be the result of an evolution-bases strategy not to expend resources unless strictly necessary, which under modern conditions is dysfunctional. The following chapters review a massive amount of research on different types of reasoning errors, few of which are likely to be familiar to psychologist not specialized in the cognitive area. The reader is invited to try her hand with actual problems. Here is an example to show how most of us are 'cognitive misers', unable to resist the temptation of going for the apparently easy but false answer: Jack is looking at Anne but Anne is looking at George. Jack is married but George is not. Is a married person looking at an unmarried person? The error types include the 'framing effect', whereby one is misled by seeming differences between problems that are formally identical; egocentric reasoning, whereby personal preconceptions distort judgments; and many others. The crunch point of all this is that a massive amount of research on such reasoning problems shows that success is only moderately, if at all, correlated with IQ level. The failures are often due to participants lack of 'mindware', that is sets of rules, procedures and strategies (such as looking for alternative possibilities). These can be learnt, and the author suggests that they ought to be taught at every stage of the educational system, since even university students are generally deficient in this respect. The arguments are compelling, and this reader has been persuaded. Does this mean that the work is flawless ? Well, not altogether, and one might question his discussion of so-called 'contaminated mindware'. This refers to collective beliefs which make for irrational behavior, and in this connection the author adopts Dawkins' notion of 'memes', or ideas that spread through a society by analogy with genes. Others have followed, and a science of memetics has emerged. In my view memetics is a pseudo-science, which carries the analogy to genes too far by postulating that memes are replicators that actually invade their 'hosts'. There is of course a real question of how ideas spread rapidly, a problem that has been recognized long ago. At the turn of the 19th century the French scholar Gabriel Tarde put forward in considerable detail the then common theory that ideas spread by imitation. While that does not explain everything, it is preferable to the quasi-mystical postulate of memes as active agents. Another issue concerns the fact that the author, understandably as a cognitivist, focuses unduly on individual mental processes and pays insufficient attention to the powerful influence of the socio-cultural environment.; moreover, the context of a modern industrial society is tacitly taken for granted. An example will help to illustrate this. The famous anthropologist Evans-Pritchard studied the withcraft beliefs of the Azande. They are immersed in a universe of discourse in which the occurrence of witchcraft is a commonplace. Evans-Pritchard reports that after living with them he 'learnt the idiom of their thought and applied notions of witchcraft as spontaneously as themselves in situations where the concept was relevant.' Were the Zande irrational ? Not at all: they applied a test to decide on the truth of a witchcraft accusation (whether or not a chicken died after being given poison). My point is that where people live within a more or less closed thought system, shared by those around them, the western category of rationality becomes itself problematic. My reservations are of course peripheral to the main thrust of the book, written with admirable clarity and enriched by numerous real-life examples of inadequate reasoning. Except perhaps for the models and technical passages on Bayes' theorem, the work is quite accessible for the curious and open-minded (I dare not say 'intelligent') lay person. It cannot be too strongly recommended, and given the prominence of IQ testing in our culture, deserves the widest possible readership.
© 2009 Gustav Jahoda
Gustav Jahoda, Ph.D. is Emeritus Professor of Psychology at the University of Strathclyde, Glasgow. His main fields of interest are cross-cultural and social psychology, especially the development of social cognition. He is the author of A History of Social Psychology (Cambridge University Press). |
