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Thus, for every 51 patients who test positive for XYZ, only one will actually have it. Because of the relatively low base rate of the disease and the relatively high false-positive rate, most people who test positive for XYZ syndrome will not have it. The answer to the question, then, is that the probability a person who tests positive for XYZ syndrome actually has it is one in 51, or approximately 2 percent.
A second aspect of mindware, the ability to think scientifically, is also missing from standard IQ tests, but it, too, can be readily measured:. An experiment is conducted to test the efficacy of a new medical treatment. Picture a 2 x 2 matrix that summarizes the results as follows:. As you can see, patients were given the experimental treatment and improved; 75 were given the treatment and did not improve; 50 were not given the treatment and improved; and 15 were not given the treatment and did not improve.
Before reading ahead, answer this question with a yes or no: Was the treatment effective? Most people will say yes. They focus on the large number of patients in whom treatment led to improvement and on the fact that of those who received treatment, more patients improved than failed to improve But this reflects an error in scientific thinking: an inability to consider the control group, something that disturbingly even physicians are often guilty of.
In the control group, improvement occurred even when the treatment was not given. Another mindware problem relates to hypothesis testing. This, too, is rarely tested on IQ tests, even though it can be reliably measured, as Peter C. Wason of University College London showed. Try to solve the following puzzle, called the four-card selection task, before reading ahead:.
As seen in the diagram, four cards are sitting on a table. Each card has a letter on one side and a number on the other. Two cards are letter-side up, and two of the cards are number-side up. The rule to be tested is this: for these four cards, if a card has a vowel on its letter side, it has an even number on its number side. Your task is to decide which card or cards must be turned over to find out whether the rule is true or false.
Indicate which cards must be turned over. Most people get the answer wrong, and it has been devilishly hard to figure out why. About half of them say you should pick A and 8: a vowel to see if there is an even number on its reverse side and an even number to see if there is a vowel on its reverse. Another 20 percent choose to turn over the A card only, and another 20 percent turn over other incorrect combinations. That means that 90 percent of people get it wrong. Let's see where people tend to run into trouble.
They are okay with the letter cards: most people correctly choose A. The difficulty is in the number cards: most people mistakenly choose 8. Why is it wrong to choose 8? Read the rule again: it says that a vowel must have an even number on the back, but it says nothing about whether an even number must have a vowel on the back or what kind of number a consonant must have. It is because the rule says nothing about consonants, by the way, that there is no need to see what is on the back of the K.
So finding a consonant on the back of the 8 would say nothing about whether the rule is true or false. In contrast, the 5 card, which most people do not choose, is essential.
The 5 card might have a vowel on the back. And if it does, the rule would be shown to be false because that would mean that not all vowels have even numbers on the back. In short, to show that the rule is not false, the 5 card must be turned over.
When asked to prove something true or false, people tend to focus on confirming the rule rather than falsifying it. This is why they turn over the 8 card, to confirm the rule by observing a vowel on the other side, and the A card, to find the confirming even number. But if they thought scientifically, they would look for a way to falsify the rule—a thought pattern that would immediately suggest the relevance of the 5 card which might contain a disconfirming vowel on the back.
Seeking falsifying evidence is a crucial component of scientific thinking. But for most people, this bit of mindware must be taught until it becomes second nature. Dysrationalia and Intelligence The modern period of intelligence research was inaugurated by Charles Spearman in a famous paper published in in the American Journal of Psychology.
Spearman found that performance on one cognitive task tends to correlate with peformance on other cognitive tasks. He termed this correlation the positive manifold, the belief that all cognitive skills will show substantial correlations with one another.
This belief has dominated the field ever since. Yet as research in my lab and elsewhere has shown, rational thinking can be surprisingly dissociated from intelligence. Individuals with high IQs are no less likely to be cognitive misers than those with lower IQs.
No matter what their IQ, most people need to be told that fully disjunctive reasoning will be necessary to solve the puzzle, or else they won't bother to use it. Maggie Toplak of York University in Toronto, West and I have shown that high-IQ people are only slightly more likely to spontaneously adopt disjunctive reasoning in situations that do not explicitly demand it. For the second source of dysrationalia, mindware deficits, we would expect to see some correlation with intelligence because gaps in mindware often arise from lack of education, and education tends to be reflected in IQ scores.
But the knowledge and thinking styles relevant to dysrationalia are often not picked up until rather late in life. It is quite possible for intelligent people to go through school and never be taught probabilistic thinking, scientific reasoning, and other strategies measured by the XYZ virus puzzle and the four-card selection task described earlier.
What is more, argues Stanovich, intelligence and rationality show only small-to-medium correlation Stanovich, b , which makes an assessment device for rational thinking it even more relevant. Part II. Many of the tasks are well-known and relatively simple questions from classic studies like Linda, the bank teller problem designed by Kahneman and Tversky in or the Wason selection task designed by Peter C.
Wason in but there are some quite complex designs as well, like the Argument Evaluation Task. Based on the detailed guidelines for the design of the tasks and also for the suggested scoring system for every individual category of tasks one can rebuild the full RQ test or a part of it and start their own studies. Since the full test is quite sizeable and may take several hours to complete the authors designed two shorter versions of the test which are less comprehensive but whose results nevertheless correlate strongly with the full test.
Part III. In the last two chapters the authors discuss the narrow and wider context of the CART, the remaining issues and also the social and practical implications of such a test. Critics of intelligence tests, and to a lesser degree of the psychological construct of intelligence itself, argue that IQ tests minimize the importance of creativity, interpersonal skills, morality, empathy, and many other vital non-cognitive competence of a person.
Stanovich et al. In the Rationality Quotient they follow up this claim and provide the CART, an RQ test designed to measure rational thinking that is likely to become a standard psychometric tool in the future. They claim that the RQ is complementary to the IQ test and together provide a much wider assessment of one's cognitive capacity. The Rationality Quotient is an effort of staggering scale and is an enormous accomplishment.
The work is far from being completed, the authors themselves consider the RQ test a prototype and it certainly is.
There are a number of open issues here including the missing but decisive biases like confirmation bias, myside bias, and bias blind spot. Also, some of the subtest of the cart, like Financial Literacy and Risk Knowledge are rather culture and sometimes country dependent.
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