Keith E Stanovich

University of Toronto | U of T · Department of Applied Psychology and Human Development

Actively open-minded thinking (AOT) is measured by items that tap the willingness to consider alternative opinions, sensitivity to evidence contradictory to current beliefs, the willingness to postpone closure, and reflective thought. AOT scales are strong predictors of performance on heuristics and biases tasks and of the avoidance of reasoning tr...

Beliefs play a central role in our lives. They lie at the heart of what makes us human, they shape the organization and functioning of our minds, they define the boundaries of our culture, and they guide our motivation and behavior. Given their central importance, researchers across a number of disciplines have studied beliefs, leading to results a...

The first reference on rationality that integrates accounts from psychology and philosophy, covering descriptive and normative theories from both disciplines. Both analytic philosophy and cognitive psychology have made dramatic advances in understanding rationality, but there has been little interaction between the disciplines. This volume offers t...

The bias blind spot is a meta-bias in which people think that psychological biases are much more prevalent in others than in themselves. Such a blindspot appears to be operating in the thinking of the social scientists who study partisan differences. They overwhelmingly feel that their political opponents display irrationality and other epistemical...

There are individual differences in rational thinking that are less than perfectly correlated with individual differences in intelligence because intelligence and rationality occupy different conceptual locations in models of cognition. A tripartite extension of currently popular dual-process theories is presented in this chapter that illustrates h...

Humans are cognitive misers because their basic tendency is to default to processing mechanisms of low computational expense. Such a tendency leads to suboptimal outcomes in certain types of hostile environments. The theoretical inferences made from correct and incorrect responding on heuristics and biases tasks have been overly simplified, however...

I agree with the target essay that psychology has something to offer in helping to address societal problems. Intelligence has helped meliorate some social problems throughout history, including the period of time that is covered by the Flynn effect, but I agree with Sternberg that other psychological characteristics may be contributing as well, pa...

This article features an interdisciplinary debate and dialogue about the nature of mind, perception, and rationality. Scholars from a range of disciplines — cognitive science, applied and experimental psychology, behavioral economics, and biology — offer critiques and commentaries of a target article by Felin, Koenderink, and Krueger (2017): “Ratio...

This chapter describes the thinking dispositions of rationality, which in the CART are assessed by supplemental measures. These thinking dispositions help to contextualize the scores on other components of the CART. However, they are not scored as part of the CART itself. Rather, they were developed to serve as useful supplements to the CART subtes...

In this chapter, the Scientific Reasoning subtest is described. The reason for each of the task-types chosen for this subtest is discussed. The skills tapped by this subtest include: covariation detection; falsification tendencies in the four-card selection task; understanding the logic of converging evidence; the ability to avoid drawing causal in...

In this chapter, four subtests of the CART are described. All four are direct measures of the avoidance of miserly processing. The subtests are: the Reflection versus Intuition subtest; the Belief Bias in Syllogistic Reasoning subtest; the Ratio Bias subtest; and the Disjunctive Reasoning subtest. All of these subtests have heavy processing require...

This chapter discusses the social implications of an assessment device for rational thinking. The chapter presents a table showing, for each of the paradigms and subtests of the CART, an association with a real-life outcome. The differences between rationality assessment and intelligence assessment are discussed. In the domain of rational thinking,...

Based on the taxonomy of errors discussed in Chapter 3, Chapter 4 outlines a positive framework for assessing rational thinking using the CART. Ten subtests of the CART are classified as having heavy processing requirements compared to knowledge requirements. Four subtests of the CART are classified as having heavy knowledge requirements compared t...

Knowledge becomes implicated in rationality in two different ways. When the knowledge bases discussed in Chapter 9 are missing, the problem is called a mindware gap. A different type of mindware problem arises because some acquired mindware can be the direct cause of irrational actions that thwart our goals. This type of problem has been termed the...

This chapter focuses on a set of subtests of the CART that are more knowledge dependent than are the subtests discussed in the previous chapters. Although these subtests do have processing requirements, successful performance on them is much more dependent on the presence of specific declarative knowledge. The subtests of the CART discussed in this...

Chapter 12 describes a large-scale study of the short-form version of the CART. The short-form is composed of 11 of the 20 subtests and can be completed in less than two hours by most subjects. The short-form CART includes both the Probabilistic and Statistical Reasoning and the Scientific Reasoning subtests, as both are at the core of most definit...

This chapter contextualizes the CART within the broader literature on cognitive ability assessment and critiques the CART, pointing out certain caveats and cautions that follow from its status as a beta (or early prototype) version of a rational thinking assessment. The chapter discusses the relation of the CART to other related instruments in the...

Because the operationalization of rational thinking comes from the heuristics and biases tradition, this chapter explicates the logic of heuristics and biases tasks in terms of contemporary theories of the functional architecture of the human mind. A tripartite model of the mind is described that is based on current dual-process theories. With this...

This chapter unpacks the logic of heuristics and biases tasks in terms of the tripartite model of mind developed in Chapter 2. There are three requirements for success on tasks. First, the necessity of overriding Type 1 processing must be detected. Second, the mindware that allows the computation of more rational responses needs to be available. Th...

This chapter describes a large-scale study of the full-form version of the CART involving 747 subjects. Reliabilities of all the subtests are reported, as well as correlations with measures of cognitive ability and the four thinking disposition scales of the CART. Correlations among all the subtests are reported as well as a principal components an...

This book shows that rational thinking, like intelligence, is a measurable cognitive competence. Drawing on theoretical work and empirical research from the last two decades, The Rationality Quotient presents the first prototype for an assessment of rational thinking analogous to an IQ test: the CART (Comprehensive Assessment of Rational Thinking)....

Chapter 7 discussed four subtests that are direct measures of the avoidance of miserly processing on the CART. Chapter 8 discusses how the CART also contains six other subtests that assess the ability to avoid suboptimal thought patterns that arise indirectly from miserly thinking tendencies. Three of those subtests assess an important component of...

Chapter 5 begins a series of chapters that describe subtests of the CART. In this chapter, the Probabilistic and Statistical Reasoning subtest is described. The reason for each of the task-types chosen for this subtest is discussed. The skills tapped by this subtest include: the ability to avoid probability matching tendencies and instead choose a...

Because rationality is an issue across many disciplines, it has acquired many different definitions. This chapter describes definitions of rationality from cognitive science that are amenable to a program of measuring individual differences. Definitions of both epistemic and instrumental rationality are described in terms in terms of axiomatic util...

In the current study, we sought to examine whether performance on several heuristics and biases tasks and thinking dispositions was associated with real-life correlates in a community sample of adults. We examined performance on five heuristics and biases tasks (ratio bias, belief bias in syllogistic reasoning, cognitive reflection, probabilistic a...

The Nobel Prize in Economics was awarded in 2002 for work on judgment and decision-making tasks that are the operational measures of rational thought in cognitive science. Because assessments of intelligence (and similar tests of cognitive ability) are taken to be the quintessence of good thinking, it might be thought that such measures would serve...

The great rationality debate in cognitive science (Tetlock and Mellers 2002) has largely been conducted with a narrow view of human rationality in mind. A minority voice in the debate has been theorists who take a broader view of rationality — one that does not accept current desires and goals is given and that takes a longer view of decisions th...

The Cognitive Reflection Test (CRT; Frederick, 2005) is designed to measure the tendency to override a prepotent response alternative that is incorrect and to engage in further reflection that leads to the correct response. It is a prime measure of the miserly information processing posited by most dual process theories. The original three-item tes...

In modern cognitive science, rationality and intelligence are measured using different tasks and operations. Furthermore, in several contemporary dual process theories of cognition, rationality is a more encompassing construct than intelligence. Researchers need to continue to develop measures of rational thought without regard to empirical correla...

It is a profound historical irony of the behavioural sciences that the Nobel Prize was awarded for studies of cognitive characteristics (rational thinking skills) that are entirely missing from the most well-known mental assessment device in the behavioral sciences - the intelligence test. Intelligence tests measure important things, but not these...

We studied developmental trends in 5 important reasoning tasks that are critical components of the operational definition of rational thinking. The tasks measured denominator neglect, belief bias, base rate sensitivity, resistance to framing, and the tendency toward otherside thinking. In addition to age, we examined 2 other individual difference d...

The Cognitive Reflection Test (CRT; Frederick, 2005) is designed to measure the tendency to override a prepotent response alternative that is incorrect and to engage in further reflection that leads to the correct response. It is a prime measure of the miserly information processing posited by most dual process theories. The original three-item tes...

Dhar and Gorlin show that default-interventionist dual-process theory differentially classifies several effects in the consumer choice literature and makes differential predictions across a variety of manipulations. One of the most startling differential classifications in their model is that it drives a wedge between the attraction and enhancement...

Myside bias occurs when people evaluate evidence, generate evidence, and test hypotheses in a manner biased toward their own prior opinions and attitudes. Research across a wide variety of myside bias paradigms has revealed a somewhat surprising finding regarding individual differences. The magnitude of the myside bias shows very little relation to...

Several experiments are reported in which comparisons were made between different neutral conditions that have been used in sentence context experiments. There was a tendency for the neutral sentence fragment “the next word will be” to yield faster word-naming times than three other neutral conditions (“they said it was the, ” randomized strings of...

Dual-process and dual-system theories in both cognitive and social psychology have been subjected to a number of recently published criticisms. However, they have been attacked as a category, incorrectly assuming there is a generic version that applies to all. We identify and respond to 5 main lines of argument made by such critics. We agree that s...

In this article, we respond to the four comments on our target article. Some of the commentators suggest that we have formulated our proposals in a way that renders our account of dual-process theory untestable and less interesting than the broad theory that has been critiqued in recent literature. Our response is that there is a confusion of level...

Several formal analyses in decision theory have shown that if people's preferences follow certain logical patterns (the so-called axioms of rational choice) then they are behaving as if they are maximising utility. However, numerous studies in the decision-making literature have indicated that humans often violate the axioms of rational choice. Add...

Adult, third-grade, first-grade, and kindergarten subjects searched for target letters through fields of six types. The six fields were formed by factorially combining the two variables wordness (words vs. nonwords) and case (upper, lower, and mixed). The adults and third-graders showed word superiority effects when searching through upper- and low...

Althought the mind/body problem has been vigorously debated for decades by philosophers, virtually nothing is known about the implicit theories of mind held by people who are not specialists on the subject. In this study, a scale was developed that assessed the extent to which respondents endorsed dualistic theories of mind and rejected materialist...

Background: Both performance-based and rating measures are commonly used to index executive function in clinical and neuropsychological assessments. They are intended to index the same broad underlying mental construct of executive function. The association between these two types of measures was investigated in the current article. Method and re...

The so-called bias blind spot arises when people report that thinking biases are more prevalent in others than in themselves. Bias turns out to be relatively easy to recognize in the behaviors of others, but often difficult to detect in one's own judgments. Most previous research on the bias blind spot has focused on bias in the social domain. In 2...

Many critics of dual-process models have mistaken long lists of descriptive terms in the literature for a full-blown theory of necessarily co-occurring properties. These critiques have distracted attention from the cumulative progress being made in identifying the much smaller set of properties that truly do define Type 1 and Type 2 processing. Our...

Although critical thinking has long been deemed important by educators, the less well known but more encompassing concept of rational thinking has been largely ignored in the field of education. This chapter argues that critical thinking is a subspecies of rational thought and that educators should be more concerned with the superordinate concept:...

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Thinking and reasoning, long the academic province of philosophy, have emerged over the past century as core topics of empirical investigation and theoretical analysis in the modern fields of cognitive psychology, cognitive science, and cognitive neuroscience. Formerly seen as too complicated and amorphous to be included in early textbooks on the s...

Rational thinking involves adopting appropriate goals, taking the appropriate action given one's goals and beliefs, and holding beliefs that are commensurate with available evidence. Traditional tests of intelligence are not good proxies for rational thinking skills because rational thought and intelligence are conceptually and empirically separabl...

Elqayam & Evans (E&E) drive a wedge between Bayesianism and instrumental rationality that most decision scientists will not recognize. Their analogy from linguistics to judgment and decision making is inapt. Normative models remain extremely useful in the progressive research programs of the judgment and decision making field.

Drawing developmental predictions from dual-process theories is more complex than is commonly realized. Overly simplified predictions drawn from such models may lead to premature rejection of the dual process approach as one of many tools for understanding cognitive development. Misleading predictions can be avoided by paying attention to several c...

The Cognitive Reflection Test (CRT; Frederick, 2005) is designed to measure the tendency to override a prepotent response alternative that is incorrect and to engage in further reflection that leads to the correct response. In this study, we showed that the CRT is a more potent predictor of performance on a wide sample of tasks from the heuristics-...

Intelligence tests are often treated as if they encompassed all cognitive abilities. Our goal in this chapter is to challenge this assumption by showing that an important class of cognitive skills is missing from commonly used intelligence tests. We accomplish this by showing that intelligence, narrowly defined by what intelligence tests measure, f...

The authors look closely at the normative question, following Stanovich's detailed consideration of it in a book (Stanovich, 1999), which was both greatly influenced by Jonathan's thinking, as they relate in their chapter, and has greatly influenced Jonathan's, as he has often acknowledged. They consider belief bias and heuristics from a dual-proce...

A concern for individual differences has been missing from the Great Rationality Debate in cognitive science-the debate about how much irrationality to attribute to human cognition. There are individual differences in rational thinking that are less than perfectly correlated with individual differences in intelligence because intelligence and ratio...

This book attempts to resolve the Great Rationality Debate in cognitive science-the debate about how much irrationality to ascribe to human cognition. It shows how the insights of dual-process theory and evolutionary psychology can be combined to explain why humans are sometimes irrational even though they possess remarkably adaptive cognitive mach...

This chapter begins with a discussion of Great Rationality Debate in cognitive science-the debate about how much irrationality to attribute to human cognition-detailing the contrasting positions of the Panglossians and Meliorists. It then discusses individual differences in the Great Rationality Debate, dual process theory, and the features of Type...

The data presented in this book indicate that the rankings of individuals on assessments of rational thinking would be different from rankings on intelligence. At present, of course, there is no IQ-type test for rationality-that is, a test of one's RQ (rationality quotient). This chapter argues that it is time to start talking about such a thing. A...

Having sketched out a model of how and when cognitive ability associates with heuristics and biases tasks in Chapters 6 and 7, this chapter uses the model to summarize the empirical findings on the nature of the relationship between intelligence and rational thought. It argues that the relative dissociation between intelligence and rationality is c...

This chapter argues that it is useful to distinguish the algorithmic level of processing from the reflective level when discussing Type 2 processing. Individual differences in the former reflect the efficiency of the functional cognitive machinery that carries out mental tasks. Individual differences at the reflective level result from variance in...

This chapter elaborates on the uniquely human functionality of the nonautonomous minds and speculates on the evolutionary origins of Type 2 processing. These speculations involve conjoining a concept much discussed in the literature with one of the author's own invention. The more well-known concept is that of metarepresentation, and the new concep...

This chapter identifies the key operations of the algorithmic mind and the reflective mind that support human rationality. The key function of the algorithmic mind is to sustain the processing of decoupled secondary representations. Secondary representations are copies of primary representations that are not directly connected to input processes or...

This chapter explores the social consequences of the modest association between rational thinking and intelligence. It argues that an understanding of the implications of the modest association helps to check the imperialism of the intelligence concept in folk psychology. Extant IQ tests do not measure rational thought, but instead are good indicat...

This chapter fleshes out the full tri-process model (on autonomous, algorithmic, and reflective levels) of the mind. Fully decoupled cognitive simulation is distinguished from another type of Type 2 cognition, a cognition termed serial associative cognition. Three different types of cognitive decoupling are also distinguished. In the override case,...

The Iowa Gambling Task (IGT) has been used to study decision-making differences in many different clinical and developmental samples. It has been suggested that IGT performance captures abilities that are separable from cognitive abilities, including executive functions and intelligence. The purpose of the current review was to examine studies that...

As teacher quality becomes a central issue in discussions of children's literacy, both researchers and policy makers alike express increasing concern with how teachers structure and allocate their lesson time for literacy-related activities as well as with what they know about reading development, processes, and pedagogy. The authors examined the b...

This book explores the idea that we have two minds – one being automatic, unconscious, and fast, the other controlled, conscious, and slow. In recent years, there has been great interest in so-called dual-process theories of reasoning and rationality. According to such theories, there are two distinct systems underlying human reasoning: an evolutio...

Critics of intelligence tests-writers such as Robert Sternberg, Howard Gardner, and Daniel Goleman-have argued in recent years that these tests neglect important qualities such as emotion, empathy, and interpersonal skills. However, such critiques imply that though intelligence tests may miss certain key noncognitive areas, they encompass most of w...

A framework for conceptualizing the development of individual differences in reading ability is presented that synthesizes a great deal of the research literature. The framework places special emphasis on the effects of reading on cognitive development and on “bootstrapping” relationships involving reading. Of key importance are the concepts of rec...

In this article, the authors argue that there are a range of effects usually studied within cognitive psychology that are legitimately thought of as aspects of critical thinking: the cognitive biases studied in the heuristics and biases literature. In a study of 793 student participants, the authors found that the ability to avoid these biases was...

This interdisciplinary work is a collection of major essays on reasoning: deductive, inductive, abductive, belief revision, defeasible (non-monotonic), cross cultural, conversational, and argumentative. They are each oriented toward contemporary empirical studies. The book focuses on foundational issues, including paradoxes, fallacies, and debates...

Two critical thinking skills—the tendency to avoid myside bias and to avoid one-sided thinking—were examined in three different experiments involving over 1200 participants and across two different paradigms. Robust indications of myside bias were observed in all three experiments. Participants gave higher evaluations to arguments that supported th...

In 7 different studies, the authors observed that a large number of thinking biases are uncorrelated with cognitive ability. These thinking biases include some of the most classic and well-studied biases in the heuristics and biases literature, including the conjunction effect, framing effects, anchoring effects, outcome bias, base-rate neglect, "l...

The danger of reification is ever-present in many areas of educational psychology, but this is especially true in the area of learning disabilities-a field with a recurring history of concepts getting ahead of the evidence. It is, for example, well known that the field of learning disabilities has had a checkered history. It is littered with conten...

The cognitive critique of the goals and desires that are input into the implicit calculations that result in instrumental rationality is one aspect of what has been termed broad rationality (Elster, 198322. Elster , J. 1983. Sour grapes: Studies in the subversion of rationality, Cambridge, , UK: Cambridge University Press. [CrossRef]View all refer...

The most well-known indicators of cognitive functioning—intelligence and cognitive ability tests—do not assess a critical aspect of thinking, which is the ability to think rationally. To think rationally means adopting appropriate goals, taking the appropriate action given one's goals and beliefs, and holding beliefs that are commensurate with avai...

En este artículo se reseñan los resultados de una serie de investiga- ciones destinadas a explorar el papel que desempeña la "cantidad de lectura" en el desarrollo de las estructuras cognitivas de los estudian- tes. Se concluye que muchas de las brechas cognitivas observadas

Natural myside bias is the tendency to evaluate propositions from within one's own perspective when given no instructions or cues (such as within-participants conditions) to avoid doing so. We defined the participant's perspective as their previously existing status on four variables: their sex, whether they smoked, their alcohol consumption, and t...

This study examined the predictors of belief bias in a formal reasoning paradigm (a syllogistic reasoning task) and myside bias in two informal reasoning paradigms (an argument generation task and an experiment evaluation task). Neither cognitive ability nor thinking dispositions predicted myside bias, but both cognitive ability and thinking dispos...

We present a taxonomy that categorizes the types of cognitive failure that might result in persistent gambling. The taxonomy subsumes most previous theories of gambling behavior, and it defines three categories of cognitive difficulties that might lead to gambling problems: The autonomous set of systems (TASS) override failure, missing TASS output,...

The cognitive psychology of judgment and decision making helps to elaborate Gintis's unified view of the behavioral sciences by highlighting the fact that decisions result from multiple systems in the mind. It also adds to the unified view the idea that the potential to self-critique preference structures is a unique feature of human cognition.