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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 epistemically problematic psychological traits. In this chapter, I review the evidence indicating that no such difference in rational thinking tendencies has been proven.

Most definitions of dyslexia involve the assessment of a discrepancy between reading ability and measured intelligence. These discrepancy definitions carry the implicit assumption that the reading difficulties of the dyslexic stem from problems different from those characterizing the poor reader without IQ discrepancy. An accumulating body of empirical evidence appears to contradict this assumption. The phenotypic performance profile that defines reading disability does not seem to differ for reading-disabled children with or without aptitude/achievement discrepancies. Degree of aptitude/achievement discrepancy is unrelated to the unique cognitive tradeoffs that are characteristic of the word identification performance of reading-disabled children. Genetic studies have indicated that IQ-discrepancy measurement does not identify a group of children with significantly different heritability values for core information processing deficits. Finally, there are as yet no indications that the neuroanatomical anomalies that are associated with reading disability are more characteristic of high-IQ than of low-IQ poor readers. These findings are extremely problematic for traditional conceptions of reading disability that rely on aptitude/achievement discrepancy to define a group of children whose reading problems are cognitively, physiologically, and etiologically distinctive.

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 hostil...

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): “Rationality, Perception, and the All-Seeing Eye,” Psychonomic Bulletin & Review. The commentaries raise a number of criticisms and issues concerning rationality and the all-seeing-eye argument, including the nature of judgment and reasoning, biases versus heuristics, organism–environment relations, perception and situational construal, equilibrium analysis in economics, efficient markets, and the nature of empirical observation and the scientific method. The debated topics have far-reaching consequences for the rationality literature specifically, as well as for the cognitive, psychological, and economic sciences more broadly. The commentaries are followed by a response from the authors of the target article. Their response is organized around three central issues: (1) the problem of cues; (2) what is the question?; and (3) equilibria, $500 bills, and the axioms of rationality.

Actively open-minded thinking (AOT) is measured by questionnaire items that tap the willingness to consider alternative opinions, the sensitivity to evidence contradictory to current beliefs, the willingness to postpone closure, and reflective thought. AOT has been found to be a strong predictor of performance on heuristics and biases tasks and of the avoidance of reasoning traps such as superstitious thinking and belief in conspiracy theories. Recently, several studies that have employed short forms of the AOT scale have shown startlingly high negative correlations with religiosity (in the range of −0.50 to −0.70). In a re-analysis of a large dataset, we demonstrate that it was a particular type of AOT item (termed a belief revision item, BR) that accounts for these large correlations. To our consternation, we realized that it was our research team that had introduced these items into the literature two decades ago, but we had heretofore never realized the potential for these items to skew correlations. In a new experiment, we demonstrate how BR items of this type disadvantage religious-minded subjects, and we show that it is possible to construct BR items with parallel content that are not so demographically biased. We also show that unbiased BR items do not sacrifice the predictive power that has previously been shown by AOT scales. We believe this lesson in item construction resulted from the lack of intellectual diversity in our own laboratory (specifically, the overwhelmingly secular composition of our lab personnel). We believe this case study shows the importance of intellectual diversity in psychology, especially when studying such topics as religiosity and political attitudes.

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 as proxies for the assessment of rational thought. It is important to understand why such an assumption would be misplaced. It is often not recognized that rationality and intelligence (as traditionally defined) are two different things conceptually and empirically. Distinguishing between rationality and intelligence helps explain how people can be, at the same time, intelligent and irrational. Thus, individual differences in the cognitive skills that underlie rational thinking must be studied in their own right because intelligence tests do not explicitly assess rational thinking. In this article, I describe how my research group has worked to develop the firs...

This chapter presents some conclusions and speculations about the cognitive mechanisms that underlie individual differences in reading acquisition. It then considers some of the processes and skills that have been widely discussed in the past decade in the literature on individual differences in reading. The chapter provides equal attention to some of the implications that failing at early reading acquisition, and failing for particular reasons, has for later academic achievement and for cognitive development in general. Research has demonstrated that difficulty at using context to facilitate the recognition of words is not a major cause of reading failure or a major determinant of variability in reading achievement. Studies of early reading converge with the research with older children and adults in indicating that reading acquisition in less-skilled children seems not to be impeded by an inability to use context to facilitate word recognition.

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 throughout a person’s life. Schwartz’s target article is clearly in the tradition of those advocating a broader view of how we conceive rationality. It has many affinities with the meta-rationality that I have previously advocated for decision science.

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 test may be becoming known to potential participants, however. We examined a four-item version that could serve as a substitute for the original. Our data show that it displays a .58 correlation with the original version and that it has very similar relationships with cognitive ability, various thinking dispositions, and with several other rational thinking tasks. Combining the two versions into a seven-item test resulted in a measure of miserly processing with substantial reliability (.72). The seven-item version was a strong independent predictor of performance on rational thinking tasks after the variance accounted for by cognitive ability and thinking dispositi...

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 intelligence. Avoiding myside bias is thus one rational thinking skill that is not assessed by intelligence tests or even indirectly indexed through its correlation with cognitive ability measures.

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 some of these arguments have force against some of the theories in the literature but believe them to be overstated. We argue that the dual-processing distinction is supported by much recent evidence in cognitive science. Our preferred theoretical approach is one in which rapid autonomous processes (Type 1) are assumed to yield default responses unless intervened on by distinctive higher order reasoning processes (Type 2). What defines the difference is that Type 2 processing supports hypothetical thinking and load heavily on working memory.

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. Additionally, studies of nonhuman animals indicate that they are largely rational in an axiomatic sense. It is important to understand why the finding that humans are less rational than other animals is not paradoxical. This paper discusses three reasons why the principles of rational choice are actually easier to follow when the cognitive architecture of the organism is simpler: contextual complexity, symbolic complexity, and the strong evaluator struggle.

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 problem of contaminated mindware. Four subtests of the CART assess contaminated mindware: the Superstitious Thinking subtest; Antiscience Attitudes subtest; Conspiracy Beliefs subtest; and Dysfunctional Personal Beliefs subtest. The history of each subtest is described, as well as a large study of each subtest in which correlations with cognitive ability and thinking dispositions are examined. Correlations among these subtests themselves are reported.

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 are: the Probabilistic Numeracy subtest; Financial Literacy and Economic Knowledge subtest; Sensitivity to Expected Value subtest; and the Risk Knowledge subtest. The history of each subtest is described, as well as a large study of each subtest in which the reliability and correlations with cognitive ability are examined.

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 axiomatic utility theory: the ability to avoid being affected by irrelevant context when decision-making. The three subtests that measure the ability to avoid this tendency are: the Framing subtest, the Anchoring subtest, and the Preference Anomalies subtest. Three other subtests are described in this chapter. The avoidance of myside bias is a fundamental component of performance in most discussions of rational thinking. We used our original version of an Argument Evaluation subtest to measure this component of rational thinking. The ability to avoid overconfidence is measured on the CART by the Knowledge Calibration subtest. Finally, the Rational Temporal Discounting subtest assesses the ability to pass up an immediate reward for a delayed larger one. The history of each subtest is described, as well as a large study of each subtest in which correlations with cognitive ability and thinking dispositions are examined.

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, we are interested in individual differences in the sensitivity to probabilistic reasoning principles and in the tendency to apply scientific principles when seeking causal explanations. People can have knowledge of these principles without the propensity to use them. The CART assess not only whether people have knowledge of the principles but also their propensity to see situations in terms of the probabilities. It is discussed how the CART is a measure of thinking in a hostile world rather than a benign world. It is true that heuristics and biases problems seem more hostile than typical IQ test problems in that the latter do not contain enticing lures toward an incorrect response. This is a strength, not a weakness, of heuristics and biases tasks. The modern world creates many environments for thinking that are hostile rather than benign.