
When rational thinking is correlated with intelligence the correlation is modest - lkrubner
http://www.scientificamerican.com/article/rational-and-irrational-thought-the-thinking-that-iq-tests-miss/
======
tokenadult
The author of the article kindly submitted to open this thread has thought
deeply about the title issue of the article and has written a whole book on
the subject[1] (and parts of several other books on closely related topics).
Other researchers on human intelligence give Keith E. Stanovich, the author of
the submitted article, credit for bringing up findings from experimental
studies on human thinking that will have be taken into account as cognitive
psychology refines its theories on how you and I think. I see several comments
in this thread along the lines of "The doesn't ponder" or "the author doesn't
make the case" as if this article, restricted by a length limit, is the only
writing he has ever produced on the topic. He mentions his longer book in the
article. The article submitted today is a brief popular summary of an ongoing
research program that the author has thought about as deeply as anyone on
earth.

[1]
[http://yalepress.yale.edu/yupbooks/book.asp?isbn=97803001646...](http://yalepress.yale.edu/yupbooks/book.asp?isbn=9780300164626)

~~~
unclebucknasty
Well, I personally think the current editorialized title here ("When rational
thinking is correlated with intelligence the correlation is modest") is off,
but the title of the article itself ("Rational and Irrational Thought: The
Thinking that IQ Tests Miss") is more accurate.

The article essentially points more to the disparity between IQ test results
and rational thinking ability, which is more a critique of IQ testing.
However, the title here points to a disparity between intelligence and
rational thinking capacity, which is certainly counterintuitive. So, those who
didn't note the difference in titles and/or went in with the idea that the
title here was the author's premise may have taken issue with the article.

The title editorializing was likely purposeful in that many people dismiss IQ
tests out-of-hand, so the notion that IQ tests aren't predictive of rational-
decision making capacity would have been far less remarkable or click-worthy.

------
lkrubner
I consider myself smart and rational, so I was surprised that I stumbled on
many of the test questions. I got this one wrong, though you would think,
having been programming computers for 15 years, I surely should have gotten
this one right:

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?

A) Yes

B) No

C) Cannot be determined

Oddly enough, I feel that if this had been presented to me as a bit of Java or
Ruby code, then I would have gotten this one correct. It's the informality of
English, and the assumptions I make when reading English, that tripped me up.

Computer code engages the rational side of my brain in a way that English does
not.

And to follow up on a point made long ago by Jeff Atwood, I think this (that
IQ and rationality are different) also explains the strange inability of some
smart people to learn how to program computers. I'm thinking of the post here:

[http://blog.codinghorror.com/separating-programming-sheep-
fr...](http://blog.codinghorror.com/separating-programming-sheep-from-non-
programming-goats/)

Jeff Atwood discusses this quote:

"All teachers of programming find that their results display a 'double hump'.
It is as if there are two populations: those who can [program], and those who
cannot [program], each with its own independent bell curve. Almost all
research into programming teaching and learning have concentrated on teaching:
change the language, change the application area, use an IDE and work on
motivation. None of it works, and the double hump persists."

And also this quote:

"Despite the enormous changes which have taken place since electronic
computing was invented in the 1950s, some things remain stubbornly the same.
In particular, most people can't learn to program: between 30% and 60% of
every university computer science department's intake fail the first
programming course. Experienced teachers are weary but never oblivious of this
fact; brighteyed beginners who believe that the old ones must have been doing
it wrong learn the truth from bitter experience; and so it has been for almost
two generations, ever since the subject began in the 1960s."

~~~
Rainymood
SPOILER ALERT (ANSWER OF RIDDLE BELOW):

I don't really see where you got stuck. Could you mind explaining me
why/how/where you got stuck? I couldn't find a satisfying 'aha!' moment so I
just kind of brute forced all the possibilities ..

~~~
gjm11
The failure mode isn't getting stuck, it's failing to notice that there's
actual work to do. The way you get this one wrong is a thought process like
this: "Well, obviously we only know about the first and third links in the
chain, and we aren't told anything about the second one. So of course we can't
tell whether there's a married person looking at an unmarried one because we
have no information about any two directly 'connected' people." (But less
explicit -- if you think about it in that much detail you're likely to think
of brute-forcing the possibilities.) Or like this: "Well, let's see: A looks
at B looks at C, A is married, C not. Does A->B have to be married->unmarried?
No; B could be married. Does B->C have to be married->unmarried? No; B could
be unmarried. So we're done."

Once it occurs to you that you could just kind of brute force all the
possibilities, you're going to get it right. The problem comes when you short-
circuit the process.

(And the reason why doing so isn't just stupid is that often this sort of
"pruning" of mental effort is key to working things out efficiently. It just
happens that in this case the prunability is illusory.)

~~~
Double_Cast
To expand on this.

At first glance, we don't know what value Anne has. But marital status is a
boolean value. Since marital status is boolean, it follows by the Law of the
Excluded Middle that Anne is either { _married_ | _unmarried_ }. If we brute
force the question by simulating each possible value that Anne can assume (and
follow the implications), we arrive at the correct answer.

But imagine a case where we test for flavors of ice cream rather than marital
status.

> _Jack is looking at Anne, but Anne is looking at George. Jack has chocolate
> ice cream, but George has vanilla ice cream. Is a person with chocolate ice
> cream looking at an person with vanilla ice cream?_

Can we correctly answer the new question? No, because Anne might have
_strawberry_ ice cream. A flavor isn't a boolean value!

Also consider that simulation (especially when exhausting _every_ possibility)
expends a lot of energy. Therefore, the default strategy is to use a
heuristic. And the heuristic is chosen by pattern-matching the "feel" of the
question. Unfortunately, the feel of the original question doesn't trigger a
heuristic which takes into account the boolean nature of marital status. So
rather than assign Anne a value of { _married_ | _unmarried_ }, we assign Anne
a value of { _null_ } and call it a day.

~~~
dllthomas
And of course it requires assuming "unmarried" is not distinct from "widowed"
and "divorced", which may or may not hold up.

~~~
phkahler
>> And of course it requires assuming "unmarried" is not distinct from
"widowed" and "divorced", which may or may not hold up.

Not really. Many people consider those other options as special cases of
"married" or "unmarried". In that case, how you match them up is not relevant
to the problem because she still fits one or the other. She could also be a
cat, which would change the answer.

~~~
dllthomas
I totally agree that _' [m]any people consider those other options as special
cases of "married" or "unmarried"'_. It's possible it's _most_ people.
However, I assert that _enough_ people consider "unmarried" different from
"divorced" or "widowed" that the assumption your audience thinks the other way
"may not hold up".

------
yodsanklai
"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?"

On a side note, in constructive propositional logic, the answer is indeed C
([http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intuitionistic_logic](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intuitionistic_logic)).
In this type of formalism, you have to provide a witness for every
existential, or choice for every disjunction. In particular the law of
excluded middle isn't an axiom. In order to prove the above proposition, you
would need to be able to prove whether Anne is married, or unmarried.

~~~
darkmighty
I find baring the law of the excluded middle an unnecessarily restrictive
basis for logic; but regardless, isn't this a simple (A \/ ~A) case? I mean,
you may not be able to prove that Anne is married or prove that Anne is
unmarried, but can't you prove by that Anne is either married or unmarried, by
the definition of marriege?

Moreover, I had the idea that Intuitionistic logic is advocated to curb with
non-constructive proofs over non-finite sets rather than the simple case you
mentioned.

~~~
Rapzid
What if Anne is a dog and can't be married? It was never established that
three PEOPLE were looking at each other.

~~~
phaemon
You posted this same comment twice, and four hours after I originally
suggested Anne might be a dog. Could you not at least have gone for a cat?

~~~
Rapzid
I accidentally replied under the OP when I meant to reply under this thread,
so I stripped out the part most relevant and put it here.

Dog was the first thing that came to my head that would have a proper
noun(Name) that wasn't a person. Didn't see a reason to change it?
Interestingly though, I do prefer cats.

------
erdevs
I'm surprised the author doesn't ponder the following: Perhaps higher IQ means
a person has more _ability_ to solve these sorts of problems, if they take the
time to exert the effort. That ability doesn't guarantee success in these
sorts of questions without applied effort, however.

That would mean IQ is still very, very important. But that it is not the only
importans factor in solving problems well (eg rationally).

To me, that seems quite plausible. Not sure why the author takes a rather
anti-IQ slant as opposed for promoting supplemental measures.

~~~
aetherson
I'd like to split the difference and say that sure, IQ means that a person
does have more ability to solve these sorts of problems -- but the fact that
it doesn't actually prompt you to apply it is a serious deficit for IQ, and an
under-recognized problem.

Smart people get lots of things badly wrong lots of the time. The fact that
they're smart can make others (and perhaps themselves, too) assume that they
won't be badly wrong, and thus broaden the error.

------
enord
I get really defensive when my intelligence is on the line. I read this entire
article with a combination of pretend aloofness and childlike fear of getting
gotten by the gotcha-questions. Apparently, my ego plays into my dysrationalia
(for better or worse).

~~~
halfcat
The research of Dr. Carol Dweck is interesting here [1]. It says that students
who were praised for "being smart" developed this ego/defensiveness problem
and subsequently began to underperform. While students praised for working
hard did not, and ended up outperforming the "smart" group. The amazing thing
about the research, to me, is that this effect was very prominent and quick,
and it happened based on only one sentence being told to the students on one
occasion. It did not take years of parents telling their child, "you are so
smart". It took one teacher telling the child once, "you did so well, you must
have worked hard", for the effect to take place.

[1]
[http://nymag.com/news/features/27840/](http://nymag.com/news/features/27840/)

------
swatow
I'm going to assume that IQ does measure general intelligence, since it is
highly correlated with all sorts of positive life outcomes that seem to be
associated with general intelligence.

Given this, I'm more inclined to draw the conclusion that rationality is not
central to intelligence. Most real life problems don't reduce to a logically
complex puzzle. As my kung fu teacher once said "fighting isn't like a game of
chess". In general, real life problems involve a mix of hard logical
constraints, and soft constraints that cannot be reasoned about, but rather
rely on intuition.

------
MarcScott
"shallow processing can lead physicians to choose less effective medical
treatments."

But shallow processing can lead ER physicians to choose the correct medical
treatment when time is of the essence.

These type of multiple-choice problems annoy me, admittedly because I'm bad at
them, but also because you don't always want to over analyze the problem and
waste valuable hours when a solution that 'will do the job' is a few seconds
of mental processing away.

~~~
the_af
I don't think anyone disagrees (even the author) that this kind of "shortcut"
reasoning is valuable. People want to spend as little energy as possible, and
that makes a lot of sense! I'm not a biologist or a scientist, but this
probably makes sense from an evolutionary perspective.

The problem is when this kind of thinking leads to terrible results. One
example would be thinking the effectiveness of a medical treatment is pretty
good, when it's actually worse than not administering the treatment. And
doctors are guilty of this, which in this case has serious consequences and is
not a multiple-choice riddle!

~~~
tunesmith
The question is how to tell the difference _ahead_ of time - when is a
heuristic approach going to lead to a "good enough" answer versus a
"counterintuitively damaging" answer. It would suck if the only way to know
for sure is to avoid shortcut reasoning in all cases.

------
cubetime
See also: Do Rational People Exist?
[http://srconstantin.wordpress.com/2014/06/09/do-
rationalists...](http://srconstantin.wordpress.com/2014/06/09/do-rationalists-
exist/)

------
halfcat
A lot of this says, to me, that the human brain doesn't do well with concepts
like statistics and probabilities. I think the far more interesting questions
are why we do irrational things in the face of clear and overwhelming
evidence. For instance, the knowledge of how to become physically fit and
wealthy is public knowledge and freely available to anyone with internet
access. I know I shouldn't eat that giant piece of cake right before I go to
bed, but I do anyway, every night. I think the answer is, we are ruled by our
chemical makeup, much more than any of us care to admit. The research
discussed in "The Power of Habit" is the most interesting as far as ways to
overcome our dependence on chemical/hormonal states ruling our lives.

------
jrapdx3
Most people I know probably think I'm smart enough, yet I still didn't get the
right answers to all the test questions posed in the article. I started to
wonder how come.

One question giving me no trouble at all was item 5. It was obvious to me that
the problem was one I often encounter, deciphering the ratios is a skill
developed reading countless medical research reports. After a while it seems
natural, it's about something _salient_ in my universe.

I'm guessing the item about marital status of individuals, one looking at
another, doesn't align with the salience of usual experience. In normal life
we have to be sensitive to the context, and in the question that context was
deliberately stripped away. It reduces to a purely abstract notion whereas
people, even intelligent ones, really want to know "is she married or not".
That information is lacking hence the "C" response.

Some of the other questions are kind of tricky unless one is familiar with the
statistical domain they arrive from. Sure there's a logic involved, but
learning how to think in those logical terms is unlikely to occur unless it's
germane to the individual.

If someone I cared about tested positive for the disease (#4), you bet I'd
have good reason to figure out the odds. Otherwise, probably not. The
motivational aspect is highly relevant and in many cases the "missing link"
between intelligence and worse than expected performance.

------
danieltillett
I got all of them right except 6. My initial response was that you had to turn
over all the cards. Thinking about why I chose this option I realised that I
was not trusting the rule that a card must have a number on one side if it has
a letter on the other side. My experience has made me highly suspicious that
the model I have been given by someone is correct so I always like to test the
assumptions of the model if possible.

~~~
otis_inf
I had it wrong too, but mostly because I had an issue with the 8 card: IMHO it
has to be turned over as it might have e.g. a 'V' on the other side, and that
side also belongs to the card, but the answer explicitly states 8 isn't needed
because apparently the other side isn't part of the card so the rule only
applies to the sides you initially see. A bit of a trick question IMHO.

~~~
pedrosorio
You got that wrong.

The rule is "vowel on one side implies even number on the other side". The
only cards that don't follow this rule are the ones that have a vowel and an
odd number. A card with an 8 will never disprove the rule regardless of the
letter on the other side, that's why you don't need to turn it.

~~~
otis_inf
Yeah I got that now. I feel pretty stupid after I found that out... :)

------
stephen
These books that are kind of pop-science descriptions of concepts like
dysrationality are great, but what I'd love is a set of workooks (at various
levels, e.g. my kids, adult learners like me, etc.) to systematically teach
these skills.

Without just being a list of brain teasers where you learn to recognize each
trick.

Do books like this exist? I'd love recommendations.

~~~
Strilanc
CFAR (the Center for Applied Rationality)'s goal is to create workshops that
effectively train people to be rational.

Probably not what you want, though. They're pricey and not targeted at kids.

------
pessimizer
Only if you define intelligence as IQ is this true. It's more accurate to say
that scoring high on IQ tests doesn't correlate very strongly with reasoning
skills.

Or, more interestingly, that scores on IQ tests correlate far more with
factors like parental incomes or pleasure reading during childhood than they
do with reasoning skills.

------
datashovel
I think the Jack / Anne / George problem was not fully formed if they want
someone to come to the conclusion that 'A' is the answer.

For example, in the real world there are more "states" a person can be in than
"married" or "not married". For example someone can be "separated", which IMO
is not fully in the "married" or "not married" states.

To formulate the question properly it needs to say "in this make believe
world, all people are either married or not married". This leads me down the
path to conclude 'A' is the answer. Not without this extra bit of context.

~~~
nights192
Datashovel, man, I don't understand how being "separated" could be considered
distinct from being married- it's a marital status. It's likely that they're
not looking for that variable- 'married' is a binary value, why would one need
to clarify?

~~~
datashovel
I don't claim to know all there is to know about marriage, or all the
different laws / cultures of marriage in the world throughout the entire
history of human civilization. But I guess I wasn't prepared to assume that
all possible situations in the world (regardless of culture, continent,
country, religion, etc...) can be boiled down precisely to either "married" or
"not married" states of being.

I guess I would ask: Why not include the extra context to the question?

------
UhUhUhUh
Most IQ tests have various scales and subscales, verbal, non-verbal, speed,
memory etc... Aside from the few subtests that measure fund of knowledge,
speed of reasoning, pattern extraction/recognition and ability to abstract
problems define (loosely) what is being measured as "intelligence." The "G"
Factor. Note that none of these categories strictly implies rational thinking.
You can even make a point that scoring high on any of these categories will
make you less likely to make rational decisions.

~~~
sysk
<rant>It seems there's a lot of parallels to be made between IQ tests and
programming language micro-benchmarks. Also, they seem to be equally useful:
that is, not very except at the extremes. The corollary is that if you didn't
pick your programming language based on a micro-benchmark, you probably
shouldn't give too much weight to IQ when hiring.

------
MrQuincle
The one with the probability of the disease makes me always feel like a robot.
Okay, so I know, I've to check for the prior. (Bayesian) Statistics 101.

The one with 'jack looking at anne' I glimsed already that 80% chose C, so I
spend just a bit more time to consider going through the entire decision tree.
It again makes me feel like a robot. :-)

There is something very mechanical to these types of questions and I would
wholeheartedly agree that this probably is a dimension that is not correlated
with intelligence.

------
karmacondon
The author doesn't make the case for why these types of reasoning skills are
important, or why IQ is important for that matter. This isn't the first time
that I've encountered brain teasers, and I know that I dislike them because I
generally suck at them. The author characterizes this as being a "cognitive
miser" (I also hate it when people make up terms), or not putting forth the
effort to thoroughly think through the problem and just going with the easy
answer. I can accept that this is what's happening, but what the hell does it
mean?

Should we be hiring people who are good at brain teasers? Does that kind of
thinking indicate the ability to ship products, come up with novel solutions
or understand things in a way that leads to significant increases to the
bottom line? In my experience, everybody is some kind of stupid. Even puzzle
masters occasionally lose their keys or say embarrassing things at parties.
Intelligence and the lack there of is so fractured and interconnected that it
doesn't seem like any kind of test is going to be able to measure it
accurately, or even nail down what 'it' is.

Some of the smartest people I know were good at questions like this, or maybe
I just think they're smart because they're so good at these questions. Big
companies love to use them during interviews and there's probably a reason for
that. It's definitely a skill I would like to improve myself, but I still
don't fully understand the value. Life isn't a series of puzzles, it's a
series of problems punctuated by sheer randomness. Being able to take this or
any kind of test can't be highly correlated with "success" by most measures,
and certainly not in the ways that matter to most organizations.

~~~
anextio
The point is that these are not just brain teasers, these are just distilled
examples of problems with which the brain often chooses a short-cut algorithm.

The implication is that analogues of these situations happen all the time, and
your ability to apply rational thought is proportional to the likelihood of
achieving desirable outcomes.

------
lumberjack
I don't understand no. 3.

People are being self interested. Why is that irrational?

~~~
jonahx
I think the idea is that they don't see the bias. And while hurting Germany's
export business isn't a problem (from the pov of self-interest), you can
imagine other situations where it would be a problem.

To stick with example, say they really do believe these dangerous cars should
be banned on American streets (and doing so really would save lives), but when
they find out the car is their beloved Ford Explorer, they rationalize their
caution away. Now the self-interest is getting them to make dangerous
decisions, and they don't even realize that's what's happening.

------
interdrift
Rational thinking isn't always linked to intelligence( as problem solving
intelligence ) at least in my opinion . I know this might sound irational but
oh well.

------
Rapzid
What if Anne is a dog and can't be married? It was never established that
three PEOPLE were looking at each other.

This is what we referred to in school as a "trick question". Very rarely
present on standardized testing. We were mostly trained to zero in on the lack
of information and then choose "C". The factors that play into who choose what
are like more numerous than the author has considered; or at least presented.

------
ccvannorman
This is why society develops bigger and bigger problems at scale: A few clever
powerful actors can easily manipulate the masses by virtue of these built-in
logical failings of most people, often to achieve their own evil or immoral
goals.

