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(p.i) Rationality and the Reflective Mind (p.ii) (p.iii) Rationality and the Reflective Mind 2011 (p.iv) Oxford University Press, Inc., publishes works that further Oxford University’s objective of excellence in research, scholarship, and education. Oxford New York Auckland Cape Town Dar es Salaam Hong Kong Karachi Kuala Lumpur Madrid Melbourne Mexico City Nairobi New Delhi Shanghai Taipei Toronto With offices in Argentina Austria Brazil Chile Czech Republic France Greece Guatemala Hungary Italy Japan Poland Portugal Singapore South Korea Switzerland Thailand Turkey Ukraine Vietnam Copyright © 2011 by Oxford University Press, Inc. Published by Oxford University Press, Inc. 198 Madison Avenue, New York, New York 10016 www.oup.com Oxford is a registered trademark of Oxford University Press All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the prior permission of Oxford University Press. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Stanovich, Keith E., 1950- Rationality and the reflective mind / Keith Stanovich. p. cm. ISBN 978-0-19-534114-0 1. Reasoning (Psychology) 2. Individual differences. 3. Intellect. 4. Cognition. I. Title. BF442.S727 2010 153.4'3—dc22 2010036746 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 Printed in USA on acid-free paper (p.v) Dedication (p.vi) For my friend Marilyn Preface (p.vii) In this book, I explore how data on individual differences in reasoning have implications for dual-process theory and the Great Rationality Debate in cognitive science. These same data on individual differences also have profound implications for how we understand the relationship between the concepts of intelligence and rationality, and the latter chapters of the book explore this relationship. My longtime colleague, Richard West, has worked with me on all of these issues and co-authors several of the chapters. More recently, Maggie Toplak of York University, has worked with us on the intelligence/rationality relationship and on a conceptual framework for assessing rational thought and is the co-author of Chapter 10. No one could ask for two more dedicated colleagues who make every day we work together full of anticipation and fun. My intellectual debts in writing this book are immense and are represented in the wide literature that I cite. Special note, though, goes to the work of Daniel Kahneman and Amos Tversky. Their early studies inspired my interest in rational thinking tasks that were new to psychology at the time. More recently, the work of Jonathan Evans and David Over provoked me to make my own contributions to dual-process theory. Jonathan was one of Oxford’s reviewer’s for this book, and went way beyond the call of duty with his review. He provided many pages of (p.viii) extremely apt suggestions that have been incorporated during several revisions of this book. Jonathan is a truly generous scholar. Oxford’s other reviewer was anonymous, but that scholar provided many useful suggestions as well. My editor at Oxford University Press, Catharine Carlin, is thanked for her enthusiasm for the project and for her patience in waiting for me to bring it to completion. Several conferences were seminal in allowing me to discuss these ideas at length: the Fourth International Thinking Conference in Durham, England; the Conference on Dual-Process Theories of Reasoning and Rationality in Cambridge, England, organized by Jonathan Evans and Keith Frankish; a workshop on dual-process theory at the University of Virginia organized by Tim Wilson and Jonathan Evans; the Sixth International Thinking Conference in Venice, Italy; and the NSF Workshop on Higher Cognition in Adolescents and Young Adults organized by Valerie Reyna. My empirical research on some of the issues discussed in this volume was made possible by support received from the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada and by the Canada Research Chairs program. Many members of the Stanovich/West/Toplak lab (a joint lab linking the University of Toronto, James Madison University, and York University) in the past decade have contributed in some way to the research of our own that is cited in this volume. Lab members, past and present, thanked for their participation are Maria Grunewald, Caroline Ho, Carol Kelley, Judi Kokis, Eleanor Liu, Robyn Macpherson, Sarah Mannino, Kimberly Marsh, Russ Meserve, Laura Page, George Potworowski, Walter Sá, and Geoff Sorge. Rationality and the Reflective Mind (p.xiii) Dual-Process Theory and the Great Rationality Debate Keith E. Stanovich DOI:10.1093/acprof:oso/9780195341140.003.0001 Abstract and Keywords 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 1 and Type 2 processing. It argues that the statistical distributions of the types of goals being pursued by Type 1 and Type 2 processing are different and that important consequences for human self-fulfillment follow from this fact. An overview of the subsequent chapters is presented. Keywords: rationality, human cognition, irrationality, Panglossians, Meliorists, dual process theory, Type 1 processing, Type 2 processing, self-fulfillment The term rationality has a strong and a weak sense. The strong sense of the term is the one used in cognitive science and it will be the one used throughout this book. However, a weaker sense of the term has sometimes influenced—and hence confused—arguments in the so-called “Great Rationality Debate” in cognitive science. The influence of the weak sense of the term has also impeded investigation into individual differences in rational thought which, as I hope to show in this book, has important implications for arguments in the Great Rationality Debate. Dictionary definitions of rationality tend to be of the weak sort—often seeming quite lame and unspecific (“the state or quality of being in accord with reason”). The meaning of rationality in modern cognitive science (the strong sense) is, in contrast, much more specific and prescriptive than this. The weak definitions of rationality derive from a categorical notion of rationality tracing to Aristotle (man as the rational animal). As de Sousa (2007) has noted, such a notion of rationality as “based on reason” has as its opposite not irrationality but arationality. Aristotle’s characterization is categorical—the behavior of entities is either based on thought or it is not. Animals are either rational or arational. In its stronger sense (the sense employed in cognitive science and in this book), rational thought is a normative notion. Its opposite is irrationality, and irrationality comes in degrees. Normative models of optimal judgment and decision making define perfect rationality in the noncategorical view employed in cognitive science. Rationality (and irrationality) come in degrees defined by the distance of the thought or behavior from the optimum defined by a normative model. de Sousa (2007) points out that the notion of rationality in Aristotle’s sense cannot be normative. Other animals may be arational, but only humans can be irrational. As de Sousa (2007) puts it, “if human beings can indeed be described as rational animals, it is precisely in virtue of the fact that (p.4) humans, of all the animals, are the only ones capable of irrational thoughts and actions” (p. 7). Hurley and Nudds (2006) make a similar point when they argue that, for a strong sense of the term: “ironically, rationality requires the possibility that the animal might err. It can’t be automatically right, no matter what it does…. when we say that an agent has acted rationally, we imply that it would have been a mistake in some sense to have acted in certain different ways. It can’t be the case that anything the agent might do would count as rational. This is normativity in a quite weak sense.” (p. 2) The weak sense they are referring to is an Aristotelian (categorical) sense, and no cognitive scientist is using rationality in this sense when claiming that an experiment has demonstrated human irrationality. When a cognitive scientist terms a behavior irrational he/she means that the behavior departs from the optimum prescribed by a particular normative model. The scientist is not implying that no thought or reason was behind the behavior. Some of the hostility that has been engendered by experimental claims of human irrationality no doubt derive from an influence (perhaps tacit) of the Aristotelian view—the thought that cognitive psychologists are saying that certain people are somehow less than human when they are said to behave irrationally. Nothing could be further from the case. All cognitive psychologists accept the de Sousa (2007) view that “man the rational animal” deserves Aristotle’s appellation and its corollary that humans are the only animal that can potentially display irrationality. Some of the heat in the Great Rationality Debate is no doubt caused by reactions to the term irrationality being applied to humans. As mentioned, lingering associations with the Aristotelian categorical view make charges of irrationality sound more cutting than they actually are. In the literature, we could do better to signal that it is the noncategorical, continuous sense of rationality and irrationality that is employed in cognitive science. When we find a behavioral pattern that is less than optimally rational, we could easily say that it is “less than perfectly rational,” rather than that it is irrational—with no loss of meaning. Perhaps if this had been the habit in the literature, the rationality debate in cognitive science would not have become so heated. For this reason, I will use the (p.5) term irrationality sparingly (except for the descriptions of the Great Rationality Debate in this chapter and in Chapter 8) and instead refer more often to continuous variation in rational thought. Such an emphasis also highlights the theme of the volume—that there are indeed individual differences in rational thought and that understanding the nature of these differences might have important theoretical implications. It should also be noted that in the view of rationality taken in this volume, rationality is a personal entity and not a subpersonal one (Bermudez, 2001; Davies, 2000; Frankish, 2009). A memory system in the human brain is not rational or irrational—it is merely efficient or inefficient (or of high or low capacity). Thus, subprocesses of the brain do not display rational or irrational properties per se, although they may contribute in one way or another to personal decisions or beliefs that could be characterized as such. Rationality concerns the actions of an entity in its environment that serve its goals. Of course, one could extrapolate the notion of environment to include the interior of the brain itself and then talk of a submodule that chose strategies rationally or not. This move creates two problems. First, what are the goals of this subpersonal entity—what are its interests that its rationality is trying to serve? This is unclear in the case of a subpersonal entity. Second, such a move regresses all the way down. We would need to talk of a neuron firing
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