This thought process is called fully disjunctive reasoning-reasoning that considers all possibilities. If Anne is not married, the answer is still A: in this case, Jack is the married person, and he is looking at Anne, the unmarried person. If Anne is married, the answer is A: she would be the married person who is looking at an unmarried person (George). You need to consider both possibilities, either married or unmarried, to determine whether you have enough information to draw a conclusion.
Not even wrong rationalwiki how to#
Here is how to think it through logically: Anne is the only person whose marital status is unknown. Is a married person looking at an unmarried person? Jack is looking at Anne, but Anne is looking at George. Try to answer it yourself before reading the solution:ġ. Humans are cognitive misers because our basic tendency is to default to the processing mechanisms that require less computational effort, even when they are less accurate.Īre you a cognitive miser? Consider the following problem, taken from the work of Hector Levesque, a computer scientist at the University of Toronto.
Others are comparatively low in computational power, but they are fast, require little concentration and do not interfere with other ongoing cognition.
Some mechanisms have great computational power, letting us solve many problems with great accuracy, but they are slow, require much concentration and can interfere with other cognitive tasks. When approaching a problem, we can choose from any of several cognitive mechanisms. The processing problem comes about because we tend to be cognitive misers. One is a processing problem, the other a content problem. Decades of research in cognitive psychology have suggested two causes of dysrationalia. But as I show in my 2010 book, What Intelligence Tests Miss: The Psychology of Rational Thought, there are ways to measure dysrationalia and ways to correct it. Millions of dollars are spent on unneeded projects by government and private industry when decision makers are dysrationalic, billions are wasted on quack remedies, unnecessary surgery is performed and costly financial misjudgments are made. In the 21st century, shallow processing can lead physicians to choose less effective medical treatments, can cause people to fail to adequately assess risks in their environment, can lead to the misuse of information in legal proceedings, and can make parents resist vaccinating their children. It is useful to get a handle on dysrationalia and its causes because we are beset by problems that require increasingly more accurate, rational responses. We have an implicit assumption that intelligence and rationality go together-or else why would we be so surprised when smart people do foolish things? Although most people recognize that IQ tests do not measure every important mental faculty, we behave as if they do. I coined the term “dysrationalia” (analogous to “dyslexia”), meaning the inability to think and behave rationally despite having adequate intelligence, to draw attention to a large domain of cognitive life that intelligence tests fail to assess.
The behavior of such people tells us that we are missing something important by treating intelligence as if it encompassed all cognitive abilities. No doubt you know several folks with perfectly respectable IQs who repeatedly make poor decisions.
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