Table Of Content(p.i) Rationality and the Reflective Mind (p.ii)
(p.iii) Rationality and the Reflective Mind
2011
(p.iv)
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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
