Thinking and Intelligence

Thinking and Intelligence • Thought: Using what we know • Reasoning rationally • Barriers to reasoning rationally • Measuring intelligence: The psychometric approach • Dissecting intelligence: The cognitive approach • Animal minds ©2002 Prentice Hall

The Elements of Cognition • Concept • Mental category that groups objects, relations, activities, abstractions, or qualities having common properties. • A basic concept has a moderate number of instances and is easier to acquire. • A prototype is an especially representative example of a concept. • Proposition • A unit of meaning that is made up of concepts and expresses a single idea. ©2002 Prentice Hall

The Elements of Cognition • Cognitive Schema • An integrated mental network of knowledge, beliefs, and expectations concerning a particular topic or aspect of the world. • Mental Image • A mental representation that mirrors or resembles the thing it represents. ©2002 Prentice Hall

How Conscious is Thought? • Subconscious Processes • Mental processes occurring outside of conscious awareness but accessible to consciousness when necessary. • Nonconscious Processes • Mental processes occurring outside of and not available to conscious awareness. • Implicit learning occurs when you have: • acquired knowledge about something without being aware of how you did so, and without being able to state exactly what you have learned. ©2002 Prentice Hall

Formal Reasoning: Algorithms and Logic • Deductive Reasoning • A tool of formal logic in which a conclusion necessarily follows from a set of observations or propositions (premises). • Inductive Reasoning • A tool of formal logic in which a conclusion probably follows from a set of observations or propositions or premises, but could be false. ©2002 Prentice Hall

Informal Reasoning: Heuristics and Dialectical Thinking • Heuristic • A rule of thumb that suggests a course of action or guides problem solving but does not guarantee an optimal solution. • Dialectical Reasoning • A process in which opposing facts or ideas are weighed and compared, with a view to determining the best solution or resolving differences. ©2002 Prentice Hall

Reflective Judgment • Skills • The ability to question assumptions. • Evaluate and integrate evidence. • Relate that evidence to a theory or opinion. • Consider alternative interpretations. • Reach defendable conclusions. • Be able to reassess those conclusions in face of new information. • Developmental stages include prereflective, quasi-reflective, and reflective. ©2002 Prentice Hall

Barriers to Reasoning Rationally • Exaggerating the improbable • Avoiding loss • Biases due to mental sets • The confirmation bias • The hindsight bias • The need for cognitive consistency • Overcoming our cognitive biases ©2002 Prentice Hall

Exaggerating the Improbable • Availability Heuristic • The tendency to judge the probability of an event by how easy it is to think of examples or instances. • For example, in the wake of September 11, most people overestimated their odds of dying in a plane crash even though they continued to take higher risks by driving in their cars. ©2002 Prentice Hall

Avoiding Loss • People try to minimize risks and losses when making decisions. • Responses to the same choice will differ based on whether outcome is framed as gain or loss. • In the example, outcomes are the same in Problems 1 & 2 ©2002 Prentice Hall

Biases Due to Mental Sets • A tendency to solve problems using procedures that worked before on similar problems. • Mental sets make learning and problem solving more efficient. • For example, we look for patterns in events. • Not helpful when a problem calls for fresh insights or a new approach. ©2002 Prentice Hall

The Hindsight Bias • The tendency to overestimate one’s ability to have predicted an event once the outcome is known. • Also known as the “I knew it all along” phenomenon. • Common in political judgments, medical judgments, military decisions. ©2002 Prentice Hall

The Confirmation Bias • The tendency to look for or pay attention only to information that confirms one’s own beliefs. Test this rule: If a card has a vowel on one side, it has an even number on the other side. Which 2 cards to turn over? ©2002 Prentice Hall

Need for Cognitive Consistency • Cognitive Dissonance: • A state of tension that occurs when a person simultaneously holds two cognitions that are psychologically inconsistent, or • when a person’s belief is inconsistent with his or her behavior. ©2002 Prentice Hall

Conditions which may reduce dissonance. • When you need to justify a choice or decision you freely made. • When you need to justify behavior that conflicts with your view of yourself. • When you need to justify the effort put into a decision or choice. ©2002 Prentice Hall

Justification of Effort • The tendency of individuals to increase their liking for something they have worked hard for or suffered to attain. • A common form of dissonance reduction. • After listening to a boring group discussion, those who went through sever initiation to join, rated it most highly. (Aronson & Mills, 1959) ©2002 Prentice Hall

Defining Intelligence • Intelligence • An inferred characteristic of an individual, usually defined as the ability to profit from experience, acquire knowledge, think abstractly, act purposefully, or adapt to changes in the environment. • g factor • A general intellectual ability assumed by many theorists to underlie specific mental abilities and talents. • Psychometrics • The measurement of mental abilities, traits and processes. ©2002 Prentice Hall

The Invention of IQ tests • Binet believed we should measure a child’s mental age. • Binet and Simon developed a test which measured memory, vocabulary, and perceptual discrimination. • Mental age was divided by chronological age and multiplied by 100 to get a IQ or intelligent quotient score. • Now IQ scores are derived from norms provided for standardized intelligence tests. ©2002 Prentice Hall

The Psychometric Approach • IQ scores are distributed “normally” • Bell-shaped curve • Very high and low scores are rare • 68% of people have IQ between 85-115 • 99.7% between 55-145 ©2002 Prentice Hall

Can IQ Tests be Culture Free? • Attempts to make IQ tests culture fair and culture free have backfired because different cultures have different problem-solving strategies. • Cultural values and experiences affect a person’s: • Attitude toward exams, • Comfort in the settings required for testing, • Motivation • Rapport with test provider, • Competitiveness, and • Ease of independent problem solving. ©2002 Prentice Hall

Expectations, Stereotypes and IQ Scores • Scores are affected by expectations for performance. • These expectations are shaped by cultural stereotypes. • Stereotype threat • A burden of doubt one feels about his or her performance due to negative stereotypes about his or her group’s abilities. • Research has shown effects of stereotype threat on African-Americans, Latinos, low-income people, women, and elderly people. ©2002 Prentice Hall

Sternberg's Triarchic Theory • Componential - a.k.a. “Analytic” • Comparing, analyzing, and evaluating. • This type of processes correlates best with IQ. • Experiential - a.k.a. “Creative” • Inventing or designing solutions to new problems. • Transfer skills to new situations. • Contextual - a.k.a. “Practical” • Using (i.e., applying) the things you know in everyday contexts. ©2002 Prentice Hall

Domains of Intelligence • Emotional intelligence • The ability to: • identify your own and other people’s emotions accurately, • express your emotions clearly, and • regulate emotions in yourself and others. • Appears to be biologically based (Damasio, 1994). ©2002 Prentice Hall

Motivation and intelligence • Comparing the 100 most successful men with 100 least successful, researchers found that motivation, not IQ made the difference. • Motivation to work hard at intellectual tasks differs as a function of culture. • American children are as knowledgeable as Asian children on general skills. ©2002 Prentice Hall

Beliefs about intelligence • Asian parents, teachers, and students are more likely to belief that math ability comes from studying. • Americans more likely to view ability as innate. • American parents had lower academic standards for kids. • American children did not value education as much. ©2002 Prentice Hall

Animal Intelligence • Cognitive Ethology • The study of cognitive processes in nonhuman animals. • Studies in cognitive ethology have shown evidence that some animals can • Anticipate future events. • Use numbers to label quantities. • Coordinate activities with other animals. ©2002 Prentice Hall

Animals and Language • Language is a critical element of human cognition. • Many animal species can be taught to communicate in ways that resemble language. • Chimpanzees and bonobos converse using American Sign Language and symbol board systems • An African grey parrot has been taught to count, classify, and compare objects using English words • Whether these behaviors are language depends on how you define “language.” ©2002 Prentice Hall

Thinking About Animal Thinking • Anthropomorphism • The tendency to falsely attribute human qualities to nonhuman beings. • Anthropocentrism • The tendency to think, mistakenly, that human beings have nothing in common with other animals. ©2002 Prentice Hall

Thinking and Intelligence