262 Chapter 7 Thinking and Intelligence
Summary
Thought: using What We Know
• Thinking is the mental manipulation of information. Our mental
representations simplify and summarize information from the
environment.
• A concept is a mental category that groups objects, relations,
activities, abstractions, or qualities that share certain proper-
ties. Basic concepts have a moderate number of instances
and are easier to acquire than concepts with few or many
instances. Prototypical instances of a concept are more rep-
resentative than others. The language we use to express con-
cepts may influence how we think about the world.
• Propositions are made up of concepts and express a unitary
idea. They may be linked together to form cognitive schemas,
which serve as mental models of aspects of the world. Mental
images also play a role in thinking.
• Subconscious processes lie outside of awareness but can be
brought into consciousness when necessary. They allow us to
perform two or more actions at once when one of the actions
is highly automatic. But multitasking is usually inefficient,
introduces errors, and can even be dangerous, as when people
attempt to multitask while driving.
• Nonconscious processes remain outside of awareness but none-
theless affect behavior; they are involved in implicit learning,
which occurs when we learn something but aren’t able to state
exactly what we’ve learned. Even conscious processing may be
carried out in a mindless fashion.
• Both conscious and nonconscious processes are involved in
problem solving and making decisions. When problems are
well defined, they can often be solved with an algorithm; fuzz-
ier problems may require application of rules of thumb called
heuristics. “Fast” thinking refers to rapid, intuitive, emotional,
almost automatic decisions; “slow” thinking requires intellec-
tual effort, which is why most people rely on the former—and
make mistakes.
Reasoning Rationally
• Reasoning is purposeful mental activity that involves drawing
inferences and conclusions from observations, facts, or assump-
tions. Formal reasoning problems permit a single correct or best
solution. Informal reasoning problems often have no clearly
correct solution. People may not have all the information they
need, or may disagree about basic assumptions. For these rea-
sons, people need practice in dialectical thinking about oppos-
ing points of view.
• Studies of reflective judgment show that many people have
trouble thinking dialectically. Prereflective thinkers do not dis-
tinguish between knowledge and belief or between belief and
evidence. Quasi-reflective thinkers believe that because knowl-
edge is sometimes uncertain, any judgment about the evidence
is purely subjective. Those who think reflectively understand
that even when knowledge is uncertain, some judgments are
more valid than others, depending on their coherence and fit
with the evidence. Many people never learn to think reflectively,
but when students get encouragement and ample opportunities
to practice this ability, their thinking becomes more complex
and sophisticated.Barriers to Reasoning Rationally
• The ability to reason clearly and rationally is affected by many
cognitive biases. People tend to exaggerate the likelihood of
improbable events in part because of the affect and availabil-
ity heuristics. They are swayed in their choices by the desire
to avoid loss and by the framing effect. They forgo economic
gain because of a fairness bias. They overestimate their ability
to have made accurate predictions (the hindsight bias), attend
mostly to evidence that confirms what they want to believe (the
confirmation bias), and are often mentally rigid, forming mental
sets and seeing patterns where none exist.
• The theory of cognitive dissonance holds that people are
motivated to reduce the tension that exists when two cogni-
tions, or a cognition and a behavior, conflict. They can reduce
dissonance by rejecting or changing a belief, changing their
behavior, or rationalizing. Dissonance is uncomfortable, and
people are motivated to reduce it after a decision has been
made (postdecision dissonance), when their actions violate
their concept of themselves as honest and kind, and when they
have put hard work into an activity (the justification of effort).Measuring Intelligence: The Psychometric
Approach
• Intelligence is hard to define. The psychometric approach
focuses on how well people perform on standardized apti-
tude tests. Most psychometric psychologists believe that a
general ability, a g factor, underlies this performance. They
distinguish between crystallized intelligence (which reflects
accumulated knowledge) and fluid intelligence (which reflects
the ability to reason and to use information to solve new
problems).
• The intelligence quotient, or IQ, represents how well a person
has done on an intelligence test compared to other people.
Alfred Binet designed the first widely used intelligence test to
identify children who could benefit from remedial work. But
in the United States, people assumed that intelligence tests
revealed natural ability and used the tests to categorize people
in school and in the armed services.Listen to the Audio File at MyPsychLab