habit had a thoughtful phase (scanning the tracks), he was not thought-
ful about his habit (choosing the point where he should scan the tracks).
Thus, the idea of habits of mind is not self-contradictory. A behavior
can be habitual in its management but mindful in what it does. Still, one
might ask, “Why not have it all? Ideally, shouldn’t thinking processes
always be mindfully managed for that extra edge?” Probably not. At least
three things are wrong with this intuitively appealing ideal.
First, having to manage a thinking process mindfully would likely
reduce the thoughtfulness of the process itself. As Herbert Simon (1957)
and many other psychologists have emphasized, we humans have a lim-
ited capacity for processing information. Committing the management
of a thinking process to routine is one way to open up mental space for the
work the process has to do.
Second, life has many distractions and preoccupations. A well-
developed habit is more likely to make its presence felt than a practice that
always must be deployed with meticulous deliberateness.
The third objection to this ideal of thoroughly mindful thinking goes
beyond these pragmatic considerations to a logical point. Suppose the
general rule is that thinking processes need mindful management. Surely
managing a thinking process is itself a thinking process, so that process,
too, needs mindful management. And the process of managing that needs
mindful management, and so on. It is mindful management all the way
up, an infinite tower of metacognition, each process managed by its own
mindfully managed manager. Clearly this approach won’t work. Enter
habits of mind, an apt challenge to a misguided conception of thinking
as thoroughly thoughtful.
The notion of habits of mind also challenges another conception:
intelligence. Most of the research on human intelligence is emphatically
“abilities centric” (Perkins, 1995; Perkins, Jay, & Tishman, 1993). As men-
tioned in Chapter 1, the IQ tradition sees intelligence as a pervasive,
monolithic mental ability, summed up by IQ and Charles Spearman’s
(1904) “g” factor, a statistical construct representing general intelligence.
A number of theorists have proposed that there are many kinds of mental
ability (2 to 150, according to one model developed by Guilford [1967]).
Although this book is not a setting where these models bear review (see
Foreword xiii