280 HUMAN INTELLIGENCEIQ IN CULTURAL CONTEXTThinking or Reasoning
Th inking, reasoning, and prob lem solving are considered to be at the
heart of intelligence. Above all, IQ tests are considered to be mea sures of
“good thinking.” But, as mentioned earlier, there remains considerable
confusion about what thinking is. Mainstream investigation has spun off
into numerous specialized topics. Research has mostly consisted of pre-
senting generations of participants (usually long- suff ering students) with
banks of esoteric puzzles mostly detached from real- life prob lems. In
these contexts, thinking is sometimes described as judgment or decision
making. What has been repeatedly reported is that humans are not good
thinkers, and frequently make shocking errors! A number of best sellers
and thousands of scholarly papers have entertained us with the numer-
ous ways in which human thinking is “irrational.”
As a consequence, psychologists have spent much time considering
why most— other wise seemingly “intelligent”— people make errors with
simple logical prob lems devised and presented in the laboratory. For ex-
ample, participants have been presented with prob lems like: A bat and
ball cost a dollar and ten cents. Th e bat costs a dollar more than the ball.
How much does the ball cost?
Most people confi dently blurt out that the ball costs ten cents, which
is the wrong answer. A little refl ection should tell you that the ball costs
fi ve cents. Studies presenting participants with large numbers of such
prob lems show that average scores are unrelated (or even inversely
related) to IQ test per for mance. Th e fi ndings have led a number of psy-
chologists to suggest we have defi ciencies in our basic cognitive “ma-
chinery,” or the way the brain is “wired.” Our rationality is said to be
“bounded.” Daniel Kahneman— author of one of the bestsellers—
describes laboratory errors of thinking as defi ciencies in the basic “archi-
tecture” of the cognitive system.^29
Th is again, it seems to me, is a prob lem of engaging human thinking
out of context. Th e reason that some people fail such prob lems is exactly
the same as the reason some people fail IQ test items like the Raven Ma-
trices tests, described in chapter 3. It is simply not the way that the human
cognitive system is used to being engaged.
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