Invitation to Psychology

Chapter 7

t

hinking and Intelligence

COn

C

ept Map

266 Chapter 7 Thinking and Intelligence

Thought

The Elements of Cognition

Reasoning

Reasoning is purposeful mental activity that

involves drawing inferences and conclusions

from observations or propositions.

• Formal reasoning problems usually have a correct or
  best solution.


• Informal reasoning problems often have no clearly
  correct solution and require dialectical reasoning,
  the process of comparing and evaluating opposing
  points of view.

Reflective judgment is the ability to evaluate and

integrate evidence, consider alternative interpretions,

and reach a defensible conclusion. Many people

never do develop this ability.

How Conscious Is Thought?

• A concept is a mental category that
  groups objects, relations, activities,
  abstractions, or qualities that share
  certain properties.


• Basic concepts have a moderate number
  of instances and are easier to acquire than
  those having few or many instances.


• Prototypical instances of a concept are
  more representative than others.


• The words and grammatical rules used to
  express concepts may influence how we
  think about them.


• 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.
  
  
  • Because of the capacity for
    automatic processing, many
    people think they are good
    multitaskers, but in reality
    multitasking increases stress,
    errors, and reaction times,
  
  
  
  

Hormones, Emotion, and Memory

attention.

• Nonconscious processes
  remain outside of awareness
  and can be involved in
  implicit learning, where you
  can’t state exactly what it is
  you have learned.


• Mindlessness keeps people from
  recognizing the need for a
  change in behavior.

Problem Solving and Decision Making

• Conscious and unconscious processes are
  both involved in solving problems.


• Well defined problems can often be solved
  by using an algorithm, but fuzzier
  problems may require application of a
  heuristic.


• People also rely on intuition and insight
  to solve problems and make decisions.

Reasoning Rationally Many cognitive biases are obstacles to rational thinking:

• Exaggerating the probability of improbable events, in part because
  of the affect and availability heuristics.


• Avoidance of loss, which makes people susceptible to the framing
  effect; in general, people are more cautious when a choice is framed
  in terms of loss rather than gain.


• the fairness bias.


• the hindsight bias.


• the confirmation bias.


• formation of mental sets.


• The need to reduce cognitive dissonance, the tension created
  when two cognitions or a cognition and a behavior conflict. People
  reduce postdecision dissonance in various ways, including the
  justification of effort.

Barriers to Reasoning Rationally

Concepts

Propositions Mental Images

Cognitive Schemas

COGNITIVE DISSONANCE

Tension

(cognitive

dissonance)

Efforts to reduce

dissonance:

Reject belief

Change behavior

Deny the evidence

Rationalize

Behavior conflicts with

attitude or belief

Cognitions conflict