My business, Decision Clarity Consulting, as it's name implies, focuses on effectiveness in decision-making, particularly under conditions of uncertainty (insufficient information) and diversity (teams of heterogeneous backgrounds and abilities).
My preferred model, which I have written about elsewhere in Thingfider, is based on a number of attributes, each of which correlates with good life outcomes. They also correlate with one another to some extent, but in varying ways.
The components of effective decision-making are contingent on:
KnowledgeKnowing the nature and degree of these attributes gives you some insight into the probabilities of successful outcomes.
Experience
Skills
Values
Behaviors
Capabilities
Motivation
Personality
Butler is looking at a somewhat different model and asking related questions. Butler's preamble is, however, cause for concern.
The advantages of being intelligent are undeniable. Intelligent people are more likely to get better grades and go farther in school. They are more likely to be successful at work. And they are less likely to get into trouble (e.g., commit crimes) as adolescents. Given all the advantages of intelligence, though, you may be surprised to learn that it does not predict other life outcomes, such as well-being. You might imagine that doing well in school or at work might lead to greater life satisfaction, but several large scale studies have failed to find evidence that IQ impacts life satisfaction or longevity. Grossman and his colleagues argue that most intelligence tests fail to capture real-world decision-making and our ability to interact well with others. This is, in other words, perhaps why “smart” people, do “dumb” things.Well-being, like happiness, is an ambiguous term which poses significant challenges around measurement. Categorical statements about the association of any attribute and well-being has to be ring-fenced to clarify definitions.
Similarly, the categorical assertion that IQ is not associated with longevity displays great confidence in the face of mixed evidence. See here, here, and here for studies indicating that IQ is predictive of longevity.
So right out of the gate, in paragraph two of a six paragraph article, we are given good reason for being suspicious of the quality of reporting.
But in the third paragraph, Butler states a conclusion I know I want to believe.
The ability to think critically, on the other hand, has been associated with wellness and longevity. Though often confused with intelligence, critical thinking is not intelligence. Critical thinking is a collection of cognitive skills that allow us to think rationally in a goal-orientated fashion, and a disposition to use those skills when appropriate. Critical thinkers are amiable skeptics. They are flexible thinkers who require evidence to support their beliefs and recognize fallacious attempts to persuade them. Critical thinking means overcoming all sorts of cognitive biases (e.g., hindsight bias, confirmation bias, etc.).What's the evidence?
Critical thinking predicts a wide range of life events. In a series of studies, conducted in the United States and abroad, my colleagues and I have found that critical thinkers experience fewer bad things in life. We asked people to complete an inventory of life events and take a critical thinking assessment (the Halpern Critical Thinking Assessment). The critical thinking assessment measures 5 components of critical thinking skills including verbal reasoning, argument analysis, hypothesis testing, probability and uncertainty, decision-making, and problem-solving. The inventory of negative life events captures different domains of life such as academic (e.g., I forgot about an exam), health (e.g., I contracted a sexually transmitted infection because I did not wear a condom), legal (e.g., I was arrested for driving under the influence), interpersonal (e.g., I cheated on my romantic partner who I had been with for over a year), financial (e.g., I have over $5000 of credit card debt), etc. Repeatedly, we found that critical thinkers experience fewer negative life events. This is an important finding because there is plenty of evidence that critical thinking can be taught and improved.It concerns me that Butler identifies "5 components of critical thinking skills including verbal reasoning, argument analysis, hypothesis testing, probability and uncertainty, decision-making, and problem-solving" which by my count seems to be six critical thinking skills.
I am also skeptical of their methodology. Self-reporting (the inventory of life events) is a notoriously challenging mechanism sensitive to all sorts of conditions. Any research which is strongly dependent on self-reporting is automatically suspect without corroborative evidence. Butler concludes that "critical thinkers experience fewer negative life events" but it doesn't take all that much imagination to speculate that there might be a covariance issue. Perhaps people with an inclination towards critical thinking are also psychologically stable/robust and do not dwell on past negative occurrences. Perhaps they take a spill, learn from it and then move on. Perhaps they report fewer negative life occurrences because they are disposed to not remember negative life occurrences?
I am glad that Butler is researching in this area and I am inclined to share her conclusions but I feel she is not actually providing good evidence to support that conclusion. There is a whiff of motivated reasoning. Her final paragraph might shed some light on that.
Reasoning and rationality more closely resemble what we mean when we say a person is smart than spatial skills and math ability. Furthermore, improving intelligence is difficult. Intelligence is largely determined by genetics. Critical thinking, though, can improve with training and the benefits have been shown to persist over time. Anyone can improve their critical thinking skills: Doing so, we can say with certainty, is a smart thing to do.The claim that anyone can improve their critical thinking skills is a statement of hope rather than a demonstrated fact. We have been talking about critical thinking for two or three decades and schools have had various initiatives to incorporate critical thinking into curriculums but there is precious little evidence that we are in fact raising the average ability to cultivate and practice critical thinking. Even among those advocating for critical thinking.
Postmodernist social justice people are increasingly at odds with most the fields of science and one area of especial conflict is that concerning IQ and heritability. The volume of studies supporting the importance of IQ and the strength of its heritability keep building. In political/ideological discussions it is still fashionable to abjure IQ and deny its heritability but the preponderance of the scientific evidence is that IQ does have predictive power and that it is materially heritable (40-70% depending on the study).
I wonder if Butler is seeking to find a way to avert the dilemma? Postmodernist social justice depends on a human blank slate and IQ and heritability are major impediments to that world view. Is Butler trying to circumvent that issue by displacing IQ with critical thinking? I have no means of knowing but that is my suspicion.
IQ is not easily susceptible to modification. Good maternal health, childhood nutrition and a cognitively challenging but carefully moderated environment in the 0-6 years age frame tilt the dial one way or another but only be a few points. If critical thinking is a skill in which people can be trained, then it allows the postmodernist to escape the shackles of biological determinism. It is pure speculation, but I suspect that Butler is allowing ideological preferences to not only shape her research but determine her conclusions.
Which is unfortunate. This is an interesting field in which we need more reliable information and the more cognitive pollution there is out there, the longer it takes to achieve better understanding of reality.
Posts
No comments:
Post a Comment