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Stanovich’s rationality program and backgammon at school

Posted By: Fabrice Liardet
Date: Sunday, 24 July 2011, at 2:53 p.m.

Keith Stanovich is a cognitive psychologists who is one of the world’s authorities on rationality and cognitive bias. He has argued in several books that rationality (more or less in the economist’s sense) was a very important skill that was terribly insufficiently developed or valued in our current schools. His probably most accessible book and most telling title is What Intelligence Tests Miss : the psychology of rational thought (Yale University Press, 2009). I have just finished Rationality and the Reflective Mind (Oxford University Press, 2001), which seemed a little more advanced but which I found excellent. In that latter book Stanovich exposes a lot of hard data showing that rationality is only weakly correlated with fluid intelligence, and comes with strong arguments for a program of education to rationality.

After reading here about some projects to teach backgammon at school, I couldn’t help thinking that Stanovich’s endorsement and conceptualizations could be a great backing for such a project. So I will reproduce here Stanovich’s taxonomy of the possible rational thinking problems so that we can see how backgammon could be a prime teaching tool for remedying to some of them.

Category 1, The Cognitive Miser : sparing oneself the effort of thinking as hard as one can

1) Default to the Autonomous Mind : That is the real autopilot functioning, acting on gut feeling without even thinking about it.

2) Override Failure : Slightly different because the possibility of engaging reflection has been considered, but the decision has been to rely on gut feeling.

3) Serial Associative Cognition with Focal Bias : The shallowest kind of thinking, functioning by association of ideas instead of examining alternative worlds.

Category 2.1, Mindware Gap : missing knowledge

4) Probability knowledge (self-explanatory for the backgammon player).

5) Importance of Alternative Hypotheses : Failure to consider possible worlds where one’s hypothesized theories don’t obtain.

6) Domain-Specific Knowledge Structures : e.g. economic literacy, causal reasoning, scientific thinking, etc.

Category 2.2, Contaminated Mindware : fallacious knowledge

7) Lay Psychological Theory : fallacious theories that people form about their own mind (that one actually is also a part of category 2.1, because there are things science knows about our minds, that most people don’t know).

8) Evaluation-Disabling Strategies : the promise of punishment if the mindware is questioned, or rewards for faith in the mindware (some religions would fit here), or making the mindware unfalsifiable.

9) Egocentric Processing : seeing the world only from one’s vantage point of view, or only what serves one’s own interests.

10) Domain-Specific Knowledge Structures : specific fallacies, e.g. the gambler’s fallacy.

I would say that backgammon can be most fruitful in building useful mindware (category 2.1). What do you think about it ?