To be clear, I never said, nor do I believe: > "simple minded" people are biased by their 'emotion' but smart people are not > smart people are better able to guard against their biases
Let's stick to the topic. You keep using words with varying meanings as if they are interchangeable. Also context matters when using words.
Someone laments people making PURELY emotional decisions that are clearly illogical and thus send people to prison. (emotional thinking = system 1)
This is a lack of critical thinking (system 2)
We all fail to use critical thinking (one part of system 2) sometimes. As any characteristic in any group of individuals, there is variation, and some will use critical thinking more frequently than others.
At a certain low threshold of critical thinking, they are called 'simple minded'.
You say 'we are all like that'.
I contend that yes, we all fail to think critically sometimes. But some individuals will do so infrequently/not at all, because they are simply unable to grasp concepts. So yes, everyone does it, but no, not to the same degree. Just like everyone lies, some people are liers.
Is critical thinking and IQ correlated one for one? Absolutely not.
Do high IQ people use their IQ to justify non-critical thinking? Yes, yes they do.
But here's the crux: Critical thinking requires the understanding of concepts. The definition of intelligence, quite literally, is the ability to understand concepts.
I really don't have any studies that can prove that low intelligence can understand concepts. As it would literally break the definition of the words we are talking about. That's why I don't like the interchanging of words. It makes for people talking past each other.
There are specific words being used, with specific meanings in a specific context.
Change them, and the whole thing changes. 'Rational', 'bias', etc... were all introduced by you. They are vaguely related to the topic at hand. I was bringing Kanemans work into the fray based on the system 1 and system 2 concepts he describes. Just as someone talking about a Pavlovian response might talking purely about concepts of conditioning without any intention to conjure things like his interest with 'biomarkers'.
I completely understand Kaneman's point. It's valid. Just as it is valid to show that we all lie. We all cheat. We are all hypocritical sometimes. We all would steal (situational ethics).
It's part of the good side of post modernism, showing universality. But I find some people get lost in post modernism and make it a religion. If you say 'someone is a lier' they will smugly say 'we all lie'. As if frequency and intensity were not at play.
My contention is not against admitting there is a gradient of IQ or G or whatever metric of intelligence is used. That seems fairly apparent, even if uncomfortable for some to admit.
What I'm claiming is that engaging System 2 is not dependent on your level of intelligence. Take an example of three people being tasked with determining the fuel needed to reach escape velocity of earth. One may reflexively say "10,000 kg" because they are using System 1. Another may try to use algebra and the third calculus. The last two may both use System 2 even though person two doesn't have the capacity to understand calculus. Utilizing System 2 is not a result of intelligence, it's the result of being engaged enough to slow down and use analytical thinking. Whether they can do this is dependent on their System 2 mind, whether they arrive at the right answer is the result of their intelligence. This is where it feels like terms are being conflated.
Point taken on using terms interchangeably and cavalierly; it was poor selection on my part. In a similar vein, there was a reason I stayed away from the term "critical thinking". In psychology, critical thinking is distinct from intelligence and both are distinct from rationality (at least in the way Stanovich uses rationality). We should be careful not to conflate these terms as well.
In short, I don't think "System 2" engagement is dependent on the ability to understand concepts, it has more to do with the ability to focus one's attention with deliberate effort. Just like I don't think System 1 thinking is correlated to intelligence thresholds. I revisited some of the texts and studies over the course of this conversation and I think they back this up.
I agree system 2 is only activated on deliberate effort.
However effective use of critical thinking via system 2 has an additional requirement: intelligence.
Remember we have a topic: people being sent to jail, and emotional decision makers being called 'simple minded'. That's what you took issue with. That's what this thread is about.
If you honestly believe that someone with severe mental retardation has the same ability to engage critical thinking using system 2 in the context we are talking about (analyzing evidence as part of a jury) to the same level as someone with a higher IQ, then we will simply have to agree to disagree.
I already exposed why I believe this: critical thinking requires understanding concepts, intelligence is the ability to understand concepts... ergo, you need intelligence to engage in critical thinking.
OF COURSE intelligence won't make you think critically, that's obvious as I had originally stated, like the book, that system 2 is a deliberate process.
And remember, before you post more scarecrow arguments: no one said Critical thinking = intelligence. You keep fighting things you create. My point was extremely narrow and clear based on the clear and narrow context we are talking about.
I'd say the whole thing could be summed up at:
Simply minded emotional thinkers who don't use system 2 are causing harm.
Your post basically disagrees with this and says we all do it to the same degree.
I disagree with you for reasons.
My reasons don't change your perceptions.
Fine.
I never claimed people who rely on System 1 don't cause harm. I claimed that we all engage in System 1 thinking NOT that we all do it to the same degree. The entire intent of the original reply was to disagree with the idea that there are distinct classes of 'emotional' and 'rational' thinkers. You are reading into my point something that was never there and I'm not sure why.
>You keep bringing up intelligence
If you look, you were the one to bring up intelligence in your very first response and I've been trying to convey that this is a misunderstanding of my point. Intelligence and critical thinking are tangential and not what my original point was about. If you want to side with the OP, fine, just realize that appears to be an opinion that wasn't backed up with any research. To beat a dead horse, my follow-up point is that irrational decisions are made irrespective of intelligence. Going way back to my first reply to you, I think you keep mixing up rationality and intelligence. Stanovich came up with the terminology of System 1 and System 2 that you invoked and his research made it clear that System 2 thinking is not an intelligence-dependent trait. So it seems odd that you keep circling the wagons on this point.
> If you honestly believe that someone with severe mental retardation...
This is a straw man. Not only is it twisting my position but it's being hyperbolic.
> I disagree with you for reasons.
I can get behind your reasons and they seem plausible. It's just that the research seems to go against them. That's why I was really hoping you would back up your position with some academic opinion/research. Especially when the counterpoint is supported by research from two well-regarded psychologists, one of which is a Nobel Laureate and the other which is one of the most cited in his field, it's probably prudent to side with the existing research and not one's unfounded opinion.
If your point is that critical thinking is necessary to come to the right conclusions in court, there's no disagreement. If you feel that there are varying degrees of competency with regard to critical thinking, again there's no disagreement. That's not the point I was making which is why the conversation has been so hard for me to follow. Like I said before, it comes across as apropos of nothing like it's just a point you were just waiting for a chance to shoehorn into a conversation. At the very least, it doesn't seem to fit as a response to my original post and probably should have been posted in response to something else.
We all have the same access to system 2.
Like everyone having access to start a car, everyone needs to put in effort to start their car, but someone with low intelligence is like someone who has a car that has 10hp... they will go slower than someone who has a car that has 1000hp. Both can start the car equally is what you are saying.
Fair enough.
I think my point is, below a certain IQ threshold, the HP is virtually 0, and can move little to no distance/speed. Therefore, it's as if it wasn't there. My point is an observation arrived at from the very meanings of the words intelligence/critical thinking, there's really no studies that can 'prove' a word has a meaning. It's simply an agreed upon sound that we associate with concepts.
BTW, the degree of what is done is all I ever meant to get at. Look at my very first reply to you. The word 'degree' is central to my answer.
It seems like you are saying smart people are better able to guard against their biases because they have more access/capacity in their System 2 thinking. I disagree on this, and I think both Kahneman and Stanovich make it clear that equating (or correlating) System 2 to intelligence is a mistake. It feels like you may be making an unsubstantiated logical leap here to fit a model of the world that 'makes sense' but hasn't transitioned from hypothesis to theory. In the context of Kahneman's work, it comes across as a System 1 error to try and maintain coherence in a previously held worldview. Maybe I'm misinterpreting their work, but that's why I deliberately pointed out that I'm largely relying on a layman's understanding. I am genuinely interested (because it's a topic that I enjoy) if you have sources to back up this stance.
In regard to why I started using the term 'bias', it was mainly because Kahneman's work focuses largely on heuristics and biases that affect decisions. To speak about System 1 and System 2 hinders communication because it's generally only known to people familiar with his work. However, most people immediately understand what is meant when people say 'bias' or 'emotional decision'. It was probably bad wording on my part, but using 'emotional' was in response the earlier post because that was their choice of words to describe how people can't parse emotion from reason. I'm assuming if they were familiar with Kahneman's work, they would have chose more precise wording like "System 1" and "System 2". So the choice of words between 'emotion' or 'bias' was a bit clunky but meant to redirect the parent comment's sentiment into the verbiage of the academic work, not really an attempt of 'moving goalposts'. It was essentially the same topic (unless I misunderstood the parent comment's intent). The reason I responded is because I felt that comment missed one of the fundamental takeaways from Kahneman, namely that "simple minded" people are biased by their 'emotion' but smart people are not.
I think the key distinction in our opinions is that (to re-state your position), some 'simple-minded' people don't have access to System 2 (and thus can't avoid biases) because of the very nature of their lower intelligence. Psychologists specifically studied if intelligence is a discriminator between the level of bias in decisions and the conclusion was bias is independent of intelligence. To re-phrase one of my earlier comments, rational != intelligent. Or put another way, greater intelligence does not make you more rational or any less biased. The book Thinking Fast and Slow is rife with all kinds of examples of smart people doing otherwise irrational things as case studies.