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Invitation To Psychology
Carol Wade and Carol Tavris
PowerPoint Presentation by
H. Lynn Bradman
Metropolitan Community College-Omaha
Wade and Tavris © 2005
Prentice Hall
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Thinking and Intelligence
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Prentice Hall
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Thinking and Intelligence
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Thought: Using What We Know
Reasoning Rationally
Barriers to Reasoning Rationally
Intelligence
The Origins of Intelligence
Animal Minds
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Thought: Using What We Know
The Elements of Cognition
How Conscious Is Thought?
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The Elements of Cognition
• Concept: Mental category
that groups objects,
relations, activities,
abstractions, or qualities
having common
properties.
• Proposition: A unit of
meaning that is made up
of concepts and
expresses a single idea.
• Mental Image:
Representation that
mirrors or resembles the
thing it represents.
• Cognitive Schema: An
integrated mental
network of knowledge,
beliefs, and expectations
concerning a particular
topic or aspect of the
world.
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How Conscious is Thought?
• Subconscious Processes: Mental
processes occurring outside of conscious
awareness but accessible to
consciousness when necessary.
• Nonconscious Processes: Mental
processes occurring outside of and not
available to conscious awareness.
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Reasoning Rationally
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Reasoning Rationally
• Formal Reasoning: Algorithms and Logic
• Informal Reasoning: Heuristics and
Dialectical Thinking
• Reflective Judgment
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Formal Logic
• Deductive Reasoning:
A tool of formal logic in which a conclusion
necessarily follows from a set of observations
or propositions (premises).
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Formal Logic
• Inductive Reasoning:
A tool of formal logic in which a conclusion
probably follows from a set of observations or
propositions or premises, but could be false.
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Informal Reasoning
• Heuristic:
– A rule of thumb that suggests a course of
action or guides problem solving but does
not guarantee an optimal solution.
• Dialectical Reasoning:
– A process in which opposing facts or ideas
are weighed and compared, with a view to
determining the best solution or resolving
differences.
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Barriers to Reasoning Rationally
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Barriers to Reasoning Rationally
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Exaggerating the Improbable
Avoiding Loss
The Confirmation Bias
Biases Due to Mental Sets
The Hindsight Bias
The Need for Cognitive Consistency
Overcoming Our Cognitive Biases
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Exaggerating the
Improbable
• Availability Heuristic:
– The tendency to judge the probability of an
event by how easy it is to think of examples
or instances.
– For example, most people
overestimate the odds of dying in a
plane crash.
– Dying in an automobile accident is far more
likely.
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Avoiding Loss
• People try to minimize
risks and losses when
making decisions.
• Responses to the same
choice will differ based on
whether outcome is
framed as gain or loss.
– In the example,
outcomes are the
same in Problems 1
and 2.
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The Confirmation Bias
• Confirmation Bias: The tendency to look
for or pay attention only to information
that confirms one’s own beliefs.
E
J
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Test this rule: If a card has a
vowel on one side, it has an
even number on the other
side.
Which 2 cards to turn over?
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Biases Due to Mental Sets
• Mental Set: A tendency to solve
problems using procedures that worked
before on similar problems.
• Mental sets help us solve most problems
efficiently.
• Not helpful when a problem calls for
fresh insights or a new approach.
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The Nine-Dot Problem
• Connect all 9 dots
• Use only 4 lines
• Do not lift your pencil
from the page after
you begin drawing
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The Hindsight Bias
• Hindsight Bias: The tendency to overestimate
one’s ability to have predicted an event once
the outcome is known.
– Also known as the “I knew it all along”
phenomenon.
• “The older they get the better they were when
they were younger.”
– Jim Bouton, professional baseball player
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Need for Cognitive
Consistency
• Cognitive Dissonance:
– A state of tension
that occurs when a
person
simultaneously holds
two cognitions that
are psychologically
inconsistent, or
when a person’s
belief is inconsistent
with his or her
behavior.
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Intelligence
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Intelligence
• Measuring Intelligence: The
Psychometric Approach
• Dissecting Intelligence: The Cognitive
Approach
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Intelligence
• Intelligence: An inferred characteristic of
an individual, usually defined as the
ability to profit from experience, acquire
knowledge, think abstractly, act
purposefully, or adapt to changes in the
environment.
• g factor: A general intellectual ability
assumed by many theorists to underlie
specific mental abilities and talents.
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The Psychometric Approach
• IQ scores are distributed “normally”
– Bell-shaped curve
• Very high and low scores are rare
– 68% of people
have IQ between
85-115
– 99.7% between
55145
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The Cognitive Approach
• Metacognition: The knowledge or
awareness of one’s own cognitive
processes.
• Tacit Knowledge: Strategies for success
that are not explicitly taught but that
instead must be inferred.
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Sternberg's Triarchic Theory
• Components - a.k.a. “Analytic”
– Comparing, analyzing, and evaluating.
– This type of processes correlates best with IQ.
• Experiential - a.k.a. “Creative”
– Inventing or designing solutions to new problems.
– Transfer skills to new situations.
• Contextual - a.k.a. “Practical”
– Using (i.e., applying) the things you know in everyday
contexts.
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The Origins of Intelligence
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The Origins of Intelligence
• Genes and Intelligence
• The Environment and Intelligence
• Attitudes, Motivation, and Intellectual
Success
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Correlations in Siblings’ IQ
Scores
• IQ scores of siblings
were highly
correlated, even
when they were
reared apart.
• Identical twins have
higher correlations
than fraternal twins.
– Suggests a genetic
link
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Explaining Group Differences
• Within a group with
all treated exactly
the same, differences
may reflect genetics.
• When one group
differs from another,
the differences may
reflect environmental
differences.
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Environment and
Intelligence
• Factors associated with reduced IQ:
– Poor prenatal care
– Malnutrition
– Exposure to toxins
– Stressful family circumstances
• Healthy and stimulating environments
can raise IQ, sometimes dramatically.
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Attitudes and Intellectual
Success
• Asian children score higher
on standard math tests than
American children.
• Differences:
– Americans are more
likely than Asians to
believe that math ability
is innate.
– Americans have far lower
standards for their
children.
– Asian children value
education more highly
than Americans.
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Animal Minds
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Animal Minds
• Animal Intelligence
• Animals and Language
• Thinking About the Thinking of Animals
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Animal Intelligence
• Cognitive Ethology: The study of
cognitive processes in nonhuman
animals.
• Studies in cognitive ethology have
shown evidence that some animals can
– Anticipate future events
– Use numbers to label quantities
– Coordinate activities with other
animals
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Animals and Language
• Language is a critical element of human
cognition
• Many animal species can be taught to
communicate in ways that resemble language
– Chimpanzees and bonobos converse using American
Sign Language and symbol board systems
– An African grey parrot has been taught to count,
classify, and compare objects using English words
• Whether these behaviors are language depends
on how you define “language.”
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Thinking About Animal
Thinking
• Anthropomorphism: The tendency to
falsely attribute human qualities to
nonhuman beings.
• Anthropocentrism: The tendency to
think, mistakenly, that human beings
have nothing in common with other
animals.
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