The Development of a Test of Rational Thinking

The lay public and scientists alike have long puzzled over the phenomenon of smart people doing stupid things.  Cognitive science now provides the terminology to understand this phenomenon and the methodologies to study it.  Smart people often act stupidly because intelligence and rationality are two different things.  Psychology has devised many measures of intelligence.  However, we do not measure rationality systematically.  In the three-year term of our grant, we plan to develop the first prototype of a test to assess individual differences in rational thinking—in short, a test that could in theory assign people an RQ (Rationality Quotient) analogous to an IQ.  The project will generate at least six scholarly articles/chapters demonstrating the theoretical and empirical separability of intelligence and rationality.  We will present our framework for the comprehensive measurement of rational thinking at four leading national conferences.  Our capstone product will be a book in which we will summarize the conceptual justification for—indeed, the necessity of—a test of rational thinking.  We hope that our prototype test will ignite a major discussion in the world of educational assessment about the cognitive skills that IQ tests miss.  Such discussions have long focused on noncognitive domains, implicitly conceding that IQ tests capture most of what is important cognitively.  We wish to challenge this assumption about mental abilities.  This will have profound effects for educators to question this assumption, because it could fuel a new push to include more rational thinking and decision making skills in the curriculum and begin a discussion of the limitations of current assessment devices for university admissions and employment.

Grant Amount:

$999,376

Start Date:

January 2013

End Date:

December 2015

Grant ID:

34603