The Intelligence Trap: Revolutionise your Thinking and Make Wiser Decisions

by David Robson

We’ve already seen how our definition of intelligence could be expanded to include practical and creative reasoning. But those theories do not explicitly examine our rationality, defined as our capacity to make the optimal decisions needed to meet our goals, given the resources we have to hand, and to form beliefs based on evidence, logic and sound reasoning.* * Cognitive scientists such as Keith Stanovich describe two classes of rationality. Instrumental rationality is defined as ‘the optimisation of someone’s goal fulfilment’, or, less technically, as ‘behaving so that you get exactly what you want, given the resources available to you’. Epistemic rationality, meanwhile, concerns ‘how well your beliefs map onto the actual structure of the world’. By falling for fraudulent mediums, Conan Doyle was clearly lacking in the latter.