Results for “Tests”

772 found

The always-interesting-and-still-underrated Michelle Dawson points me to this batch of work.  Here is one of the papers, by Keith E. Stanovich and Richard F. West:

In 7 different studies, the authors observed that a large number of thinking biases are uncorrelated with cognitive ability. These thinking biases include some of the most classic and well-studied biases in the heuristics and biases literature, including the conjunction effect, framing effects, anchoring effects, outcome bias, base-rate neglect, “less is more” effects, affect biases, omission bias, myside bias, sunk-cost effect, and certainty effects that violate the axioms of expected utility theory. In a further experiment, the authors nonetheless showed that cognitive ability does correlate with the tendency to avoid some rational thinking biases, specifically the tendency to display denominator neglect, probability matching rather than maximizing, belief bias, and matching bias on the 4-card selection task. The authors present a framework for predicting when cognitive ability will and will not correlate with a rational thinking tendency.

Even more interesting, in my view, is that higher-IQ people are more likely to behave rationally when they are told that a rationality issue is on the table, but less so otherwise. 

If you are interested in issues of IQ, or for that matter overcoming bias, you should read Stanovich's work.  As noted above, higher-IQ people seem to be just as guilty of "myside bias."

Stanovich has a new book summarizing some of the results, namely What Intelligence Tests Miss: The Psychology of Rational Thought.  It is more idiosyncratic than the articles (he overcommits to one very particular model of the mind; cognitive laziness, without regard for margin) but recommended nonetheless.  For those who care about these issues, a must.

This caught my eye:

If you’ve ever had to take a test in a room with a lot of people, you may be able to relate to this study: The more people you’re competing against, it turns out, the less motivated and competitive you are. Psychologists observed this pattern across several different situations. Students taking standardized tests in more crowded venues got lower scores. Students asked to complete a short general-knowledge test as fast as possible to win a prize if they were in the fastest 20 percent completed it faster if they were told that they were competing against 10 people rather than 100. Students asked how fast they would run in a race for a $1,000 prize if they finished in the top 10 percent said they would run faster in a race against 50 people rather than 500. Similarly, students contemplating a job interview or Facebook-friending contest said they would be less competitive if they expected more competitors – even if "winning" only required finishing in the top 20 percent. The authors conclude that competitiveness was curtailed because the larger the group, the more difficult it is to compare oneself directly to others.

The original paper is here, but note that context effects may well give you varying results in other settings.  The initial article, from the Boston Globe, discusses several other social science mechanisms of interest, although I was not surprised to learn that your dog relaxes you.

Addendum: Here is my earlier article on invisible competition.

You may have heard about the recent study by Mark Kishiyama et.al. described by USA Today as follows:

A new study finds that certain brain functions of some low-income 9-
and 10-year-olds pale in comparison with those of wealthy children and
that the difference is almost equivalent to the damage from a stroke.

Here is more detail:

…[they] rigged up the noggins of 26 kids — with an average age of 9.5 years —
with probes that sense the ebb and flow of electrical current in
different regions of the brain. Then, they put them through a battery
of neuropsychological tests. Half of the kids came from families with
annual incomes that averaged just over $27,000 and generally had low
levels of parental education; the other half came from families where a
primary caregiver had completed at least four years of college and in
which annual household income averaged a little more than $97,000.

The paper is here.  Who better to ask about this than Michelle Dawson?  Michelle wrote to me:

I read the poor vs rich
kids brains study (Kishiyama et al.). It’s a very small study (13 in
each group) and the groups aren’t matched on ethnicity. In the major
task (the one which got media attention), where the authors looked at
ERPs [TC: here is a link on ERP], the performance of the two groups was the same. The performance
of the two groups on a Stroop task, a classic test of what the poor
kids are said to be incapable of, was also the same. The major
performance difference between groups was on vocabulary (the WISC-III
vocabulary test), but only a few tests were used. There was no attempt
to match the groups on IQ.

Just to repeat two key points: a) the observed difference in electrical current patterns may depend on IQ differences, not poverty, and b) on the actual major task the poor kids did just as well.  There are tasks where the poor children do less well but this is hardly news.

Popular science reporting on neuro issues is very often not to be trusted.

Addendum: There is more from Michelle Dawson in the comments.