Episode 42: Intelligence, Rationality, and Wisdom

So last time we took a look at the work of Stanovich and ideas coming out of the rationality debate. I tried to explicate the notion of 'need for cognition', talked a little bit more about problem finding and the generation of a problem nexus, and then also the affective component of that: wonder and curiosity and sort of balancing them off together.

Then we looked more specifically at Stanovich's theory of foolishness, which he calls dysrationalia. We looked at the idea of dual processing (S1 and S2) and the idea that what makes you foolish is S1's functioning (that makes you leap to conclusions) interferes with the inferential processing of S2. You leap to conclusions inappropriately, and that's what causes you to be biased in your processing, self-deceptive, foolish, etc., and then what active open-mindedness does is it foregrounds S2 and protects it from undue interference from S1.

That's all very good in a theoretical context, but we took a look at the work of Jacobs and Teasdale and said: but in a therapeutic context the opposite is the case! What you need is you need that machinery of leaping to work well, and we took a look at the work of Baker-Sennett and Ceci showing that cognitive leaping is actually very powerfully predictive of insight and that's what you need in therapy. You need powerful kinds of insight to break you out of the ways in which you're confronting existential entrapment, inertia, and ignorance. You cannot infer your way through transformative, qualitative change.

So I proposed (and Teasdale has also independently proposed this) that we need a cognitive style that foregrounds S1 (puts us into a state for triggering insight) and tends to background and constraint S2's processing, and that's mindfulness. We have evidence that mindfulness facilitates insight and mindfulness is also increasingly being incorporated into therapeutic settings precisely for its capacity to generate cognitive flexibility and afford insight. So we're noticing is that because the relationship between S1 and S2 is opponent instead of adversarial, we're going to need some higher-order way of coordinating these two cognitive styles, active open-mindedness and mindfulness, so that we can optimize the enhancement in rationality of the relevance realization that is at the core of our intelligence.

Note this idea: that how you are relating to your intelligence and applying your intelligence to itself, the degree to which you problematize your own intelligence and try to improve it, we can see that as rationality. Then I suggested to you that when I do this, when I recursively and reflectively use my rationality to enhance and optimize my rationality, perhaps by enhancing the relationship between the component styles of mindfulness and active open-mindedness, then I'm moving towards wisdom.

We took a look at that and in connection with this we took a look at the work of Dweck, and again making the argument that the way you relate to your higher cognitive processes (your meaning-making problem-solving capacity, not just the intellectual or information processing) is deeply existential. We saw the work on mindset and that the way you identify with your intelligence, the way you're framing how you're identifying with your intelligence, has a tremendous impact on your need for cognition, your problem-solving, your behavior, your proclivity towards deception, self-deception, etc.