I deleted the previous post. There is more value to this scientific research and the process that they underwent to come up with their conclusions than the most people here give it credit for.
On June 13 2012 12:20 Masvidal wrote: They aren't trick questions. They are questions of simple arithmetic. How can you read them and get them wrong? It's as simple as reading simple conditions and doing the basic math. I don't understand how any normal thought process could arrive at a different answer, unless the person in question lacks an understanding of basic math.
On June 13 2012 12:12 Probe1 wrote: Well, I read your entire post and thought about writing an amusing jibe about your post being evidentiary proof of their findings but I decided to take the high road and research the material you quipped from. There are no public domain copies of the findings in detail. This thread is actually the 8th search result on google.
I would offer opinions when someone springs for the $11.99 copy and I can read the study in full then come to my own conclusion instead of extrapolating from the abstract.
I saw your post before the ninja edit. Maybe the study has more credit that we realize.
The so-called bias blind spot arises when people report that thinking biases are more prevalent in others than in themselves. Bias turns out to be relatively easy to recognize in the behaviors of others, but often difficult to detect in one's own judgments. Most previous research on the bias blind spot has focused on bias in the social domain. In 2 studies, we found replicable bias blind spots with respect to many of the classic cognitive biases studied in the heuristics and biases literature (e.g., Tversky & Kahneman, 1974). Further, we found that none of these bias blind spots were attenuated by measures of cognitive sophistication such as cognitive ability or thinking dispositions related to bias. If anything, a larger bias blind spot was associated with higher cognitive ability. Additional analyses indicated that being free of the bias blind spot does not help a person avoid the actual classic cognitive biases. We discuss these findings in terms of a generic dual-process theory of cognition. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2012 APA, all rights reserved).
Apologies for the title, but I had to be limited by character limit. The title should have been: The Smarter People Get, The More Prone They Are to Cognitive Bias
Anyway...
We have always assumed that homo sapiens are rational. Logically, the more people know (READ: the more degrees are attached to their names), the easier and moer efficient people should get around with problems.
But a recent scientific research published at Journal of Personality and Social Psychology proves this notion on human intelligence is the opposite of it really is. The scientific study suggests that, in many instances, smarter people are more vulnerable to these thinking errors. Although we assume that intelligence is a buffer against bias—that’s why those with higher S.A.T. scores think they are less prone to these universal thinking mistakes—it can actually be a subtle curse.
West and his colleagues began by giving four hundred and eighty-two undergraduates a questionnaire featuring a variety of classic bias problems. Here’s a example:
In a lake, there is a patch of lily pads. Every day, the patch doubles in size. If it takes 48 days for the patch to cover the entire lake, how long would it take for the patch to cover half of the lake?
Your first response is probably to take a shortcut, and to divide the final answer by half. That leads you to twenty-four days. But that’s wrong. The correct solution is forty-seven days.
The results were quite disturbing. For one thing, self-awareness was not particularly useful: as the scientists note, “people who were aware of their own biases were not better able to overcome them.” This finding wouldn’t surprise Kahneman, who admits in “Thinking, Fast and Slow” that his decades of groundbreaking research have failed to significantly improve his own mental performance. “My intuitive thinking is just as prone to overconfidence, extreme predictions, and the planning fallacy”—a tendency to underestimate how long it will take to complete a task—“as it was before I made a study of these issues,” he writes.
And here’s the upsetting punch line: intelligence seems to make things worse. The scientists gave the students four measures of “cognitive sophistication.” As they report in the paper, all four of the measures showed positive correlations, “indicating that more cognitively sophisticated participants showed larger bias blind spots.” This trend held for many of the specific biases, indicating that smarter people and those more likely to engage in deliberation were slightly more vulnerable to common mental mistakes. Education also isn’t a savior; as Kahneman and Shane Frederick first noted many years ago, more than fifty per cent of students at Harvard, Princeton, and M.I.T. gave the incorrect answer to the bat-and-ball question. (See question below.)
What explains this result? One provocative hypothesis is that the bias blind spot arises because of a mismatch between how we evaluate others and how we evaluate ourselves. When considering the irrational choices of a stranger, for instance, we are forced to rely on behavioral information; we see their biases from the outside, which allows us to glimpse their systematic thinking errors. However, when assessing our own bad choices, we tend to engage in elaborate introspection. We scrutinize our motivations and search for relevant reasons; we lament our mistakes to therapists and ruminate on the beliefs that led us astray.
The problem with this introspective approach is that the driving forces behind biases—the root causes of our irrationality—are largely unconscious, which means they remain invisible to self-analysis and impermeable to intelligence. In fact, introspection can actually compound the error, blinding us to those primal processes responsible for many of our everyday failings. We spin eloquent stories, but these stories miss the point. The more we attempt to know ourselves, the less we actually understand. What do you think guys?
BAT AND BALL QUESTION (Please reply with your answer, and please answer as spontaneously as possible.) A bat and ball cost a dollar and ten cents. The bat costs a dollar more than the ball. How much does the ball cost?
Lets go with ego. Let me explain: Smart people know they are smart. They also want to answer the question in the least amount of time, and get on with doing things they deem more important. Some might even be lazy, and assume their intuition is powerful enough to get the right answer right away. Therefore, the hop to a reasonably justifiable conclusion using bits and pieces of data to support what they think the answer should be.
The punctuation in the Bat and ball question is fine... All I can say is that maybe I am really smart because I am so bad with questions like that... However, I am probably just extra stupid. EDIT: Thanks for the title change.
x + x + 1 = 1.1 2x + 1 = 1.1 2x=.1 x=.05 x= ball = 5 cents x +1 = bat = 1 dollar 5 cents
But that aside. Cognitive biases have been known for a while. In the end people generally will not be persuaded by logic alone but will fish for rationales that conform to their own positions. Being smart has nothing to do with getting past this problem. Dumb or smart, you'll be biased. It's really about having the ability to be open to all positions more than anything else.
This is actually one of the reasons I read Fox news and the National Review every now and then. I don't want to unknowingly become pigeon-holed with a blind liberal bias.
Well clearly none of the degrees attached to their names were math degrees. Some people go their entire lives without advancing far beyond a middle school understanding of math, even if their other areas are exceptionally strong.
Now watch this cleverness: A bat and ball cost a dollar and ten cents. The bat costs a dollar, more than the ball. How much does the ball cost? Suddenly the ball costs 10 cents instead of 5 cents. ****ing commas man. How do they work.
I wonder if there is any correlation with discipline here, would for instance a mathematics or physics major be less prone to these type of errors than an arts/psychology/etc major?
Ehh I'm hesitant to just ignore the thread and let it die but..
I did not edit my original post because I got the answer wrong. I didn't even realize I was wrong until I read the correct answers later on.
I edited out my answer to the giant bold question because I realized that if people started answering it, it would produce a thread identical to the one you have here.
Congratulations, you've opened a riddle thread couched in a research study that no one in the thread will read.
On June 13 2012 13:27 Ecrilon wrote: Well clearly none of the degrees attached to their names were math degrees. Some people go their entire lives without advancing far beyond a middle school understanding of math, even if their other areas are exceptionally strong.
Now watch this cleverness: A bat and ball cost a dollar and ten cents. The bat costs a dollar, more than the ball. How much does the ball cost? Suddenly the ball costs 10 cents instead of 5 cents. ****ing commas man. How do they work.
This is the kind of math problem I probably would have gotten right 15 years ago when all my high school math tests were like this.
The lilly pad got me, but I read it too fast and ignored the "it grows twice its size daily", but after I reread the question (before reading the answer) I got it right instantly.
The bat and ball question, I read $1.10, then $1 for the bat so I ignored the $1 and just went 10/2 and $1.05 for the bat. I didn't hesitate.
So if I got the answer wrong, that means I'm more prone to cognitive bias and therefor smart?
Well that's convenient.
EDIT I'd just like to add that I didn't get the answer wrong, as no one intelligent should have. The truly intelligent person just scolls down the page a little first.
One other interesting thing to notice is how all of the people here are trying to make sure that everyone knows that they got the answer correct. Seems almost like an inferiority complex or something haha.
On June 13 2012 13:28 HaNdFisH wrote: I wonder if there is any correlation with discipline here, would for instance a mathematics or physics major be less prone to these type of errors than an arts/psychology/etc major?
Honestly, I think it has more to do with 'priming' and familiarity with a certain kind of problem, more than it has to do with a specific discipline.
For example, I'm sure an English major would struggle with Scrabble or a Crossword if they never played/solved one before.
I guess I'm saying I want a second chance to redeem myself LOL.
The lilypad problem is a result of people latching onto the words 'half' and 48, missing out on the context of half. Changing that is simply a matter of practice - the more often you deal with rates of change, the less likely you are to make this error.
It seems reasonable to me that there is an increase in the number of shortcuts taken as people become smart enough to spot more shortcuts. It also seems reasonable that those shortcuts applied incorrectly lead to error. But it strikes me as odd that there would not be an upper limit beyond which biases decrease as misapplications decrease in frequency, and that someone can be intelligent enough to understand that they are biased yet be unable to change it.
Seems the study was done just on Psychology students, would have been interesting to see a cross-discipline one.
Method Participants. The participants were 482 undergraduate students (122 men, 360 women) from a medium-sized, eastern university recruited through an introductory psychology subject pool.
On June 13 2012 13:28 HaNdFisH wrote: I wonder if there is any correlation with discipline here, would for instance a mathematics or physics major be less prone to these type of errors than an arts/psychology/etc major?
No it probably has more to do with personality. I'm a lazy bastard who graduated with a math degree and I'd make that error because I don't care about the answer and I wouldn't feel like doing the work.
Any way, I still find this article odd. At first glance, it's almost stating that those who are smarter make more mistakes. I suppose the article picks up on smarter people being more sure of themselves, and thus more likely to make mistakes when rushing, or something... otherwise, you get a loop of higher intelligence = more mistakes... but then how else would you rank intelligence when given a test? ^^
On June 13 2012 13:49 HaNdFisH wrote: Seems the study was done just on Psychology students, would have been interesting to see a cross-discipline one.
Yeah, I would conclude from these results that psychology students are not as smart as they might think they are. Not that smart people have more bias. They're almost saying that engineering/math students (smarter) would have even more questions wrong; something that is easily tested.
(I didn't read the article so I probably don't have all the information about the studies they've done)
So isn't this largely something of a correlation between the old addage: jack-of-all-trades, master-of-none? Typically to master a certain field, people lose practice in other fields.
So though the students in university might really know a lot about law, if the last time they were even asked a maths question was 6 years ago, their ego will get in the way and force them to answer what may appear to be a simple question fast, or without proper thought.
What surprises me the most is that people told of their bias struggle to fix it. Though I can correlate as I do see some people who get to a point in education (I'm a teacher for context) where they are typically more right than wrong, and upon finding that refuse to change. Been butting heads with some more senior educators since I got here as they try to teach AAA game development in a locally independently driven market. They don't even have AAA experience =/ Can't tell them they're wrong either.
I guess that falls into another stereotype of old people being less inclined to change. So though the study is interesting to think about, to be fair we've known of this forever. But as it says: people struggle to change their bias upon identification of said bias.
(For the record: I answered the question wrong because I didn't read it. I missed the "dollar" part. Pretty essential haha)
Got both of them right..the first one was very obvious, the second one, it's quite easy to get into the "yeah obviously.." mode and get the answer wrong,if my trick question senses were not tingling.
All comes down to just thinking slowly for a bit and understanding the question.
"Smarter people more pron..." is all the saw on the title. I quickly clicked expecting something stimulating and was instead given a math test. I am disappoint, son.
The problem with your ball question is that as soon as people read your little article they will instantly look at the question you post as if it were a trick question and therefore look for the "trick" in the question.
When I read the ball question, I saw 10 cents instantly, but realized that it was most likely a trick question and therefore thought the question through and came to the correct answer. The truly intelligent people while realize the nature of your so called "test" and therefore answer every question correctly.
Method Participants. The participants were 482 undergraduate students (122 men, 360 women) from a medium-sized, eastern university recruited through an introductory psychology subject pool.
Not Pyschology students as in Psychology majors, just people who were in the introductory Psych class. I know at my university it was a very very common class to take as a General Education requirement (has a different name at every school) and we were required to participate in 10 experiments as homework. Probably will be a slightly above average number of Psychology majors, but I'd imagine the students had a very broad range of majors overall.
Also I got both the questions correct basically instantaneously, I guess I'm an inbred mouthbreathing imbecile.
On June 13 2012 14:01 Artemis_ wrote: The problem with your ball question is that as soon as people read your little article they will instantly look at the question you post as if it were a trick question and therefore look for the "trick" in the question.
When I read the ball question, I saw 10 cents instantly, but realized that it was most likely a trick question and therefore thought the question through and came to the correct answer. The truly intelligent people while realize the nature of your so called "test" and therefore answer every question correctly.
Yeah pretty much. Most people have just read an article on smart people being dumb, so they hit the question with a "Got to prove myself" mindset. If this thread was just the question posted, and people couldn't see the posts of other users, then we might have a wider variety.
Bat + Ball = $1.10 (ok) Bat = Ball + $1 (ok) => (Ball +1) + Ball = 1.10 (no..... ball + $1 = bat + ball) no where did it say if you buy 2 balls and add a dollar it equals $1.10 Ball + Ball = $.10 (now irrelevant) 2Ball = $.10 (now irrelevant) Ball = $.05 (now irrelevant)
On June 13 2012 14:06 SipNanana wrote: can someone please explain these?
Bat + Ball = $1.10 (ok) Bat = Ball + $1 (ok) => (Ball +1) + Ball = 1.10 (no..... ball + $1 = bat + ball) no where did it say if you buy 2 balls and add a dollar it equals $1.10 Ball + Ball = $.10 (now irrelevant) 2Ball = $.10 (now irrelevant) Ball = $.05 (now irrelevant)
Ball = X Bat = X + 1.00 X+ (X + 1.00) = 1.10 2X = .10 (If you do not understand how I got here, then well... idk what to say) X = .05
The problem with this OP along with the questions is that right away you are clued in that these questions are attempting to "trick" you. They WANT you to go with the 'easy' answer. In other words in order to succeed, you have to question your immediate gut reaction. So if saying "oh durr a dollar must be the right answer", you realize that it was too easy to come to that conclusion, so you have to think once more. Then simple math comes into play: "Of course, if the bat was one dollar MORE, it can't just be a dollar, because then the ball was free, total cost one dollar -- correct answer must be 5 cents + 1.05 =1.10"
It's a trick for taking standardized tests where you know the difficulty of the answers. On hard questions you are supposed to avoid whatever the seemingly 'easy' answer is, while on easy questions it's often best not to overthink, because the majority is getting it correct. Something like that
Well, the article is odd and from the way I interpret it, it has more to do with their interpretation of smart.
The article defines smart from their SAT scores which means students who do well in exams. I would say that's how a lot of students are taught to do SATs or exams in general which is to identify tips and tricks that enable the students to answer the questions in the least amount of effort possible so they can get the highest amount of correct answers possible under a limited amount of time.
The wording of the question led students to believe ( from the way they have been trained) to answer 10 cents. Out of 10 question, the student might get it wrong this one time on this particular "trick question" but for the other 9, he will get the answer in the shortest possible time by spending the least amount of effort. That's smart in our exam-based education system. Sure, if you resort to doing it in full algebra every time, you will never make such a mistake. But you are spending "too much" energy and thought and time at each question and you might end up not having enough time to finish the whole exam and you won't get the highest score possible using this method.
If these students are aware that they are being tricked instead of being presented the problem in a usual test environment, there is very little chance they will get it wrong as proven by people reading it from this website expecting trick questions.
I'll like to read the study itself - I don't understand how bias can be measured by some arithmetic tests - these tests are designed to "trick" people but if people pause for a couple of seconds, they will get the right answer.
Anyways, I have a deep skepticism of these psychology studies and this has made me even more unimpressed.
On June 13 2012 14:12 Azzur wrote: I'll like to read the study itself - I don't understand how bias can be measured by some arithmetic tests - these tests are designed to "trick" people but if people pause for a couple of seconds, they will get the right answer.
Anyways, I have a deep skepticism of these psychology studies and this has made me even more unimpressed.
Tried to get it for you. It's not out yet, not even on epub ahead of print. Date says Jun 04 2012, so maybe in a couple weeks. All you can settle for is the abstract right now
I'm prone to many biases, and I make plenty of careless math errors, but both the pond and bat/ball questions were extremely simple to get within a few seconds. Do these rudimentary examples really expose a bias? Maybe I'm just dumb.
edit: without reading the article, I'm guessing that these examples are not particularly the basis of the research but more of a throwaway anecdote to set the stage, maybe as related works? I hope.
Method Participants. The participants were 482 undergraduate students (122 men, 360 women) from a medium-sized, eastern university recruited through an introductory psychology subject pool.
Just curious but how did you get access to methods? I can't find access online to the journal article, seems to be from Jun 04 even though i have full paid access to that particualr journal
People who ace the SAT's aren't always the smartest. SATs tend to be grade 9 content. Acing them just means you really understand your grade 9 stuff. Doesn't constitute to intelligence. Intelligence is also hard to quantify. The test could be invalid using different standards for intelligence. It totally depends on the perspective and reference point.
On June 13 2012 13:49 HaNdFisH wrote: Seems the study was done just on Psychology students, would have been interesting to see a cross-discipline one.
Method Participants. The participants were 482 undergraduate students (122 men, 360 women) from a medium-sized, eastern university recruited through an introductory psychology subject pool.
Just curious but how did you get access to methods? I can't find access online to the journal article, seems to be from Jun 04
Pulled the paper up from my University's library site, has subscriptions for journals etc. I just skimmed down to that as I was interested to see what the sample group was.
*edit*
After skimming further it seems they also cover a second study in the paper (Study 2). This time on 265 Mechanical Turk workers, with educational backgrounds varying from highschool to BA/BS degrees.
The method they used to determine cognitive ability was a set of 3 question tests like the questions given in the OP (apparently called a CRT), as well as self reporting of SAT scores for the psychology students. So it seems the questions in the OP were what was used to determine cognitive ability, and then the bias questions were things like
Imagine that the U.S. is preparing for the outbreak of an unusual disease, which is expected to kill 600 people. Two alternative programs to combat the disease have been proposed. Assume that the exact scientific estimates of the consequences of the programs are as follows:
If Program A is adopted, 200 people will be saved. If Program B is adopted, there is a one-third probability that 600 people will be saved and a two-thirds probability that no people will be saved. Which of the two programs would you favor?
Shouldn't the ball cost 5 cents? If the ball cost 5 cents then the bat which cost a dollar more would be 1.05$. 1.05$+.05$ = 1.10$. The ball can't cost 10 cents because then the bat would cost 1.10$ and .10$ + 1.10$ = 1.20$.
On June 13 2012 13:49 HaNdFisH wrote: Seems the study was done just on Psychology students, would have been interesting to see a cross-discipline one.
Method Participants. The participants were 482 undergraduate students (122 men, 360 women) from a medium-sized, eastern university recruited through an introductory psychology subject pool.
Just curious but how did you get access to methods? I can't find access online to the journal article, seems to be from Jun 04
Pulled the paper up from my University's library site, has subscriptions for journals etc. I just skimmed down to that as I was interested to see what the sample group was.
On June 13 2012 14:06 SipNanana wrote: can someone please explain these?
Bat + Ball = $1.10 (ok) Bat = Ball + $1 (ok) => (Ball +1) + Ball = 1.10 (no..... ball + $1 = bat + ball) no where did it say if you buy 2 balls and add a dollar it equals $1.10 Ball + Ball = $.10 (now irrelevant) 2Ball = $.10 (now irrelevant) Ball = $.05 (now irrelevant)
Ball = X Bat = X + 1.00 X+ (X + 1.00) = 1.10 2X = .10 (If you do not understand how I got here, then well... idk what to say) X = .05
my problem with this is; let's say we know the ball costs 10cents, using your formula to prove it.
There was a study in germany where they tested how people understand text questions. One question was for example: "You have 10 oranges on a boat. On the boat there are 32 passengers. How old is the captain?"
People who have a high education standard answered more often with 42 (~70%) and people with a low education did not answer as much (~30%)
Therefore I don't see how you can really unroll the argument because people are trained to scan through question and just plug the numbers
On June 13 2012 14:06 SipNanana wrote: can someone please explain these?
Bat + Ball = $1.10 (ok) Bat = Ball + $1 (ok) => (Ball +1) + Ball = 1.10 (no..... ball + $1 = bat + ball) no where did it say if you buy 2 balls and add a dollar it equals $1.10 Ball + Ball = $.10 (now irrelevant) 2Ball = $.10 (now irrelevant) Ball = $.05 (now irrelevant)
Ball = X Bat = X + 1.00 X+ (X + 1.00) = 1.10 2X = .10 (If you do not understand how I got here, then well... idk what to say) X = .05
my problem with this is; let's say we know the ball costs 10cents, using your formula to prove it.
You should look too posts above at Bearhammers post
It reminds me of story problems in grade school. I would know what they wanted, could easily identify the garbage information, but then how they worded the money question, I could always interpret it in 2-4 ways. Do they want the really smart(ass) answer? or the simple one?
It also reminds me of the test where the teachers says read the freakin directions. the 2nd to last direction is grats on reading the test, kick back and watch these idiots do all these problems. i remember doing the math fast as shite and noticing some of the"dumb" kids looking around and I was like wtf.
Anyway, the realization that self-awareness does not improve oneself is fairly disturbing. The whole I hate my dad and I'll never be like that, but when you grow up to be just like him always sucks right? The emotion part of the brain is op. Buff me logic bro!
On June 13 2012 14:44 Chiller274 wrote: There was a study in germany where they tested how people understand text questions. One question was for example: "You have 10 oranges on a boat. On the boat there are 32 passengers. How old is the captain?"
People who have a high education standard answered more often with 42 (~70%) and people with a low education did not answer as much (~30%)
Therefore I don't see how you can really unroll the argument because people are trained to scan through question and just plug the numbers
LMAO if someone actually read the question how would they answer 42? Too many people skim instead of reading, I guess.
On June 13 2012 14:44 Chiller274 wrote: There was a study in germany where they tested how people understand text questions. One question was for example: "You have 10 oranges on a boat. On the boat there are 32 passengers. How old is the captain?"
People who have a high education standard answered more often with 42 (~70%) and people with a low education did not answer as much (~30%)
Therefore I don't see how you can really unroll the argument because people are trained to scan through question and just plug the numbers
LMAO if someone actually read the question how would they answer 42? Too many people skim instead of reading, I guess.
There might me a different reason to answer this question with "42". Just saying.
I just guessed and checked. Ball costing 10 cents gives you $1.20 overall. Go lower. 5 cents make sense, since you will get a multiple of 10 cents as an answer.
If someone basically tells me that the problem is going to be a 'trick' question, it makes it much easier. If this were on a test where it was one of a hundred word problems with time pressure it would likely be easy to answer incorrectly. Also, I don't see why the SAT is mentioned as correlating to intelligence. Its almost completely down to test taking skills and practice.
On June 13 2012 14:51 TehRealSulfur wrote: It reminds me of story problems in grade school. I would know what they wanted, could easily identify the garbage information, but then how they worded the money question, I could always interpret it in 2-4 ways. Do they want the really smart(ass) answer? or the simple one?
It also reminds me of the test where the teachers says read the freakin directions. the 2nd to last direction is grats on reading the test, kick back and watch these idiots do all these problems. i remember doing the math fast as shite and noticing some of the"dumb" kids looking around and I was like wtf.
Anyway, the realization that self-awareness does not improve oneself is fairly disturbing. The whole I hate my dad and I'll never be like that, but when you grow up to be just like him always sucks right? The emotion part of the brain is op. Buff me logic bro!
I remember doing that like that in elementary grade school, that was odd though, i did probably a quarter of the test before i saw the last question that said that. I use to love doing math questions in my head while i looked on ahead, so it was around 20 questions, i jotted the first 4 down before reading that i was like LOL shit i technically failed.
Its kind of funny, i consider myself to be a smart person, my IQ was something like 1245 when i took the test as a kid, I got a great score on the ASVAB when i was considering the army, and I got a perfect on the reading comprehension section of the SAT's...
My physics teacher in high school was a big fan of little intelligence games similar to the questions mentioned in the OP
in his class one day i finished a test really early, he gave me two trapezoidal wooden blocks and said make a pyramid out of them... i spent a solid half hour trying to figure it out, the answer was extremely simple, but i kept "over thinking it"
Wait, so this question in OP indicates whether or not you have cognitive bias right? Where people who are too smart that they get these simple questions wrong. So if i answered it wrong, that shows indication of cognitive bias. But smart people are prone to bias, which suggests that i am one of the smarter people by thinking that that ball was actually 10 cents.
The paper does have a point that sometimes, people aren't careful. A lot of times, a problem may seem simple at a high level, but there is additional complexity once you dive deeper. If you don't take the time to sit down and understand it, you will be wrong.
A smart person who expects to solve a question quickly may be more easily taken in by deliberate trickery, yes. However, if you point out the error/trick, they should quickly understand and correct what they did wrong.
On June 13 2012 14:06 SipNanana wrote: can someone please explain these?
Bat + Ball = $1.10 (ok) Bat = Ball + $1 (ok) => (Ball +1) + Ball = 1.10 (no..... ball + $1 = bat + ball) no where did it say if you buy 2 balls and add a dollar it equals $1.10 Ball + Ball = $.10 (now irrelevant) 2Ball = $.10 (now irrelevant) Ball = $.05 (now irrelevant)
Ball = X Bat = X + 1.00 X+ (X + 1.00) = 1.10 2X = .10 (If you do not understand how I got here, then well... idk what to say) X = .05
my problem with this is; let's say we know the ball costs 10cents, using your formula to prove it.
If we know the ball costs 10 cents we have no unknown X for his equation. If we would tackle it using logic it would also make either the premise P1: Ball + Bat = 1.10 false or the premise P2: Bat = Ball + 1.00 false.
On June 13 2012 14:06 SipNanana wrote: can someone please explain these?
Bat + Ball = $1.10 (ok) Bat = Ball + $1 (ok) => (Ball +1) + Ball = 1.10 (no..... ball + $1 = bat + ball) no where did it say if you buy 2 balls and add a dollar it equals $1.10 Ball + Ball = $.10 (now irrelevant) 2Ball = $.10 (now irrelevant) Ball = $.05 (now irrelevant)
Ball = X Bat = X + 1.00 X+ (X + 1.00) = 1.10 2X = .10 (If you do not understand how I got here, then well... idk what to say) X = .05
my problem with this is; let's say we know the ball costs 10cents, using your formula to prove it.
If we know the ball costs 10 cents we have no unknown X for his equation. If we would tackle it using logic it would also make either the premise P1: Ball + Bat = 1.10 false or the premise P2: Bat + 1.00 = Ball false.
so you're saying the question is wrong not the price of the ball? Equations should work backwards
I really wish there were more example problems, because those problems were both easy enough to get in a couple of seconds, and I arrived at the correct answers. I did first guess $1.00 and $0.10 for the prices of the bat and ball, but it was just a stepping stone since seeing that the difference is 90 cents and adjusting by 5 cents (half of the remaining difference needed) in each direction is faster for me than doing out the algebra. Those examples suggest that smart people don't properly read or frame the problems or something.
I don't know what's in the study but the 2 exposed questions are particulary unimpressive... The lotus thing is like the most classic tricky question in the book (I already saw it a lot of time), why the ball question is just classic (with other values etc). What else was in this study ? Did they just put all the classic tricky questions ? They could have added : "we take a product that cost 100$, make a 10% increase, then a 20% reduction, what is the final prize of the product ?" (hint : it's not 90$)
Because for now I don't know how "intelligent people" would get tricked by questions that they already encountered a lot of time
I can't help but question the validity of this study. Both questions were extremely easy. I mean, with the lily pad question you have to ignore just about everything stated in the question in order to answer it incorrectly.
Method Participants. The participants were 482 undergraduate students (122 men, 360 women) from a medium-sized, eastern university recruited through an introductory psychology subject pool.
Not having access to this either I still really question the methodology and how the authors established a correlation. What we know so far is a mention of self-reported scores and a questionable sample. Look at that sex ratio.
Most importantly, this "Cognitive Reflection Test," the exact same three mathematical questions, has been used before in several other studies. The results contradict this claim.
Students at better universities with more stringent admissions criteria and higher test scores, performed much better than students at weaker universities. People with better performance on other mathematical and cognitive metrics, given in the same sitting, performed better on the CRT questions. iirc students with higher GPAs were found to perform better on the CRT in one study as well. It's possible to suppose the individuals involved in this study were particularly stupid or say similar disparaging things, but if the authors didn't even address the above it's a terrible job on their parts. The finding that people who self-report "being smart" are more prone to bias doesn't appear to be well established by this one study, let alone any broader claims.
Lol, the questions just needed to be read fully and carefully. Reminded me of the time when one of my teachers gave the class a 'test'. It basically had on it all these random tasks like multiply 4 by 103, take half the answer and triple it, tap on your desk three times etc. Then on the last line of the test it said "Don't do all the things above, and write your name on the top right corner of the paper". The smartest kid in our class all did the random stuff, before realizing.
On June 13 2012 14:44 Chiller274 wrote: There was a study in germany where they tested how people understand text questions. One question was for example: "You have 10 oranges on a boat. On the boat there are 32 passengers. How old is the captain?"
People who have a high education standard answered more often with 42 (~70%) and people with a low education did not answer as much (~30%)
Therefore I don't see how you can really unroll the argument because people are trained to scan through question and just plug the numbers
LMAO if someone actually read the question how would they answer 42? Too many people skim instead of reading, I guess.
There might me a different reason to answer this question with "42". Just saying.
Yeah, I know. That's what came to mind at first, because I doubted anyone would add 10 and 32 from reading that.
On June 13 2012 14:06 SipNanana wrote: can someone please explain these?
Bat + Ball = $1.10 (ok) Bat = Ball + $1 (ok) => (Ball +1) + Ball = 1.10 (no..... ball + $1 = bat + ball) no where did it say if you buy 2 balls and add a dollar it equals $1.10 Ball + Ball = $.10 (now irrelevant) 2Ball = $.10 (now irrelevant) Ball = $.05 (now irrelevant)
Ball = X Bat = X + 1.00 X+ (X + 1.00) = 1.10 2X = .10 (If you do not understand how I got here, then well... idk what to say) X = .05
my problem with this is; let's say we know the ball costs 10cents, using your formula to prove it.
If we know the ball costs 10 cents we have no unknown X for his equation. If we would tackle it using logic it would also make either the premise P1: Ball + Bat = 1.10 false or the premise P2: Bat + 1.00 = Ball false.
so you're saying the question is wrong not the price of the ball? Equations should work backwards
Isnt the question define X, with x + x + 1 = 1.1 Being the general statement Its still really hard to think anyone can be serious with 10 cents being the ball right. even if so that would make the bat 1.10 (being a dollar more) and the total 1.20(not the problem, your mixing it up) The bat was never defined in the original statement, so defining the bat is a byproduct of finding out X (the way it went through my mind anyways, how i shouted 5 cents)
On June 13 2012 14:06 SipNanana wrote: can someone please explain these?
Bat + Ball = $1.10 (ok) Bat = Ball + $1 (ok) => (Ball +1) + Ball = 1.10 (no..... ball + $1 = bat + ball) no where did it say if you buy 2 balls and add a dollar it equals $1.10 Ball + Ball = $.10 (now irrelevant) 2Ball = $.10 (now irrelevant) Ball = $.05 (now irrelevant)
Ball = X Bat = X + 1.00 X+ (X + 1.00) = 1.10 2X = .10 (If you do not understand how I got here, then well... idk what to say) X = .05
my problem with this is; let's say we know the ball costs 10cents, using your formula to prove it.
If we know the ball costs 10 cents we have no unknown X for his equation. If we would tackle it using logic it would also make either the premise P1: Ball + Bat = 1.10 false or the premise P2: Bat + 1.00 = Ball false.
so you're saying the question is wrong not the price of the ball? Equations should work backwards
Isnt the question define X, with x + x + 1 = 1.1 Being the general statement Its still really hard to think anyone can be serious with 10 cents being the ball right. even if so that would make the bat 1.10 (being a dollar more) and the total 1.20(not the problem, your mixing it up) The bat was never defined in the original statement, so defining the bat is a byproduct of finding out X (the way it went through my mind anyways, how i shouted 5 cents)
Yes i guess it's supposed to make people wrongly assume "oh the bat is 1 dollar, ball is 10 cents = 1.1" even though it's really that the bat also must be 1 dollar more than the ball, so that wouldn't work. Super easy math, but i guess the point is to word it such that it isn't as clear if being too hasty
On June 13 2012 14:06 SipNanana wrote: can someone please explain these?
Bat + Ball = $1.10 (ok) Bat = Ball + $1 (ok) => (Ball +1) + Ball = 1.10 (no..... ball + $1 = bat + ball) no where did it say if you buy 2 balls and add a dollar it equals $1.10 Ball + Ball = $.10 (now irrelevant) 2Ball = $.10 (now irrelevant) Ball = $.05 (now irrelevant)
Ball = X Bat = X + 1.00 X+ (X + 1.00) = 1.10 2X = .10 (If you do not understand how I got here, then well... idk what to say) X = .05
my problem with this is; let's say we know the ball costs 10cents, using your formula to prove it.
If we know the ball costs 10 cents we have no unknown X for his equation. If we would tackle it using logic it would also make either the premise P1: Ball + Bat = 1.10 false or the premise P2: Bat + 1.00 = Ball false.
so you're saying the question is wrong not the price of the ball? Equations should work backwards
Isnt the question define X, with x + x + 1 = 1.1 Being the general statement Its still really hard to think anyone can be serious with 10 cents being the ball right. even if so that would make the bat 1.10 (being a dollar more) and the total 1.20(not the problem, your mixing it up) The bat was never defined in the original statement, so defining the bat is a byproduct of finding out X (the way it went through my mind anyways, how i shouted 5 cents)
I just think the answer can be either 5 or 10 cents. Using a mathematical equation doesn't prove every situation. The question is; What is the price if there is 1 dollar difference? (White still costing $1.10) If you can't use your equation to resolve if you know the answer, doesn't it make your formula incorrect?
What are these easy questions? Without looking at any other replies I can tell you with 100% accuracy that the ball costs 5 cents. That makes the bat cost 1.05$ and together they cost 1.10$.
The lotus question is also piss easy, the only possible error is the result of a pretty grave oversight. Maybe they should have polled people at a local rock concert since these might be inclined to think with their own head and not students from some ivy league indoctrination factory
In a lake, there is a patch of lily pads. Every day, the patch doubles in size. If it takes 48 days for the patch to cover the entire lake, how long would it take for the patch to cover half of the lake?
I must be a genius.. my first response .0000001 seconds after reading the question was 47 since every day it doubles in size so obviously its 48-1=47......... :/ I don't even understand how someone would get 24 although maybe thats the point of the thread but was too lazy to read it all...
I ended up with an answer of 10 cents. Wait, if this study shows that more intelligent people are more prone to cognitive bias, and I got the wrong answer, could that imply that I'm actually really smart?
For those still struggling to get it through their universities' library system.
I got it under
Journal of Personality and Social Psychology ; Jun 4, 2012 (i.e latest issue, view the issue)
Then third option: Cognitive Sophistication Does Not Attenuate the Bias Blind Spot. West, Richard F.; Meserve, Russell J.; Stanovich, Keith E.. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology (Jun 4, 2012). Found in: PsycARTICLES Full text - PDF (175 KB)
On June 13 2012 14:06 SipNanana wrote: can someone please explain these?
Bat + Ball = $1.10 (ok) Bat = Ball + $1 (ok) => (Ball +1) + Ball = 1.10 (no..... ball + $1 = bat + ball) no where did it say if you buy 2 balls and add a dollar it equals $1.10 Ball + Ball = $.10 (now irrelevant) 2Ball = $.10 (now irrelevant) Ball = $.05 (now irrelevant)
Ball = X Bat = X + 1.00 X+ (X + 1.00) = 1.10 2X = .10 (If you do not understand how I got here, then well... idk what to say) X = .05
my problem with this is; let's say we know the ball costs 10cents, using your formula to prove it.
If we know the ball costs 10 cents we have no unknown X for his equation. If we would tackle it using logic it would also make either the premise P1: Ball + Bat = 1.10 false or the premise P2: Bat + 1.00 = Ball false.
so you're saying the question is wrong not the price of the ball? Equations should work backwards
Isnt the question define X, with x + x + 1 = 1.1 Being the general statement Its still really hard to think anyone can be serious with 10 cents being the ball right. even if so that would make the bat 1.10 (being a dollar more) and the total 1.20(not the problem, your mixing it up) The bat was never defined in the original statement, so defining the bat is a byproduct of finding out X (the way it went through my mind anyways, how i shouted 5 cents)
I just think the answer can be either 5 or 10 cents. Using a mathematical equation doesn't prove every situation. The question is; What is the price if there is 1 dollar difference? (White still costing $1.10) If you can't use your equation to resolve if you know the answer, doesn't it make your formula incorrect?
The question was A bat and ball cost a dollar and ten cents. The bat costs a dollar more than the ball. How much does the ball cost?
We break down the information we are given into two premises P1: Cost[bat] + Cost[ball] = $1.10 P2: Cost[bat] = Cost[ball] + $1.00
Using this we set up an equation to find the cost of the ball.
X: cost of ball Y: cost of bat
From premise P2 Y = X + $1.00
From premise P1 Y + X = $1.10 => X = $1.10 - Y
Replace Y with the deduced value of Y (from P2) above to get X = $1.10 - (X + $1.00) => X = $1.10 - X - $1.00 => X = $0.10 -X => X + X = $0.10 => 2*X = $.10 => X = $0.10 / 2 => X = $0.05
But I guess you want to argue that "math is stupid" or "there might be an undisclosed premise Px that alters the cost of the ball at any time!". Since you posts so far have been partly unintelligible I don't find it particulary interesting to continue this.
Ummmmmmm... so my opinion as of now is that this (i don't really know what it is...hypothesis?) is either wrong or flawed, or something other than completely correct.
Since I can't see anything other than the abstract, I HAVE NO IDEA what they did exactly... but i have a few questions/comments, so here they go.
How does someone (in this case, the investigator of the study) rate people's intelligence? IQ's aren't even unanimous in their ability to determine intelligence, or at least ALL kinds or areas of intelligence. Unndergraduates at Ivy League schools may or MAY NOT be highly intelligent. It's also possible that they work REALLY hard. Those are often the more successful anyways.
What exactly is the study suggesting? If I were a colleague of these guys, I would urge them to rephrase of lot of their sentences, but I'm not in that realm of academia, so maybe that's why it's hard to follow. What i mean is...
What is the bias they are talking about? Bias of how smart people are? Obviously we aren't talking racial/economical...maybe social? Is bias the right word for this, or is what they are trying to say is that the smarter you are, the more likely you gloss over minor mistakes?
What if the people who answered incorrectly aren't actually the smartest people taking this test? If Neil de Grasse Tyson took this, I bet he would answer right, as well as most mathematicians...
I guess what I'm saying, is I'm really doubtful that this study can conclude anything. It may be somewhere in between a "waste of time", and "needs many more studies to mean anything".
Education does not equal intelligence, although it can foster it. I'm pretty sure (just like ALMOST EVERYTHING) that there are genetic as well as learned components to intelligence. So obviously studying THINGS may increase how smart you are, but it shouldn't be confused with increasing how knowledgeable either.
My definition of intelligence would be the capability and rate one learns, comprehends, and extrapolates/applies information. IN OTHER WORDS, problem solving capability. It's range is from about a rock --> infinite (like a god, or Jane or something). Obviously both god and jane would not only get those answers right, but know a lot more about why questions like those are relevant to these questions. So are the people missing these further along the line than the ones who aren't? Maybe...probably not, though.
EDIT: Since i'm no longer attached to any university, I won't be able to view the article in depth, but maybe someone could answer, what is cognitive sophistication? Is that like my History professor who maintains a nice beard, wears tweed suits, talks slowly and sophisticated, with a pipe, and over utilizes long words? Or do they just mean smart? I sincerely hope it's not the latter.
On June 13 2012 13:27 Ecrilon wrote: Well clearly none of the degrees attached to their names were math degrees. Some people go their entire lives without advancing far beyond a middle school understanding of math, even if their other areas are exceptionally strong.
Now watch this cleverness: A bat and ball cost a dollar and ten cents. The bat costs a dollar, more than the ball. How much does the ball cost? Suddenly the ball costs 10 cents instead of 5 cents. ****ing commas man. How do they work.
Haha this is awesome, took me second to read the comma correctly ^_^
The ball costs 5 cents! My immediate though was that the ball was 10 cents but I had a feeling it just wasn't correct so I wanted to reevaluate, I don't like to make snap decisions. I'm not good on the spot haha.
This study actually doesn't surprise me as the more intellectual people are the more arrogant they seem to be in regards to their own intelligence and thus will answer questions like these quickly because 'It's so easy!".
I got the lilypad correct two but, yet again, my immediate thought was to blurt 24 DAYS then I immediately said "WAIT A MINTUE!" However I feel that by reading the OP people are going to be more likely to double check their answers in their head as they are expecting it to be a trick question, that's probably why I wasn't so quick to confirm my answers of 24 days or 10 cents.
Obviously the ball is five cents, which I'd be surprised to see anybody NOT answer, however if you have zero time to calculate the answer then I think most people would have 10 cents jump into their head as the cost of the ball.
I know when I read the question I thought "10c because...no it's 5 cents, duh". I can't see many people getting this wrong in a written test (because the calulation takes less time than writing "10c"), but I could see many people getting the answer wrong in a verbal test (where you just blurt out 10c, by the time the thought makes it to your lips you know it's wrong, but it's too late).
Trick questions are trick questions for a reason. Theres a pretty good chance a dumb person would get this question wrong too, its just taht smart people think they got the right answer by saying 10cents.
Maybe, people didn't consider how those psychology students suck at math since they hadn't used it much (SAT maths lol). I'd assume they have to be good at (they are tested on) = i.e. they are tested on memorising and giving theoretical solutions to problems, just like a biology or maybe chemistry subject.
Somebody correct me if I'm wrong with my assumptions.
Try asking Engineering/Mathematics/IT students -- people who actually are tested on their logical thinking.
This study seems ridiculous for now.
On June 13 2012 17:03 althaz wrote: Obviously the ball is five cents, which I'd be surprised to see anybody NOT answer, however if you have zero time to calculate the answer then I think most people would have 10 cents jump into their head as the cost of the ball.
I know when I read the question I thought "10c because...no it's 5 cents, duh". I can't see many people getting this wrong in a written test (because the calulation takes less time than writing "10c"), but I could see many people getting the answer wrong in a verbal test (where you just blurt out 10c, by the time the thought makes it to your lips you know it's wrong, but it's too late).
Ahh good point. Those are trick questions for a reason. Why are they testing cognitive bias with trick questions? At least have some normal control questions or something.
Without reading the comments, I'd say 5 cents, as: x + y = 1.1 x = y + 1 y + y + 1 = 1.1 2y + 1 - 1 = 1.1 - 1 2y = 0.1 2y / 2 = 0.1 / 2 y = 0.05 x = 1.05 x + y = 1.05 + 0.05 = 1.1
Hmm, so I had a look at the paper (thanks) and it's hard to articulate how much of a mess this seems to be. The authors write like vicious weasels and I have never seen a more potentially biased paper in any respectable publication.
The selection of data presented gives the impression of a really suspect pattern of entirely avoiding any results that could possibly be harmful to the authors' conclusion. The bit on the second hastily addressed study lacks what would seem to be very necessary and relevant discussion on why and how the participants differ so much from the participants of the first study of all college students, and avoids the majority of the "bias questions" the authors purport to study in the first place.
The first thing I took away, and cannot stress enough, is how subpar the students involved in the study are. To anyone who wasn't sure or thought this was an "ivy-league" school or anything similar - rest assured it's not. It stands out glaringly, to many Americans that would be as soon as one learns this was done at JMU, but the authors mention the necessary statistics regardless. The participants in the study reported SAT scores close to the institution means - 1140 math+reading total. For those not familiar with the SAT, that's completely unimpressive compared to many, many other American universities. JMU students are by and large the rejects of any more prestigious universities of the several nearby states. These are community college level students, especially as the majority of students in the study were freshmen (first year at the university, and as the authors report, median age arond 19).
Likewise the results on the CRT, the three trick-sounding questions which everyone is making a big deal about, are abysmal for these participants. The authors report a mean of 0.79, with 50% or 241 of the participants getting none correct, (lol) and only 27 or 5.6% getting all 3 correct. This is an extremely poor performance compared to other students at other universities on this same CRT test from previous studies (some probably referenced by authors in this paper).
The first objection I'd raise is the worry that the raw number of students who had high performance on any cognitive metric is too small a sample size. There's no data on the real distribution of SAT scores - whether any participants at all had scores high enough they would be good at a more prestigious university - and only 27 total individuals is of course worrisome for the CRT results. The other cognitive measures were not objective, better-or-worse measures of intelligence or cognition such that they could be used in comparisons towards the authors' overall thesis. Considering individuals had to be split into experimental groups for the bias measures, having an insufficient number of individuals with high performance on the cognitive measures could result in no statistical significance.
What's ridiculously annoying if not scandalous, is that authors did not give any data, NO DATA AT ALL, on the relationship between the students' CRT score and performance on their full set of "bias measures." Performance on the CRT was found to be positively correlated with scores on the other cognitive measures and self-reported test scores, at least that's consistent with other studies. However, to draw their headline conclusions, they only found a lack of correlation between the "bias measures" tested to the bias-blind spot generated from self reports and self-reported SAT scores. The correlations to other cognitive measures were also not tabled. This is questionable in and of itself, and is ridiculous given the the authors' report of "Study 2" where the only data they present on a different group of internet-survey answerers is the CRT results. (Also, the internet survey folks perform far better than the pathetic JMU students on the CRT)
It's worth summarizing one of the bias questions examined to see the obvious, intuitive objections any reasonable person would raise to the specifics of this study. Glossing over the specifics to present final conclusions based on a few statistical correlations and omitting others is not acceptable.
So this one bias question on "anchoring" was based around having participants guess how tall the tallest trees in the world are. The experiment for bias was performed by "framing" the question in two ways (two experimental groups), such as the suggestion the tree was 1000 feet tall, versus framing with a smaller number - 85. That's a tree. A tree. The result for the one group was a mean of guessing 884 ft tall with a standard deviation of 572, and to no real surprise the group framed with the smaller number gave much smaller answers, and presumably almost none of them giving objectively idiotic answers. (As expected the authors found the presence of bias on all the bias measures they tested, consistent with previous studies, for the set of participants as a whole. Nothing interesting there. Remember the whole point of the authors' conclusion is whether the "smarter" participants had less bias than the others.) It's also very annoying that, while "base rate" bias and other related biases are supposedly studied in other questions, the attempt to study a DIFFERENT BIAS is done with an absolutely awful experimental question that mixes in these biases as well. But there's nothing to be said for people who think a tree is over a thousand feet tall. Complete morons.
I really wish the authors had actually provided the data, and we could see whether the handful of students who got all 3 CRT questions correct gave such ridiculous answers on several of the bias questions. There were so few of these students amongst the throng of JMU morons (only 27 total) that the sample size might still not be enough, but it's worth knowing. The authors only report a small correlation between overall SAT scores and bias on this question, as with others, but find it's not significant, which still could be relatively meaningless given the awful SAT scores of all participants all around. If the students who got all of the CRT questions correct, also gave answers such as > 1000 ft trees the same as their peers, then at least the authors are being honest in presenting the results they obtained. Somehow I doubt that, I suspect their performance on the bias questions was much better and they were justified in labeling their peers as morons. (After all, the answer to whether the median JMU student is more susceptible than average to cognitive biases should be very high. It's true as the base rate, y'know)
Method Participants. The participants were 482 undergraduate students (122 men, 360 women) from a medium-sized, eastern university recruited through an introductory psychology subject pool.
Oh.... mainly women... they are bad at math right? Cognitive bias, I know
OT : i tend to think that people ask me dumb questions, so i don't really care enough to take the time to answer it correctly. I would have say 10 cent, but i didn't do any calculation, just the first thing that came to my mind. And i already knew the trick for the lily pads.
Hmm, so I had a look at the paper (thanks) and it's hard to articulate how much of a mess this seems to be. The authors write like vicious weasels and I have never seen a more potentially biased paper in any respectable publication.
The selection of data presented gives the impression of a really suspect pattern of entirely avoiding any results that could possibly be harmful to the authors' conclusion. The bit on the second hastily addressed study lacks what would seem to be very necessary and relevant discussion on why and how the participants differ so much from the participants of the first study of all college students, and avoids the majority of the "bias questions" the authors purport to study in the first place.
The first thing I took away, and cannot stress enough, is how subpar the students involved in the study are. To anyone who wasn't sure or thought this was an "ivy-league" school or anything similar - rest assured it's not. It stands out glaringly, to many Americans that would be as soon as one learns this was done at JMU, but the authors mention the necessary statistics regardless. The participants in the study reported SAT scores close to the institution means - 1140 math+reading total. For those not familiar with the SAT, that's completely unimpressive compared to many, many other American universities. JMU students are by and large the rejects of any more prestigious universities of the several nearby states. These are community college level students, especially as the majority of students in the study were freshmen (first year at the university, and as the authors report, median age arond 19).
Likewise the results on the CRT, the three trick-sounding questions which everyone is making a big deal about, are abysmal for these participants. The authors report a mean of 0.79, with 50% or 241 of the participants getting none correct, (lol) and only 27 or 5.6% getting all 3 correct. This is an extremely poor performance compared to other students at other universities on this same CRT test from previous studies (some probably referenced by authors in this paper).
The first objection I'd raise is the worry that the raw number of students who had high performance on any cognitive metric is too small a sample size. There's no data on the real distribution of SAT scores - whether any participants at all had scores high enough they would be good at a more prestigious university - and only 27 total individuals is of course worrisome for the CRT results. The other cognitive measures were not objective, better-or-worse measures of intelligence or cognition such that they could be used in comparisons towards the authors' overall thesis. Considering individuals had to be split into experimental groups for the bias measures, having an insufficient number of individuals with high performance on the cognitive measures could result in no statistical significance.
What's ridiculously annoying if not scandalous, is that authors did not give any data, NO DATA AT ALL, on the relationship between the students' CRT score and performance on their full set of "bias measures." Performance on the CRT was found to be positively correlated with scores on the other cognitive measures and self-reported test scores, at least that's consistent with other studies. However, to draw their headline conclusions, they only found a lack of correlation between the "bias measures" tested to the bias-blind spot generated from self reports and self-reported SAT scores. The correlations to other cognitive measures were also not tabled. This is questionable in and of itself, and is ridiculous given the the authors' report of "Study 2" where the only data they present on a different group of internet-survey answerers is the CRT results. (Also, the internet survey folks perform far better than the pathetic JMU students on the CRT)
It's worth summarizing one of the bias questions examined to see the obvious, intuitive objections any reasonable person would raise to the specifics of this study. Glossing over the specifics to present final conclusions based on a few statistical correlations and omitting others is not acceptable.
So this one bias question on "anchoring" was based around having participants guess how tall the tallest trees in the world are. The experiment for bias was performed by "framing" the question in two ways (two experimental groups), such as the suggestion the tree was 1000 feet tall, versus framing with a smaller number - 85. That's a tree. A tree. The result for the one group was a mean of guessing 884 ft tall with a standard deviation of 572, and to no real surprise the group framed with the smaller number gave much smaller answers, and presumably almost none of them giving objectively idiotic answers. (As expected the authors found the presence of bias on all the bias measures they tested, consistent with previous studies, for the set of participants as a whole. Nothing interesting there. Remember the whole point of the authors' conclusion is whether the "smarter" participants had less bias than the others.) It's also very annoying that, while "base rate" bias and other related biases are supposedly studied in other questions, the attempt to study a DIFFERENT BIAS is done with an absolutely awful experimental question that mixes in these biases as well. But there's nothing to be said for people who think a tree is over a thousand feet tall. Complete morons.
I really wish the authors had actually provided the data, and we could see whether the handful of students who got all 3 CRT questions correct gave such ridiculous answers on several of the bias questions. There were so few of these students amongst the throng of JMU morons (only 27 total) that the sample size might still not be enough, but it's worth knowing. The authors only report a small correlation between overall SAT scores and bias on this question, as with others, but find it's not significant, which still could be relatively meaningless given the awful SAT scores of all participants all around. If the students who got all of the CRT questions correct, also gave answers such as > 1000 ft trees the same as their peers, then at least the authors are being honest in presenting the results they obtained. Somehow I doubt that, I suspect their performance on the bias questions was much better and they were justified in labeling their peers as morons. (After all, the answer to whether the median JMU student is more susceptible than average to cognitive biases should be very high. It's true as the base rate, y'know)
So I take it that you're suggesting that the authors are brilliant, according to their own results?
If the bat and the ball is 1 dollar and 10 cents and the ball costs 1 dollar more than the bat then the ball must cost 1.05 and the bat 0.5 answer is 0.5 since 1.05-0.5 = 1 dollar.
EDIT: I totally screwed up everything and its obvious I did not understand the question since I took it in the wrong order and so forth, yet I got the correct answer, god I'm retarded. Then again they are right, stupid people really seem to answer the question without any problem
EDIT2: There are psychology classes at my university which requires zero math skills if you want to attend. So it could be that the people they used were idiots when it came to math.
i guess i am pretty smart* because i answered both lilypad and bat questions correct. but i think if you are in math for some reason(for me its comp.sci) answering them correct at the first try is quite possible. edit:i got it wrong the first time
From a sporadic standpoint, my mind first came up with 10 cents. Took a minute to reevaluate and came up with 5 cents. (I didn't give myself enough time to do the lilypad problem, although I suppose spontaneously, I just divided the days in half before giving myself time to actually think about it and come up with an answer)
But reading the article itself introduces obvious bias and most likely results in many people rethinking their initial answer. I don't think asking the question right after allowing people to read an article that would basically challenge their initial beliefs is really... anything.
Nonetheless, polls are fun to make :D
Poll: What did you answer for the ball and bat question?
5 cents (11)
73%
10 cents (4)
27%
Other (0)
0%
15 total votes
Your vote: What did you answer for the ball and bat question?
Got both right, second one took a little while. My bias says that this doesn't seem right and further than that it's most surely not reliable, how does one even define who is intelligent and who isn't?It's not that simple.
Well, I know that when something doesn't seem to require a lot of thoughts, i'll answer immediatly, most of the time i'll get it right because i'm a fucking badass (in maths) but I always assume that there is no traps.
Five cents is correct, but asking for "spontaneous" answers is a bit silly, since the question is intentionally written to create an incorrect intuitive response. My "sponteneous" answer was 10 cents, as it probably is for most people, then I added 10 cents and $1.10, realized the answer was wrong, and fixed it.
The lilly pad question I got right intuitively, but I'm a maths/comp sci guy, so I've been dealing with concepts like exponential growth for long enough that they make intuitive sense to me, which I don't think is probably typical of people who don't deal with problems like that on a regular basis.
It should have been done in sociology, because it's part of the discipline (well for a certain school specifically) that you have to analyse your own view on your subject, why you take it, how you view it, in order to break with this cognitive bias we all have and study scientifically the subject in question.
Now with this, it almost defend the idea that breaking with prenotions is impossible ?
And here’s the upsetting punch line: intelligence seems to make things worse. The scientists gave the students four measures of “cognitive sophistication.” As they report in the paper, all four of the measures showed positive correlations, “indicating that more cognitively sophisticated participants showed larger bias blind spots.”
I am not sure what you exactly mean by that and I won't waste any time reading a psychology paper but if you're trying to have me believe smart people are more inclined to answer wrongly to questions like the bat and the ball, or the nenuphar, or the frog climbing up a well, than the average person in the population, you'll be hard-pressed. Ask those questions to the average person and they'll fail to nearly all of them. So how can it be worse with the smarter ones ? (Yes, yes, this is typically a hyper-biased reaction, still I had the correct answers).
many years ago, more than fifty per cent of students at Harvard, Princeton, and M.I.T. gave the incorrect answer to the bat-and-ball question. (See question below.)
I take it the test was lead on the students as a whole. What guarantee do I have most students in those colleges are smart ? I have no doubt all students in physics and math in Harvard and Princeton answered correctly, and all students in the M.I.T. ; now if one mixes their results with those of biology, sociology or law students, what does one expect if not a completely worthless conclusion ?
Edit : I sense a strong bias in the poll above ; I don't remember the name, but you see the one.
5 cents... after a split second of thought... and the first question was blatantly obvious without thought to me... I have a IQ of around 140 so I do not get what exactly is being said... was I supposed to get these "bias" questions wrong?
to know thyself requires great wisdom and few have such good fortune. it is better not to seek knowledge of oneself, but understanding of the universe as it exists. when you stop seeing yourself as a wholly separate entity, then may you begin, but never may you stop for there is no end.
It makes sense for "smarter" people to make mistakes, since they think more quickly. However, when you get to real top smarts, these are people who learned, over time, due to making these shortcuts too many times, to stop and think.
BAT AND BALL QUESTION (Please reply with your answer, and please answer as spontaneously as possible.) A bat and ball cost a dollar and ten cents. The bat costs a dollar more than the ball. How much does the ball cost?
On June 13 2012 18:01 Surgical_Strike wrote: 5 cents... after a split second of thought... and the first question was blatantly obvious without thought to me... I have a IQ of around 140 so I do not get what exactly is being said... was I supposed to get these "bias" questions wrong?
The irony.Followed by shakespeare, thread is golden.
On June 13 2012 17:33 Crazy Eddie wrote: Hmm, so I had a look at the paper (thanks) and it's hard to articulate how much of a mess this seems to be. The authors write like vicious weasels and I have never seen a more potentially biased paper in any respectable publication.
The selection of data presented gives the impression of a really suspect pattern of entirely avoiding any results that could possibly be harmful to the authors' conclusion. The bit on the second hastily addressed study lacks what would seem to be very necessary and relevant discussion on why and how the participants differ so much from the participants of the first study of all college students, and avoids the majority of the "bias questions" the authors purport to study in the first place.
The first thing I took away, and cannot stress enough, is how subpar the students involved in the study are. To anyone who wasn't sure or thought this was an "ivy-league" school or anything similar - rest assured it's not. It stands out glaringly, to many Americans that would be as soon as one learns this was done at JMU, but the authors mention the necessary statistics regardless. The participants in the study reported SAT scores close to the institution means - 1140 math+reading total. For those not familiar with the SAT, that's completely unimpressive compared to many, many other American universities. JMU students are by and large the rejects of any more prestigious universities of the several nearby states. These are community college level students, especially as the majority of students in the study were freshmen (first year at the university, and as the authors report, median age arond 19).
Likewise the results on the CRT, the three trick-sounding questions which everyone is making a big deal about, are abysmal for these participants. The authors report a mean of 0.79, with 50% or 241 of the participants getting none correct, (lol) and only 27 or 5.6% getting all 3 correct. This is an extremely poor performance compared to other students at other universities on this same CRT test from previous studies (some probably referenced by authors in this paper).
The first objection I'd raise is the worry that the raw number of students who had high performance on any cognitive metric is too small a sample size. There's no data on the real distribution of SAT scores - whether any participants at all had scores high enough they would be good at a more prestigious university - and only 27 total individuals is of course worrisome for the CRT results. The other cognitive measures were not objective, better-or-worse measures of intelligence or cognition such that they could be used in comparisons towards the authors' overall thesis. Considering individuals had to be split into experimental groups for the bias measures, having an insufficient number of individuals with high performance on the cognitive measures could result in no statistical significance.
What's ridiculously annoying if not scandalous, is that authors did not give any data, NO DATA AT ALL, on the relationship between the students' CRT score and performance on their full set of "bias measures." Performance on the CRT was found to be positively correlated with scores on the other cognitive measures and self-reported test scores, at least that's consistent with other studies. However, to draw their headline conclusions, they only found a lack of correlation between the "bias measures" tested to the bias-blind spot generated from self reports and self-reported SAT scores. The correlations to other cognitive measures were also not tabled. This is questionable in and of itself, and is ridiculous given the the authors' report of "Study 2" where the only data they present on a different group of internet-survey answerers is the CRT results. (Also, the internet survey folks perform far better than the pathetic JMU students on the CRT)
It's worth summarizing one of the bias questions examined to see the obvious, intuitive objections any reasonable person would raise to the specifics of this study. Glossing over the specifics to present final conclusions based on a few statistical correlations and omitting others is not acceptable.
So this one bias question on "anchoring" was based around having participants guess how tall the tallest trees in the world are. The experiment for bias was performed by "framing" the question in two ways (two experimental groups), such as the suggestion the tree was 1000 feet tall, versus framing with a smaller number - 85. That's a tree. A tree. The result for the one group was a mean of guessing 884 ft tall with a standard deviation of 572, and to no real surprise the group framed with the smaller number gave much smaller answers, and presumably almost none of them giving objectively idiotic answers. (As expected the authors found the presence of bias on all the bias measures they tested, consistent with previous studies, for the set of participants as a whole. Nothing interesting there. Remember the whole point of the authors' conclusion is whether the "smarter" participants had less bias than the others.) It's also very annoying that, while "base rate" bias and other related biases are supposedly studied in other questions, the attempt to study a DIFFERENT BIAS is done with an absolutely awful experimental question that mixes in these biases as well. But there's nothing to be said for people who think a tree is over a thousand feet tall. Complete morons.
I really wish the authors had actually provided the data, and we could see whether the handful of students who got all 3 CRT questions correct gave such ridiculous answers on several of the bias questions. There were so few of these students amongst the throng of JMU morons (only 27 total) that the sample size might still not be enough, but it's worth knowing. The authors only report a small correlation between overall SAT scores and bias on this question, as with others, but find it's not significant, which still could be relatively meaningless given the awful SAT scores of all participants all around. If the students who got all of the CRT questions correct, also gave answers such as > 1000 ft trees the same as their peers, then at least the authors are being honest in presenting the results they obtained. Somehow I doubt that, I suspect their performance on the bias questions was much better and they were justified in labeling their peers as morons. (After all, the answer to whether the median JMU student is more susceptible than average to cognitive biases should be very high. It's true as the base rate, y'know)
Wtf.. why are these "complete morons' " paper not peer reviewed or something before it got published? Thanks for the info btw.
And also why are these people (people like these)still having their jobs? Social science is already so "unconcrete" as it is, there is no need for people to screw things up even more.
ten cents ... right? the framing of this question is freaking me out.
Honestly, I think it has more to do with 'priming' and familiarity with a certain kind of problem, more than it has to do with a specific discipline.
For example, I'm sure an English major would struggle with Scrabble or a Crossword if they never played/solved one before.
I guess I'm saying I want a second chance to redeem myself LOL.
It is an honest answer that is the best answer in this case. My mind wanted to say a dollar for one, ten cents for the other until I forced myself out of it a whole 30-40 seconds later. And this is KNOWING there's funny business involved, not some random test administered to 4th graders. And MIT, Harvard, and Princeton students verify that intelligence has nothing to do with it (or, it does, but its a hindrance rather than a help). Let's elect the dumbest candidate to the highest offices in government so as to limit the vulnerability to cognitive bias!
I'd like to see more experiments designed with these in mind to really narrow down the causes and expand the implications. For now, I'll throw the bat and ball into that lake filled with lily pads and wager that I'm down a dollar five. Or ... ... (Haha)
5 cents, didn't take longer than 1 second. Maybe I've seen a similar question before? I don't know, but I think a lot of this is how fluent you are with numbers. Which just takes a lot of practice. I think a cashier (not regarded as an intelligent job) could do this as well as a computer/math programmer.
Hmm, so I had a look at the paper (thanks) and it's hard to articulate how much of a mess this seems to be. The authors write like vicious weasels and I have never seen a more potentially biased paper in any respectable publication.
The selection of data presented gives the impression of a really suspect pattern of entirely avoiding any results that could possibly be harmful to the authors' conclusion. The bit on the second hastily addressed study lacks what would seem to be very necessary and relevant discussion on why and how the participants differ so much from the participants of the first study of all college students, and avoids the majority of the "bias questions" the authors purport to study in the first place.
The first thing I took away, and cannot stress enough, is how subpar the students involved in the study are. To anyone who wasn't sure or thought this was an "ivy-league" school or anything similar - rest assured it's not. It stands out glaringly, to many Americans that would be as soon as one learns this was done at JMU, but the authors mention the necessary statistics regardless. The participants in the study reported SAT scores close to the institution means - 1140 math+reading total. For those not familiar with the SAT, that's completely unimpressive compared to many, many other American universities. JMU students are by and large the rejects of any more prestigious universities of the several nearby states. These are community college level students, especially as the majority of students in the study were freshmen (first year at the university, and as the authors report, median age arond 19).
Likewise the results on the CRT, the three trick-sounding questions which everyone is making a big deal about, are abysmal for these participants. The authors report a mean of 0.79, with 50% or 241 of the participants getting none correct, (lol) and only 27 or 5.6% getting all 3 correct. This is an extremely poor performance compared to other students at other universities on this same CRT test from previous studies (some probably referenced by authors in this paper).
The first objection I'd raise is the worry that the raw number of students who had high performance on any cognitive metric is too small a sample size. There's no data on the real distribution of SAT scores - whether any participants at all had scores high enough they would be good at a more prestigious university - and only 27 total individuals is of course worrisome for the CRT results. The other cognitive measures were not objective, better-or-worse measures of intelligence or cognition such that they could be used in comparisons towards the authors' overall thesis. Considering individuals had to be split into experimental groups for the bias measures, having an insufficient number of individuals with high performance on the cognitive measures could result in no statistical significance.
What's ridiculously annoying if not scandalous, is that authors did not give any data, NO DATA AT ALL, on the relationship between the students' CRT score and performance on their full set of "bias measures." Performance on the CRT was found to be positively correlated with scores on the other cognitive measures and self-reported test scores, at least that's consistent with other studies. However, to draw their headline conclusions, they only found a lack of correlation between the "bias measures" tested to the bias-blind spot generated from self reports and self-reported SAT scores. The correlations to other cognitive measures were also not tabled. This is questionable in and of itself, and is ridiculous given the the authors' report of "Study 2" where the only data they present on a different group of internet-survey answerers is the CRT results. (Also, the internet survey folks perform far better than the pathetic JMU students on the CRT)
It's worth summarizing one of the bias questions examined to see the obvious, intuitive objections any reasonable person would raise to the specifics of this study. Glossing over the specifics to present final conclusions based on a few statistical correlations and omitting others is not acceptable.
So this one bias question on "anchoring" was based around having participants guess how tall the tallest trees in the world are. The experiment for bias was performed by "framing" the question in two ways (two experimental groups), such as the suggestion the tree was 1000 feet tall, versus framing with a smaller number - 85. That's a tree. A tree. The result for the one group was a mean of guessing 884 ft tall with a standard deviation of 572, and to no real surprise the group framed with the smaller number gave much smaller answers, and presumably almost none of them giving objectively idiotic answers. (As expected the authors found the presence of bias on all the bias measures they tested, consistent with previous studies, for the set of participants as a whole. Nothing interesting there. Remember the whole point of the authors' conclusion is whether the "smarter" participants had less bias than the others.) It's also very annoying that, while "base rate" bias and other related biases are supposedly studied in other questions, the attempt to study a DIFFERENT BIAS is done with an absolutely awful experimental question that mixes in these biases as well. But there's nothing to be said for people who think a tree is over a thousand feet tall. Complete morons.
I really wish the authors had actually provided the data, and we could see whether the handful of students who got all 3 CRT questions correct gave such ridiculous answers on several of the bias questions. There were so few of these students amongst the throng of JMU morons (only 27 total) that the sample size might still not be enough, but it's worth knowing. The authors only report a small correlation between overall SAT scores and bias on this question, as with others, but find it's not significant, which still could be relatively meaningless given the awful SAT scores of all participants all around. If the students who got all of the CRT questions correct, also gave answers such as > 1000 ft trees the same as their peers, then at least the authors are being honest in presenting the results they obtained. Somehow I doubt that, I suspect their performance on the bias questions was much better and they were justified in labeling their peers as morons. (After all, the answer to whether the median JMU student is more susceptible than average to cognitive biases should be very high. It's true as the base rate, y'know)
Thanks for reading the study in detail and summarizing it here. It puts the result into perspective, even though being blind to one's own bias is quite typical for smart people, at least in my experience.
Actually I'd prefer to put it one way that I think is easily agreeable.
If someone can't get the right answer or understand why he was wrong fast enough, he's probably just stupid If someone thinks that former person is smart, he's probably stupid.
And most of all: If an "intelligent" person is completely blind to his own bias (even after proven wrong), he'd most definitely be lacking a certain type of intelligence.
Doesn't this just say that educated/intelligent (or whatever) people should stay sharp, or else one could fall in obvioius traps?
I feel that these kinds of 'logical' flaws are one of the most dangerous traps there are. Even the argument 'i was not interested in the answer' falls into this trap, only indirectly. Laziness in thought (in the direct or indirect way) will lead to weird conclusions.
(this post has actually nothing to do with the article, in hindsight.. :$)
By the way, the story of the ball and the bat may be the most well-known version in the US, but the one I've always heard involves two persons, let's say Savior and Nada :
Nada has ten dollars and Savior has eight. How much does Nada have to give Savior so they have the same sum ? Yeah...
Well, I wouldn't say that smart people are completely unaware of their own bias. Sure, their intuition may be just as bad as anyone else's and trusting their instincts may lead them to incorrect answers. But after a while you learn that the logical part of your brain is a whole lot faster than the part that does the actual math. (I know, in primary school my math teacher called my parents in because I had horrible math results while simultaneously winning math contests. I just wasn't interested in counting out the results because in my head I was already a bunch of steps ahead with the "stupidly easy" math test problems. They bored me to tears and I just couldn't focus on adding two and two together properly). At uni I solved the problem by putting literally everything into a calculator and forcing myself not to take shortcuts when writing down the answers. I still have the urge to skip the trivial parts, but once you burn yourself often enough, you're bound to learn. And for this exact reason, smart people that actually solve math problems often enough, won't get caught offguard by simple questions like these.
Edit: Also, what kind of intelligent people are we talking about? One of the smartest people I've ever known was a history teacher at my highschool who was a complete tool at math. He'd sooner hold a two hour presentation on any topic of your choice than solve any of the problems above correctly.
Meh, there's several kinds of intellegence. People are strong about one or more things and weak on others (realizing bias?). For example, I suck at math. Big time. Poor me.
All kinds of bias is typical: the academic world is what it is. Even this study probably have some bias (meh).
Well, knowing a lot about stuff or having a pratical skill is not the same as self-awareness, mastering yourself and having good common sense. Developing the ability to think in different perspectives is the hardest thing ever... The mind apparently wants to draw everything in a stable and secure base...
- After all, skill developing is shaping your instincts to work the best they can in a certain way. A habit develops ... So... Yeah... That's normal if you want to master something. Habits of practice -> skill -> certain bias... -> or the habits of thinking or doing in a certain way, of course....
People who score higher on SAT does not always equall smarter people. Article is too short and does not offer any usefull information. Also, most likely, there is only a certain "range" where this statement stands true, because the question you gave as example can not trick anyone who is told that he might think of a wrong answer at first (anyone that can be considered smart that is).
1. Only one way of measuring how "smart" someone is 2. Unknown range of intelligence.
This article says nothing.
We have always assumed that homo sapiens are rational.
Speak for yourself. Science is well aware of the fact that we're just animals.
1 dollar and 5 cents, 5 cents, right? I accidently read the first post which said 1 dollar and 10 cents but that doesn't work. I have a hard time believing people who don't understand the way doubling works are considered "more intelligent" though.
It took me 3 hours to figure out why the ball costs 5c lol, because this is how it played out in my mind:
Me: I would like a ball please Cashier: ok, that will be 10c please *I hand over 10c* me: actually, I would like a bat as well please Cashier: ok, that will be $1 more. *I hand over $1* total paid: $1.10
but in reality its:
Me: I would like a ball please Cashier: ok, that will be 5c please *I hand over 5c* Me: actually, can I have a bat instead of the ball please Cashier: ok, that will be $1 more *I hand over $1, cashier replaces ball with bat* Me: sorry to mess you around, I think I do need the ball as well please Cashier ok, that will be another 5c *I hand over 5c* Total paid: $1.10
hope that helps someone else understand why the ball costs 5c
On June 13 2012 19:46 Sparksfly wrote: It took me 3 hours to figure out why the ball costs 5c lol, because this is how it played out in my mind:
Me: I would like a ball please Cashier: ok, that will be 10c please *I hand over 10c* me: actually, I would like a bat as well please Cashier: ok, that will be $1 more. *I hand over $1* total paid: $1.10
but in reality its:
Me: I would like a ball please Cashier: ok, that will be 5c please *I hand over 5c* Me: actually, can I have a bat instead of the ball please Cashier: ok, that will be $1 more *I hand over $1, cashier replaces ball with bat* Me: sorry to mess you around, I think I do need the ball as well please Cashier ok, that will be another 5c *I hand over 5c* Total paid: $1.10
hope that helps someone else understand why the ball costs 5c
If you can't work it out intutively surely you can break it down into a simple simultaneous equation (I didn't need to do this for this problem)
x = bat y = ball Find y y + 100 = x ("The bat costs 1 dollar more than the ball") x+y = 110 ("The bat and th ball costs 1 doller, 10 cents") y + 100 + y = 110 2 y + 100 = 110 2y = 10 y = 5.
I actually realize you can do most of these awkwardly written questions and break them into simul eqns by reading the problems in paper years ago. Maths is a useful tool for these kinds of things folks, no need to spend 3 hours confusing yourself constantly with English and wording.
On June 13 2012 13:19 Galaxy1again wrote: Asking ambiguous questions with poor punctuation doesn't make intelligent people unintelligent.
qft
when you are aware of trickery in sentence phrasing, it may take 10 second longer just long enough till you realize where the catch actually is in the sentence
other than that, problem solving remains the same, and intelligent person will probably always have faster results than an average one (which may even not get it right)
studies that make false assumptions based on collected data and exclude everything that could contradict their results really get on my nerves, so many of them these days
Further, we found that none of these bias blind spots were attenuated by measures of cognitive sophistication such as cognitive ability or thinking dispositions related to bias. If anything, a larger bias blind spot was associated with higher cognitive ability
Method
Participants. The participants were 482 undergraduate students (122 men, 360 women) from a medium-sized, eastern university recruited through an introductory psychology subject pool.
it's funny how if you post a retarded question that even 12 years old kids that are somewhat "smart" could answer you get 8 pages of smartasses trying to prove you they are more intelligent than people from the MIT / Princeton / Harvard and making a point to show you they found the correct answer. point is, many people that don't study maths are really average in it and have no idea how to actually solve a problem. IQ is not a good way to measure intelligence, just like these questions. The bias is thinking maths (or anything somewhat scientifically oriented, which involves series, patterns) is the only thing to define intelligence. I'd say your whole studies that enabled you to get accepted at Harvard are a better measure than a stupid question.
In sample 1, A has a concentration of 2 and a signal of 300. B has a concentration of 3 and a signal of 600. In sample 2, A has a concentration of 4 and a signal of 1200. B has a signal of 1800, what's the concentration?
On June 13 2012 21:14 Lobo2me wrote: Here's a little task:
In sample 1, A has a concentration of 2 and a signal of 300. B has a concentration of 3 and a signal of 600. In sample 2, A has a concentration of 4 and a signal of 1200. B has a signal of 1800, what's the concentration?
On June 13 2012 21:14 Lobo2me wrote: Here's a little task:
In sample 1, A has a concentration of 2 and a signal of 300. B has a concentration of 3 and a signal of 600. In sample 2, A has a concentration of 4 and a signal of 1200. B has a signal of 1800, what's the concentration?
I vividly remember falling foul of this kind of thing once.
We had a multiple choice test in junior school - 40 or 50 questions with a separate answer sheet of tick-boxes. I blazed through the questions and finished first. Then when we went through the answers I discovered that I'd missed out question 10. Every answer correct, but filled in one row too high up. I think it was half trying to be too clever, and half the fact that I'm left-handed, so my hand obscured the question numbers on the answer sheet as I worked my way down.
On June 13 2012 21:14 Lobo2me wrote: Here's a little task:
In sample 1, A has a concentration of 2 and a signal of 300. B has a concentration of 3 and a signal of 600. In sample 2, A has a concentration of 4 and a signal of 1200. B has a signal of 1800, what's the concentration?
4.5?
How did you arrive at that answer?
2-300 3-600 4-1200
so 5-2400 and 1-150
have no clue if it should be something like 4.65 since numbers grow faster as higher you get... (if you know what i mean)
I'm reading right now "Thinking, fast and slow" by Kahneman.Higly recommended he talks about our biases in thinking and gives this example in the beginning of the book.
I have only just come to the conclusion that it is 5 cents. If a bat has to cost a dollar more than the ball.
Ball = 0 Bat = 1.00 total 1.00 Ball = 0.05 Bat = 1.05 total 1.10 <------- Correct Ball = 0.10 Bat = 1.10 total 1.20
I'm surprised how long this took me to get this. I must be massively intelligent, however not as intelligent as someone who still think the the ball is 10 cents.
I'm inclined to say that the main reason this occurs more often in intelligent people is because they are more confident in their ability to quickly analyze a situation. They are not used to being challenged by questions on tests. They skim the question, say "this is easy" and write the first thing that comes to mind. For a less intelligent individual, they are more used to being required to think in order to answer such a question. They will ponder it for a moment and come to the correct (obvious) conclusion.
It's not a big mystery to me. The questions don't take any kind of advanced brainpower to solve, that's why most people assume they can breeze through them.
On June 13 2012 21:13 Toxi78 wrote: it's funny how if you post a retarded question that even 12 years old kids that are somewhat "smart" could answer you get 8 pages of smartasses trying to prove you they are more intelligent than people from the MIT / Princeton / Harvard and making a point to show you they found the correct answer. point is, many people that don't study maths are really average in it and have no idea how to actually solve a problem. IQ is not a good way to measure intelligence, just like these questions. The bias is thinking maths (or anything somewhat scientifically oriented, which involves series, patterns) is the only thing to define intelligence. I'd say your whole studies that enabled you to get accepted at Harvard are a better measure than a stupid question.
While you may be right, I wouldn't consider either one of those examples a "math problem". They are just trick questions that make sense to anybody when they stop to think about it.
I love how simple math questions are being posted for absolutely no reason whatsoever.
I'm unsure of the point of the article/study as well, as it essentially says "Intelligent people are far less likely to doubt themselves and their held knowledge than dumb ones" which is just common sense.
Simple, basic, meaningless, math teasers are not stimulating. The bat and ball, the pond, this is not stimulating. The goal of questions such as these is to get the answer and move on. Not to study the problem, roll it around in the mind, focus on specific details, and enjoy the problem solving experience.
In problems such as these, I think you would find that those "more intelligent" people perform significantly higher when they're doing something they enjoy and want to do.
On June 13 2012 21:14 Lobo2me wrote: Here's a little task:
In sample 1, A has a concentration of 2 and a signal of 300. B has a concentration of 3 and a signal of 600. In sample 2, A has a concentration of 4 and a signal of 1200. B has a signal of 1800, what's the concentration?
4.5?
How did you arrive at that answer?
For A to be coherent through both samples, either every unit of concentration adds 300 from concentration 1 = 0, or every unit of concentration doubles the signal, starting from concentration 1 = 150. Both thesis are ok with B being concentration 3 with signal 600, which I find weird considering that it's another sample but I don't really know what you're talking about anyway ^^ First thesis gives concentration 6 for B in sample 2, second thesis gives 4.5
On June 13 2012 13:24 nutgirdle wrote: Lets go with ego. Let me explain: Smart people know they are smart. They also want to answer the question in the least amount of time, and get on with doing things they deem more important. Some might even be lazy, and assume their intuition is powerful enough to get the right answer right away. Therefore, the hop to a reasonably justifiable conclusion using bits and pieces of data to support what they think the answer should be.
Yeah but smart people don't recognize where they fall short.
so it means people that think it was 10 cents are smarter thana the guys that answer 0.5 right away so i think most of TL guys are dumb although they answered right ;D
On June 13 2012 21:14 Lobo2me wrote: Here's a little task:
In sample 1, A has a concentration of 2 and a signal of 300. B has a concentration of 3 and a signal of 600. In sample 2, A has a concentration of 4 and a signal of 1200. B has a signal of 1800, what's the concentration?
4.5?
How did you arrive at that answer?
2-300 3-600 4-1200
so 5-2400 and 1-150
have no clue if it should be something like 4.65 since numbers grow faster as higher you get... (if you know what i mean)
You did get the right answer, but it was purely through luck.
From sample 1 to sample 2, equal concentration would get 2x signal, which is seen with A (2x concentration -> 4x signal). That means when B had a 3x signal increase, it was a 1.5x concentration increase. For example if the signal for B in sample 1 had been 1200, the concentration would be 2.25.
On June 13 2012 13:24 nutgirdle wrote: Lets go with ego. Let me explain: Smart people know they are smart. They also want to answer the question in the least amount of time, and get on with doing things they deem more important. Some might even be lazy, and assume their intuition is powerful enough to get the right answer right away. Therefore, the hop to a reasonably justifiable conclusion using bits and pieces of data to support what they think the answer should be.
Yeah but smart people don't recognize where they fall short.
In that research, the people that performed best underestimated themselves relative to how they thought the rest of the test subjects performed. However they had no problem estimating their actual test score. The people that performed worst, overestimated their performance relative to how they thought the rest of the test subjects performed. They also overestimated their actual test score.
On June 13 2012 21:45 GizmoPT wrote: so it means people that think it was 10 cents are smarter thana the guys that answer 0.5 right away so i think most of TL guys are dumb although they answered right ;D
0.5 cents or 0.5 dollars? Or did you mean 0.5 dimes?
On June 13 2012 21:14 Lobo2me wrote: Here's a little task:
In sample 1, A has a concentration of 2 and a signal of 300. B has a concentration of 3 and a signal of 600. In sample 2, A has a concentration of 4 and a signal of 1200. B has a signal of 1800, what's the concentration?
4.5?
How did you arrive at that answer?
2-300 3-600 4-1200
so 5-2400 and 1-150
have no clue if it should be something like 4.65 since numbers grow faster as higher you get... (if you know what i mean)
You did get the right answer, but it was purely through luck.
From sample 1 to sample 2, equal concentration would get 2x signal, which is seen with A (2x concentration -> 4x signal). That means when B had a 3x signal increase, it was a 1.5x concentration increase. For example if the signal for B in sample 1 had been 1200, the concentration would be 2.25.
I see no reason to assume B has the same concentration-signal relation as A.
On June 13 2012 21:14 Lobo2me wrote: Here's a little task:
In sample 1, A has a concentration of 2 and a signal of 300. B has a concentration of 3 and a signal of 600. In sample 2, A has a concentration of 4 and a signal of 1200. B has a signal of 1800, what's the concentration?
Nowhere is it stated that B and A follows the concentration/signal curve or that there is any connection. I'm going to go right ahead and say that since B has a 3 times higher concentration in sample 2 the answer is also a 3 times increase in concentration meaning 9.
You either need to specify a correlation between the 2 substances (A and B) or define a rate at which concentration/signal rises. Without either of those limits imposed I'm free to assume that B follows linear trend.
I dont know if this is realy suprising, its also not so easy to understand what is meant in the article. There 2 different things: The cognitive bias itself, and the blind spot for this (the ability to recognise your own cognitive bias) The blindspot is discussed in the article and they basicly say that the blindspot is bigger with people who have a high iq. Smarter people overestimate their own judgement more then stupid people. That doesnt make them less smart btw!, it just means that they are a bit less smart then they think they are.
The part of the article your quoted only talks about this blindspot for the cognitive bias. It does not say annything about the seize of the cognitive bias itself.
You need to have cognition before you can have a bias in the first place. Smarter people know more (have more cognition) so most likely also will be more biased due to this cognition. All knowledge is a bias you can kinda argue, it does not make it less valuable.
Meh, got both right intuitively. Intuition can be trained just like anything else.
Anyway, I've seen the claim that smart people can be more prone to cognitive biases than average ones. Specifically they were better at rationalizing their position when they were wrong, while the average person was more likely to accept the right answer on authority
The point is to use your intelligence to look for the truth not to defend positions you're mindlessly drawn to.
I agree with the results of this study but this whole experiment method seems really bad. How are we supposed to know this has anything to do with actual bias and isn't just because smarter people are likely more comfortable with tests and logical experiments and considerably less likely to take them seriously? I'm not at all confident this measures what they think it does, these amount to silly riddles and I don't think it's much of a surprise that intelligence has no bearing on someone's ability to answer them in this setting.
There is a certain, beautiful irony to a team of PhDs writing a study about cognitive bias and trying so hard to come up with the conclusion of "smart people can't solve problems through thinking and introspection". Meta as fuck.
On June 13 2012 22:18 Rassy wrote: You need to have cognition before you can have a bias in the first place. Smarter people know more (have more cognition) so most likely also will be more biased due to this cognition.
You also need an exterior idea to compare to your own to have a bias. One can imagine that the smarter someone is, the more likely he is to be right, and thus to have more of a habit to "reject" ideas.
I'm not quite sure why this is very surprising. I mean, intelligence is basically the general prowess of your brain, and cognitive bias is part of your thinking process. Thus, it stands to reason that, as the potency of your brain in general increases, so too does the parts involved in the thinking process, including bias.
I think it just takes smarter people longer to solve it, to the point where they move forward, because they're minds try to better justify the incorrect answer to themselves before exploring all alternatives.
Also, In my experience this kind of problms are better solved taking a paper and writing an equation, forcing the mathematical abstracion helps aboid silly mistakes.
Also, the question is written ambiguously and can equally mean "The bat costs a dollar more than (only) the ball" as the full logical grammitcal structure should be "The bat costs a dollar more than the ball does."
Therefore, it makes sense to automatically assume the simpler option and then your brain (I believe, especially an intelligent one) will better try to justify this position further before exploring more complicated alternatives. I believe that people would get bored of it and conclude the answer before then, as the question itself is assanine and the answer irrelevant.
Since when are undergraduates considered as smart people ? Would this test have been based on IQ, every person in the 2% would have get the problem right in less than one second.
Just my two cents as an engineering student (number problems, number problems everywhere):
It's pretty apparent the type of thinking that the "obvious" answers (half and 10c) to these two questions expose - people who respond with the first number that comes to mind; rather how I (and I assume most other people inclined to math/engineering/what have you) answer the question is to spot the obvious and subconsciously ask "does this make sense?".
These are really just catches to see who instinctively validates their answer with a quick logical justification.
I think this is pretty simple: Our education system is based mostly on memorizing everybody else's opinion or at best attending to "critical thinking" classes, but students are not used to facing real problems, most of the time in exams the problems are expected to be solved in a certain pre-determined way. This has been recognized for ages already, so people with degrees, especially things like law or economy where you need to read a lot becomes a memorization-fest, that's why discussing anything with people of those professions is always hard because they cannot accept some of their knowledge could be wrong because somebody else -- insert name -- "proved it's right", so the knowledge becomes prejudices.
Now if you do this study to chess players or to starcraft players who are used to solving problems every time they play, their minds would find the solution deffinevitely faster, most of the smartest people I've known play chess, it's a generalization of course but the constant solving of problems do make these people smarter, these simple problems would be easy for them to resolve.
On June 13 2012 19:10 Mindor wrote: Edit: Also, what kind of intelligent people are we talking about? One of the smartest people I've ever known was a history teacher at my highschool who was a complete tool at math. He'd sooner hold a two hour presentation on any topic of your choice than solve any of the problems above correctly.
Being knowledgeable (aka intellectual) doesn't necessairly mean you're smart (intelligent). Meaning that just because he can process, store, and retell a lot of information but that doesn't necessairly mean he understands it, nor (and perhaps more importantly) create any new solutions of his own.
hahaha i knew that "smarter" would mean "has a degree". oh what the system has done, in 10 years you'll need a degree to work at a liquor store. only people with science degrees do i consider "smart".
On June 13 2012 19:10 Mindor wrote: Edit: Also, what kind of intelligent people are we talking about? One of the smartest people I've ever known was a history teacher at my highschool who was a complete tool at math. He'd sooner hold a two hour presentation on any topic of your choice than solve any of the problems above correctly.
Being knowledgeable (aka intellectual) doesn't necessairly mean you're smart (intelligent). Meaning that just because he can process, store, and retell a lot of information but that doesn't necessairly mean he understands it, nor (and perhaps more importantly) create any new solutions of his own.
Exactly what I said but much more to the point. The education system should focus on improving both memorizing a lot of information, plus solving problems because one without the other makes an educated individual incomplete.
On June 13 2012 23:02 HwangjaeTerran wrote: 5 cents & 1 dollar and 5 cents.
And you know Otolia, IQ is a bullshit number that has very little to do with intelligence. Still top 2% would probably get those right straightaway.
Whether you consider IQ as a accurate measurement or not, it doesn't change anything. People in TL tends to believe everything as long as an academician wrote a paper on it without even questioning the paradigm. If only they knew the amount of bullshit and pointless studies you can find in every scientific field ... And it's even worse in humanities ...
On June 13 2012 23:02 HwangjaeTerran wrote: 5 cents & 1 dollar and 5 cents.
And you know Otolia, IQ is a bullshit number that has very little to do with intelligence. Still top 2% would probably get those right straightaway.
Whether you consider IQ as a accurate measurement or not, it doesn't change anything. People in TL tends to believe everything as long as an academician wrote a paper on it without even questioning the paradigm. If only they knew the amount of bullshit and pointless studies you can find in every scientific field ... And it's even worse in humanities ...
Yeah but do you know how hard it is to publish something in a decent journal? You'd have to be a master bullshitter.
BAT AND BALL QUESTION (Please reply with your answer, and please answer as spontaneously as possible.) A bat and ball cost a dollar and ten cents. The bat costs a dollar more than the ball. How much does the ball cost?
On June 14 2012 00:19 Deadlyhazard wrote: I still don't get the 5 cents thing. It has to be 10 cents. FYI I failed statistics 3 times in college, I must not be a very intelligent person.
10 plus 110 is 120.
5 plus 105 is 110.
I think that you getting it wrong means you're smart, not stupid.
On June 14 2012 00:19 Deadlyhazard wrote: I still don't get the 5 cents thing. It has to be 10 cents. FYI I failed statistics 3 times in college, I must not be a very intelligent person.
10 plus 110 is 120.
5 plus 105 is 110.
I think that you getting it wrong means you're smart, not stupid.
OH MAH GOD it makes perfect sense now. I feel like an idiot!
I'm not buying it. There are different kinds of intelligence so being good at IQ (a combination of some) doesnt guaranty you are good at some other one (like creative thinking). Should there be a negative correlation is a good question and I would generally say no. But there is a lot of evidence that different thinking patterns interfere with each other so there might be. And last thing since their results are a bit sensationalist one cant be really sure they didnt manipulate a bit with results to get the statistics they need.
My hypothesis to the explain the result of this study could be that being "smart" is nothing but alot of well trained neurological connection in your brain. Basically system and pathways. If these are well developed I would assume that they would also be more set in their ways, and more likely to connect things to other things you know of which might be why the new and unexpected might fool these people more.
Atleast the kind of smart that scores high on alot of these test the people were meassured by.
You can never go into something completely unbiased and open-minded. You have to have assumptions and knowledge otherwise you won't get anywhere. Some people are in these situations at a disadvantage with more knowledge as they will have more knowledge to "help" them.
On June 13 2012 21:14 Lobo2me wrote: Here's a little task:
In sample 1, A has a concentration of 2 and a signal of 300. B has a concentration of 3 and a signal of 600. In sample 2, A has a concentration of 4 and a signal of 1200. B has a signal of 1800, what's the concentration?
Heh, not enough info. Are the samples from the same population? How much noise is there? Need the background. The answer could be anything the way you phrased this.
OT: the research is dumb, I got both answers right (first immediately, because that question has been asked soo often and the second after thinking through 10 cents first and realizing it was wrong... took about 5 seconds to get it right). Insofar as I can see the sample the researchers have is not at all unbiased and any possible conclusions should only hold for first year psychology students at a specific university in the USA. Not generalizable.
Well from my experience many of the "smartest" people i have known are also the dumbest.They have zero practical knowledge and cant solve simple problems. I have a friend who is a rocket scientist (literally a rocket scientist) who lost his freaking mind one morning because his wifes car wouldnt start. He was freaking out because he had to get to work so did his wife and had to take his kids to school and he didnt know what to do. He was a mess and called me and i came over. Now this guy is a mechanical genius right? He looked at everything on that car. Except the battery cables. They were lose. Simple fix and he couldnt see it. Forest through the trees or some such.
On June 13 2012 23:02 HwangjaeTerran wrote: 5 cents & 1 dollar and 5 cents.
And you know Otolia, IQ is a bullshit number that has very little to do with intelligence. Still top 2% would probably get those right straightaway.
Whether you consider IQ as a accurate measurement or not, it doesn't change anything. People in TL tends to believe everything as long as an academician wrote a paper on it without even questioning the paradigm. If only they knew the amount of bullshit and pointless studies you can find in every scientific field ... And it's even worse in humanities ...
Yeah but do you know how hard it is to publish something in a decent journal? You'd have to be a master bullshitter.
No. You have to actually do decent research. At least, for CS journals. No clue on psychology, maybe there bullshitting is enough.
On June 13 2012 23:02 HwangjaeTerran wrote: IQ is a bullshit number that has very little to do with intelligence
Back this statement with something please, I'm interested.
There are several kinds of "intelligence", if you have a IQ of 180 you are not likely to own several companies and be rich and sociable. IQ merely represents one kind of intelligence, if you are good at reasoning, quick thinking, and logic, you will hive a decent-er IQ.
However, I've known people with relatively high GPAs with merely 100 of IQ, they usually need to work much harder than people with, let's say 130, to get the same results. Often people with not-so-high IQs get defensive and try to undervalue it by saying they're "too good" at something else regardless of their IQ.
lol you wrote that you base intelligence on how many degrees people have. thats the most ignorant thing ive read in a long time. its so easy to get a degree they dont mean hardly anything these days
The ball is 5cents while the bat is a dollar and five cents, but i had to think about it to figure it out, i was very inclined to just assume the ball would cost 10 cents which doesnt actually make any sence and had I not expected it to be a trick question i would have likely answered 10 cents before thinking about it.
On June 13 2012 23:02 HwangjaeTerran wrote: IQ is a bullshit number that has very little to do with intelligence
Back this statement with something please, I'm interested.
There are several kinds of "intelligence", if you have a IQ of 180 you are not likely to own several companies and be rich and sociable. IQ merely represents one kind of intelligence, if you are good at reasoning, quick thinking, and logic, you will hive a decent-er IQ.
However, I've known people with relatively high GPAs with merely 100 of IQ, they usually need to work much harder than people with, let's say 130, to get the same results. Often people with not-so-high IQs get defensive and try to undervalue it by saying they're "too good" at something else regardless of their IQ.
Not the first time I hear that there are several kind of intelligence. I disagree with that. To me, intelligence is how good your brain works on a pure mechanical basis. Not the same as knowledge, success, skills or sociability, even though they all require that you use any amount of intelligence you have.
Either I am really stupid because I knew the answers instantly, or judging someone's intelligence by SAT scores is.
By knowing 'instantly' I mean following train of thought "24 DAYS. NO. 47." within a second. I approached the other question more 'slowly' though, because I expected some kind of trap and just did the math instead of intuition.
And one personal example for IQ or test scores not reflecting other kinds of intelligence would be me being better in school and tests and analyzing shit etc. than one of my friends in school. He worked way harder for school than me, because I am lazy, it just didn't seem to matter. But when we played stuff like 'categories' he always was a billion times faster than me. While my brain does stuff like "City with S: SUMMER, oh thats no city...S.. hmmm.. SUMMER" in a loop. He could do shit like saying the alphabet fluently backwards, while I can say 'zyx' and then have to say the whole alphabet forward in my head for every additional letter. (He did that spontaneously at school, when I was bored and suggested doing that instead of productive things, so he probably didn't just learn it by heart beforehand.)
On June 13 2012 23:02 HwangjaeTerran wrote: IQ is a bullshit number that has very little to do with intelligence
Back this statement with something please, I'm interested.
There are several kinds of "intelligence", if you have a IQ of 180 you are not likely to own several companies and be rich and sociable. IQ merely represents one kind of intelligence, if you are good at reasoning, quick thinking, and logic, you will hive a decent-er IQ.
However, I've known people with relatively high GPAs with merely 100 of IQ, they usually need to work much harder than people with, let's say 130, to get the same results. Often people with not-so-high IQs get defensive and try to undervalue it by saying they're "too good" at something else regardless of their IQ.
Not the first time I hear that there are several kind of intelligence. I disagree with that. To me, intelligence is how good your brain works on a pure mechanical basis. Not the same as knowledge, success, skills or sociability, even though they all require that you use any amount of intelligence you have.
Also, I don't understand your last sentence.
Define pure mechanical basis.
Also, aren't the categories you mention at least partially independent? (or at least, when put together, multidimensional) That would mean that the 'intelligence'-space will have multiple independent defining factors, making the difference between different kinds of intelligence and 1 multidimensional kind of intelligence nothing substantial anymore.
I said 50 cents lol, thought it was 10c difference. Actually I had already revised my answer once, after reading the total amount as $10.10 and the difference 10c. Pretty blatant slip.
Does it matter whether it uses SAT scores or not? They might not measure intelligence perfectly but to tell me there's no correlation at all is ignorant. Besides, whether YOU believe it measures intelligence or not, the academic world bases their acceptance partially on SAT scores.
I like how this article trolls the internet, because the internet is full of geniuses. Just look at the sorry excuses on this thread for missing the answer...
Edit: Oh and to all those people defending intelligent people because they wre tricked/this is irrelevant. The point of the article is not to measure an intelligent person at his finest. The point is that in practice, intelligent/self-perceived intelligent people will commit errors confidently. Problems similar to the ones given in the article can come up in real world practice.
Sigh... its a slightly tricky math problem. It's like the question about if a watermelon is 99% water and weights 100 pounds, how much does it weigh after it dries so its only 98% water?
There are 100 football and basketball players in a room. There is at least one football player for every basketball player. How many basketball players are there?
Maybe it seems obvious that the answer is one-- I dunno, maybe the phrasing made it harder before? This problem popped up freshman year in the finals of Mathbowl for MAO (I was freaking the fuck out) and we missed it. Lost by that one point in the end, second place T_T
I tried looking for the full article on my uni's catalogs and stuff. No luck though. I figured ah, uh, "top 20 private research institution" would have a subscription to, y'know, the APA. Where does my tuition gooo? T_T
Anyways, students at Harvard, MIT and Princeton are "smart". It doesn't mean they are math smart. I think this is a pretty terribad study from what I've read of it. Without a control or varying levels of the independent variable, you have no standard of comparison.
Imagine if you had done this "cognitive bias" with the math people-- MAO members, kids who took the AMC, math majors. Probably would have gotten a MUCH higher percentage of people getting it right.
(God psychology is such a joke sometimes)
EDIT: The actual article is not online on pubmed or other sources yet because apparently it hasn't actually been published yet.
First instinct: trial and error. First instinctive trial: $0.10. Fail. Second instinctive trial: $0.00. Fail. Third instinctive trial: $0.05. Success. This process takes about a second.
On June 13 2012 23:02 HwangjaeTerran wrote: 5 cents & 1 dollar and 5 cents.
And you know Otolia, IQ is a bullshit number that has very little to do with intelligence. Still top 2% would probably get those right straightaway.
Whether you consider IQ as a accurate measurement or not, it doesn't change anything. People in TL tends to believe everything as long as an academician wrote a paper on it without even questioning the paradigm. If only they knew the amount of bullshit and pointless studies you can find in every scientific field ... And it's even worse in humanities ...
Yeah but do you know how hard it is to publish something in a decent journal? You'd have to be a master bullshitter.
There are 2 main journals, Nature and Science. The rest is very accessible as long as you present something that is valuable. But it doesn't mean the research has any point or any significance. As long as it respects particular codes, you can wrote almost anything even if the research you are doing isn't relevant to anything or so limited in its subject that it makes little sense.
I can assure you, I know how hard it is to get publish and how much everyone works but it doesn't mean their paradigm are worth the time you put in reading it (aka it's bullshit). Some universities (particularly in the USA) force their grad students to produce papers after papers which clearly brings the quality of every studies down.
On June 14 2012 01:12 Dyme wrote: Either I am really stupid because I knew the answers instantly, or judging someone's intelligence by SAT scores is.
By knowing 'instantly' I mean following train of thought "24 DAYS. NO. 47." within a second. I approached the other question more 'slowly' though, because I expected some kind of trap and just did the math instead of intuition.
And one personal example for IQ or test scores not reflecting other kinds of intelligence would be me being better in school and tests and analyzing shit etc. than one of my friends in school. He worked way harder for school than me, because I am lazy, it just didn't seem to matter. But when we played stuff like 'categories' he always was a billion times faster than me. While my brain does stuff like "City with S: SUMMER, oh thats no city...S.. hmmm.. SUMMER" in a loop. He could do shit like saying the alphabet fluently backwards, while I can say 'zyx' and then have to say the whole alphabet forward in my head for every additional letter. (He did that spontaneously at school, when I was bored and suggested doing that instead of productive things, so he probably didn't just learn it by heart beforehand.)
On June 13 2012 23:02 HwangjaeTerran wrote: 5 cents & 1 dollar and 5 cents.
And you know Otolia, IQ is a bullshit number that has very little to do with intelligence. Still top 2% would probably get those right straightaway.
Whether you consider IQ as a accurate measurement or not, it doesn't change anything. People in TL tends to believe everything as long as an academician wrote a paper on it without even questioning the paradigm. If only they knew the amount of bullshit and pointless studies you can find in every scientific field ... And it's even worse in humanities ...
Yeah but do you know how hard it is to publish something in a decent journal? You'd have to be a master bullshitter.
There are 2 main journals, Nature and Science. The rest is very accessible as long as you present something that is valuable. But it doesn't mean the research has any point or any significance. As long as it respects particular codes, you can wrote almost anything even if the research you are doing isn't relevant to anything or so limited in its subject that it makes little sense.
I can assure you, I know how hard it is to get publish and how much everyone works but it doesn't mean their paradigm are worth the time you put in reading it (aka it's bullshit). Some universities (particularly in the USA) force their grad students to produce papers after papers which clearly brings the quality of every studies down.
There are also Topics (you know, the ones that everybody in the goddamn field will write on) where scholars just go on and on and on without actually adding anything of worth to the conversation... These papers are usually structured like this: Here is the issue, let me summarize the history of the issue, let me "complicate" the issue by repeating what others have said is problematic about this issue, I think it is very complicated and should be approached with care. Holy fuck, are these papers painful to read or what?
I'm sure the world's blunderers are rejoicing at this news. Now they can feel worthwhile because they are less likely to fuck up worthless questionnaires, most likely because actually intellligent people are wishing they are somewhere else while doing these little bits of arcanery.
There are 100 football and basketball players in a room. There is at least one football player for every basketball player. How many basketball players are there?
+ Show Spoiler +
I don't understand at all. Two basketball and 48 football players (edit : I meant 98 obviously) work just as well, actually any number up to 50 works. I googled it and found that phrasing :
At a sports banquet there are one hundred athletes. Each one is either a football or basketball player. At least one is a football player. Given any two of the athletes, at least one is a basketball player. How many of the athletes are football players?
So are you sure you recounted it correctly ? with that second version there is indeed only one correct answer.
Sigh... its a slightly tricky math problem. It's like the question about if a watermelon is 99% water and weights 100 pounds, how much does it weigh after it dries so its only 98% water?
Good one, but you should add the percentages are given in weight and not volume.
5 cents - took me like 15 seconds to figure it out....
I really think that while initially higher education teaches how to think in a more broad way, later on overspecialization decreases general problem solving performance. That is just trade off you get for being good at one thing.
academic intelligence is measured by the ability to quickly be right when presented by problems of a type one has experienced before (or just questions about facts one has been exposed to before). Therefore, for standard academic performance quantifiers, the tendency to slow down and think through a problem is a negative.
This is why many post grads have difficulty in their job as researchers and professors, because all of a sudden they are expected to be masters of a skill that they very rarely trained in. I honestly think this is one of the biggest problems in science. Even peer reviewed papers are generally terrible at shirking off bias. There are just certain area's they are allowed to sneak bias in.
On June 14 2012 01:26 Severedevil wrote: Clearly, IQ imperfectly measures a useful set of mental abilities. Clearly, IQ does not even attempt to measure every useful kind of mental ability.
Which bits you count as 'intelligence' is just semantics.
IQ measures potential for learning. The reason that many intelligent people are bad at hard work and have bad social skills is that they never actually had to develop them, since everything comes so easily. And about social skills, when you're extremely intelligent (145IQ+), you are probably smarter than your teachers and know more than them at second grade, you just have problem relating and communicating with other kids.
Theoretically, wouldn't 'smarter' people just read through it quickly and think, oh easy question, snap answer, where else a 'stupider' person would read through it, and say I don't get it, and then re-read it and get it.
Basically, just that the 'stupider' person would be more methodical?
Is cognitive bias long term? If it is, I am not sure how smarter people are biased?
On June 14 2012 03:45 ShrykLdr wrote: God damnit, just realized it.... sigh
LOL. I like how dejected you sound. I got it wrong too, even though I knew something was up but it said answer as quickly as possible so I just went with it. But I'm happy I figured it out shortly after
On June 14 2012 01:26 Severedevil wrote: Clearly, IQ imperfectly measures a useful set of mental abilities. Clearly, IQ does not even attempt to measure every useful kind of mental ability.
Which bits you count as 'intelligence' is just semantics.
IQ measures potential for learning. The reason that many intelligent people are bad at hard work and have bad social skills is that they never actually had to develop them, since everything comes so easily. And about social skills, when you're extremely intelligent (145IQ+), you are probably smarter than your teachers and know more than them at second grade, you just have problem relating and communicating with other kids.
I am going to sound like the arrogant prick that I am: but that's almost the story of my childhood, except that the bad social skills came much later when I just stopped caring When it came to relating to other kids I learned at around the age of 10 that I should not act intelligent.
The real problem is that when success is measured by secondary school grades and you dont even need to show up to lessons to achieve top grades then you believe that you do not need to work to succeed, and that does cause big problems later.
I have no idea what my IQ is and I suspect it is significantly lower than that 145, but you really do not need to be intellectually ahead of your peers at a young age.
On June 14 2012 03:55 wunsun wrote: Theoretically, wouldn't 'smarter' people just read through it quickly and think, oh easy question, snap answer, where else a 'stupider' person would read through it, and say I don't get it, and then re-read it and get it.
Basically, just that the 'stupider' person would be more methodical?
Is cognitive bias long term? If it is, I am not sure how smarter people are biased?
in my opinion, this is wrong. Any 'smart' person will know that this is a trick question based on being told to answer fast and with your gut feeling, and will do it carefully (or actually calculate it). Or be tired of those questions where the one asking them gets the kick out of thinking he outsmarted smart people by showing them how them having learned stuff makes them stupid and not calculate it at all. Because my free will tells me i don't have to if those kind of really stupid questions bore me to death. And they do. For me being smart is trying to learn out of everything you do, finding mistakes by connecting patterns and constantly improving. This is like infinite possibilities and can never be truly measured by any kind of stupid IQ test where you suddenly seem more intelligent if you had the luck to already have heard such a question and its solution already. off topic: + Show Spoiler +
Oh and also solving a rubics cube is quite the interesting task, as long as you do not know any of the combinational moves (how to get tile x to position y). Find those out on your own and you are clever (and have either put a lot of time into solving a problem by experimenting or you are good at abstraction and thinking 3D in your head etc). But as soon as you find out about the moves, it just becomes all about repetitiveness and finger memory and has pretty much nothing to do with you being smart or stupid, it becomes just another way of killing time. Hm maybe i should put this side-rant into spoilers since it seems a bit OT
On June 14 2012 03:55 wunsun wrote: Theoretically, wouldn't 'smarter' people just read through it quickly and think, oh easy question, snap answer, where else a 'stupider' person would read through it, and say I don't get it, and then re-read it and get it.
Basically, just that the 'stupider' person would be more methodical?
Is cognitive bias long term? If it is, I am not sure how smarter people are biased?
in my opinion, this is wrong. Any 'smart' person will know that this is a trick question based on being told to answer fast and with your gut feeling, and will do it carefully (or actually calculate it). Or be tired of those questions where the one asking them gets the kick out of thinking he outsmarted smart people by showing them how them having learned stuff makes them stupid and not calculate it at all. Because my free will tells me i don't have to if those kind of really stupid questions bore me to death. And they do. For me being smart is trying to learn out of everything you do, finding mistakes by connecting patterns and constantly improving. This is like infinite possibilities and can never be truly measured by any kind of stupid IQ test where you suddenly seem more intelligent if you had the luck to already have heard such a question and its solution already. off topic: + Show Spoiler +
Oh and also solving a rubics cube is quite the interesting task, as long as you do not know any of the combinational moves (how to get tile x to position y). Find those out on your own and you are clever (and have either put a lot of time into solving a problem by experimenting or you are good at abstraction and thinking 3D in your head etc). But as soon as you find out about the moves, it just becomes all about repetitiveness and finger memory and has pretty much nothing to do with you being smart or stupid, it becomes just another way of killing time. Hm maybe i should put this side-rant into spoilers since it seems a bit OT
Simple questions cannot always be consciously calculated. Take the example in the OP. I knew it was 5 cents within a few hundred milliseconds. To consciously calculate it I would have to decide to slowly check my answer. A lot of the time I would not bother to check such an answer as I assume that I know it and because of that I would occasionally get such a question wrong.
I think this is actually more of a philosophical debate than anything else. What is intelligence? I do not care enough to debate it. I can certainly perform well when it comes to simple (logical) problems, and as a younger person I would of arrogantly thought that I was more intelligent than others. But I have gradually come to realise than in practice there are many ways to be intelligent and therefore there are many people more intelligent than I am.
I still do not know how to solve rubics' cubes. I have solved them and could solve them again, but it is a slow process. Damn, now I want a rubics cube...
So i got 102 on a IQ test i did like a year ago and i got the answer wrong... Either the answer is wrong or my IQ test result was wrong. I think their both wrong! Must mean i'm super smart. Hurray for sience!
On June 14 2012 04:16 Cirqueenflex wrote: For me being smart is trying to learn out of everything you do, finding mistakes by connecting patterns and constantly improving. This is like infinite possibilities and can never be truly measured by any kind of stupid IQ test where you suddenly seem more intelligent if you had the luck to already have heard such a question and its solution already.
You probably don't know much about IQ tests. It's a wide array of tasks that you have to complete, and the result is calculated considering the time it took you and how good were your answers. From what I remember there were logic, calculus, some general knowledge, vocabulary and even some moral issues (like, if you find a wallet with the owner ID in it, what do you do). Of course factors such as mood, weariness and maybe even luck to an extent can change the outcome. The trick, which is what I think most people don't know, is that the result isn't strictly how intelligent you are. It's more like trying to know what time is it by watching the shade of a stick in the ground. Indirect measurement, and with only 70% accuracy if I remember correctly. Still the best way we have to measure it so far, as far as I know. So, being intelligent isn't how fast/good you perform those tasks, but being intelligent helps in doing them better/faster. What you describe in the first sentence I quoted would be the smart way to use your intelligence, not being intelligent.
Also, please stop saying that IQ tests are stupid. Some people have suffered being "gifted" with high IQ, and knowing why can help them.
5 cents.. and I'm surprised college grads missed the lily pad question, it seems rather simple.. if something doubles in size every day it was obviously half the size the day before.. so it filled half the lake one day before..
Are you saying having a better education makes you more prone to miss these types of questions? I find it hard to belive if you gave the same questions to a group of people with no college degree a small percentage of them would miss the question..
But when you say "answer as as spontaneously as possible." This means the whole research is about cases where you have to think quickly? Because if you take like 30 seconds to think about it, it's just a simple question. And if you know these questions are about bias, you would take that extra second to think about the answer.
The one about the lake is also pretty easy too, if you think about it logically.
"The Smarter People Get, The More Prone They Are to Cognitive Bias" isn't what the article says. More like the press getting their hands on an article like this.
When faced with the problems in the study, being 'more intelligent' did not relate to getting more items wrong or right for cognitive bias questions. Being smart did however relate to an overestimation of a persons own ability to not be fooled compared to other people (bias blind spot). Which I don't really think is a "cognitive bias" in itself, since it's reasonable to think that someone who is smarter would be better at not being tricked. At least it was reasonable until I read the article, but turns out it just doesn't matter.
Also that overestimation was weak and like the title says "Cognitive Sophistication Does Not Attenuate the Bias Blind Spot" which is as they say at least the 'conservative' way of interpreting the results.
Anyway, I think the OP is still interesting just wanted to point it out. I think the fact that being aware of bias or being more open-minded (at least based on self-report), or scoring higher on SAT doesn't matter is pretty interesting. At the same time it's not impossible to get rid of cognitive bias. I and I'm sure many others looked an extra time or two at the questions because I knew there would be something strange about them and that the answer wouldn't be so obvious.
Ball is 5 cents because bat is $1 more and total price is $1.1. So 1.1= X+X+1.0. The initial reaction is 10 cents but then the bat would only be 90 cents more than the ball.
Zounds, it seems almost nobody is still getting what this paper was about or have picked it up from reading other responses. To reiterate and make it very clear:
If you got the tricky-ish little math questions (referred to as the CRT) correct, then you are smarter. If you got the tricky-ish little math questions wrong, then you are stupider.
That's not the issue. That was never the issue, and this result is consistent with previous studies. Better students and people with better cognitive performance on other measures get the CRT questions correct more often.
The authors' result is that supposedly "smarter" people underestimated their own bias on this OTHER GROUP of "bias questions."
I can see how at first everyone thought the discussion was different, both due to the OP, and apparently journalists' presentation of this. Since then it's been clarified but people keep missing it, there's a misunderstanding of what the paper was actually meant to be about. You're not "supposed" to get the CRT questions wrong. It's good to get them right. The real point the authors attempt to make is on this other group of bias questions. Now the brilliant part is, ok, now you're thinking the comparison is between the students' results on the CRT, and results on the bias questions. The authors don't report that data either. They drew the bias conclusion based on calculating correlations to SAT scores. Understand what the paper is actually about, though I'd say it's pretty rubbish on those grounds too, and not sorry for anyone who still didn't find access because then you won't have wasted your time.
So in essence, for another summary of what the paper presents, what happened was the authors conclude that better self-reported test scores do not correlate to a lack of bias on the bias questions. The particular point is on the bias-blind spot, or how people "underestimate their own bias" in a meta-sense as a few others have mentioned. None of that is news or interesting, the shock value of this paper is supposedly in how this relates to people being "smart" aka cognitively sophisticated. For whatever reason, cough, they decided to only use the self-reported test scores from the students to decide which students were smart. Also that comes with such deliciously weasely statements like, self-reported test scores usually correlate to students' actual test scores pretty well.
And ffs, the authors don't even address the use of total SAT scores instead of just SAT math which makes way more sense. Anybody with half a brain in these sorts of social sciences in American universities should know that SAT math and verbal scores do not correlate perfectly, especially due to foreign/ESL students who can have much higher math scores. Again, it's possible that the vast incompetence of all the students involved was such that it turns out this didn't matter and the authors just didn't mention it, but there was no explicit reason for why they don't simply take the much more intuitive SAT math scores only to compare to their other metrics)
Remember that almost all the student participants in the study generally have terrible scores as well. So the conclusion is reasonably questionable from the very nature of this study right away. It would be like, because researchers studied 500 bronze and silver level players and concluded that greater skill had no correlation to reduced bias, therefore more skilled Starcraft players are biased, therefore professional players are more biased. And then the responses in the thread are everyone saying "lol I can split my workers/solve this math problem, silly bronze level noobs," but the point was the set of "bias questions" in the first place, and professional players weren't even tested.
What is frustrating, to elaborate on from before and especially given the thread discussion, is that the authors do not actually report the correlation between performance on the CRT - those tricky little math questions - and performance on the bias questions. They decided not to publish that. In essence, the CRT results are rather irrelevant to most of the paper.
At that, I do think it is rather disturbing that the paper in its current state is supposedly being published in a well-reputed journal within the psychology/sociology field. Maybe this is not so different from other papers in the same social science domains to which I am also unfamiliar, but that did surprise me. If this lack of rigor happened in another field, say climate science, it would be the sort of thing where Fox News would be running 24/7 headlines on "Climate Scientists Refuse to Publish Data, Liberal Conspiracy Confirmed." One of the so-called biggest "scandals" in all the climate science controversy is debating the interpretation of ice core data going back to thousands of years ago and that's orders of magnitude less suspicious than this paper.
This is not the 1950s, where people had to sit around with slide rules or whatnot. The chance they wrote any of their own code or anything like that is vanishingly small. There's no possible way for one to believe the authors could not actually calculate these other correlation coefficients, that they literally couldn't press enter and print a table from a computer which is almost certainly all they had to do. Yet for some reason these correlations are omitted from publication.
It is possible to give the authors the benefit of the doubt and suspect no intentional wrongdoing, but still, there's either sheer idiocy at play or a clear revelation of inherent flaws in the study methodology and its sample. No possible reason not to publish the other tables of data that I can think of.
So for one last time, whether you got the tricky little math questions - the CRT - is not the issue here. The paper itself fails to present the necessary data on the CRT results compared to the results on the bias measures. A better title which reflects some of the actual results on the bias measures, might perhaps be:
"Female JMU students are imbeciles who think Africa has 10 countries, trees are 1000 feet tall."
This study definitely makes a whole lot of sense. People who are more intelligent are better at making their brains follow certain patterns to solve problems, as in the long run it saves time and cognition power for more intricate tasks. This study isn't trying to say 'intelligent people are unintelligent' or whatever it is you all are claiming. It just exposes some of the shortcuts the human mind can take in approaching problem solving. Very interesting.
my slightly tipsy brain screamed 10 cents followed within seconds by 'NOO it's a trap'. I assume that afther a few seconds of thought everybody will get to the right answer. Otherwise i can't really get interested by this research, it rieks of Diederik Stapelesc assumptions.
One problem I've always had with tests like these is that they are done under the premise of trying to trick people. And worse, people usually know that.
Which is why, if you ask an ambiguous mathematical question that uses exact semantics to try and fool people (who are already overthinking the question), you will get results you ask for.
At that, I do think it is rather disturbing that the paper in its current state is supposedly being published in a well-reputed journal within the psychology/sociology field. Maybe this is not so different from other papers in the same social science domains to which I am also unfamiliar, but that did surprise me. If this lack of rigor happened in another field, say climate science, it would be the sort of thing where Fox News would be running 24/7 headlines on "Climate Scientists Refuse to Publish Data, Liberal Conspiracy Confirmed." One of the so-called biggest "scandals" in all the climate science controversy is debating the interpretation of ice core data going back to thousands of years ago and that's orders of magnitude less suspicious than this paper.
This is not the 1950s, where people had to sit around with slide rules or whatnot. The chance they wrote any of their own code or anything like that is vanishingly small. There's no possible way for one to believe the authors could not actually calculate these other correlation coefficients, that they literally couldn't press enter and print a table from a computer which is almost certainly all they had to do. Yet for some reason these correlations are omitted from publication.
The numbers are there. I can't say I'm used to these kind of results but for example Table 3 for SATs. For example:
"The next row of the table indicates that the slope of the response as a function of SAT score was steeper for the negative outcome condition (.254) than for the positive outcome condition (.072). The direction of the effect is indicating that participants of higher SAT displayed ...."
Regarding some of the other stuff criticism, you kind of responded to it yourself in the beginning. The article is about "Bias Blind Spot" and "Cognitive Sophistication". It's not about how well people perform on the cognitive bias tests, that's just the part that the press liked. Maybe really high math SAT people do well on this stuff, maybe they don't, this article isn't about it.
If you don't find it interesting at all that is fine but not really a need to be so hostile about it. It's not like you would have made a better study and there are plenty of good points like including a sample of non-college students.
The numbers are not there for the CRT scores of the JMU participants. (Nor for the NFC or other cognitive measure they mentioned, I believe)
It's remarkably lazy at best to only check the correlation to SAT scores and the self-responses on bias blind spot. I don't see how they get away with not even publishing the other data, even an appendix table, unless I'm missing something or the version of the paper I had access to wasn't complete. But I don't see it there, which is silly considering the "study 2" only tables CRT, not SAT scores, and the reader then can't even compare that to the first study.
It's quite possible that due to the low number and skewed sample size of students with high scores on the CRT, it wasn't really possible to calculate the correlation, but that alone highlights a huge flaw in this study and would also be worth a mention.
But if your asked to answer as spontaneously as possible, wouldn't it be natural to answer with something wrong, unless you've answered a lot of similar questions in your life? I mean, doesn't being smart mean you'd find your error sooner, so if you think about your answer, you'd find out it's wrong, but the question specifically tells you not to think about it, right?
edit: my point being, how could anyone belief being smart (if we presuppose that degrees mean you smart, which i can tell you is idiotic at least in austria) means having better intuition?
On June 14 2012 08:41 blarkh wrote: But if your asked to answer as spontaneously as possible, wouldn't it be natural to answer with something wrong, unless you've answered a lot of similar questions in your life? I mean, doesn't being smart mean you'd find your error sooner, so if you think about your answer, you'd find out it's wrong, but the question specifically tells you not to think about it, right?
edit: my point being, how could anyone belief being smart (if we presuppose that degrees mean you smart, which i can tell you is idiotic at least in austria) means having better intuition?
This is exactly what I was thinking. If you ask someone that is good at math the question and tell them to write it down, I bet they would score far better than if you told them to verbally tell the answer. However, if you ask someone that is bad at math the same thing, they would probably get the answer wrong both times. This is all conjecture, but I think it really means what you said, that smart people don't give great spontaneous answers (which I don't think many people would, in this scenario).
This is all assuming that the questions were given verbally, or given in written form but with some form of added urgency.
On June 14 2012 08:32 Crazy Eddie wrote: The numbers are not there for the CRT scores of the JMU participants. (Nor for the NFC or other cognitive measure they mentioned, I believe)
It's remarkably lazy at best to only check the correlation to SAT scores and the self-responses on bias blind spot. I don't see how they get away with not even publishing the other data, even an appendix table, unless I'm missing something or the version of the paper I had access to wasn't complete. But I don't see it there, which is silly considering the "study 2" only tables CRT, not SAT scores, and the reader then can't even compare that to the first study.
It's quite possible that due to the low number and skewed sample size of students with high scores on the CRT, it wasn't really possible to calculate the correlation, but that alone highlights a huge flaw in this study and would also be worth a mention.
Study 2 didn't use SATs.
The study is NOT about how "intelligent" people perform on cognitive bias tests. You yourself pointed this out. Yet you continue to criticise the paper based on the assumption that it's about something it is not.
The exact scores for everything just isn't relevant to the focus of the paper. They present enough data to suggest that there isn't a difference, and if someone else wants to pick it up from there and make a study about how "Cognitive ability and performance on cognitive bias testing" then that study will report all the data. Because then the data is not OT. In this study it is a side note as a test to see if it is a "real" blind spot or not.
After this whole debate the only thing I can come up with is a joke that an economical analysis student used as a pick-up line at a lawyer-economist student party to guess if he was talking to an economy or a law student.
"There are 10 kinds of people on this world, those who can count in a binary numeral system and those who don't."
Psychology students shouldn't be considered "smart" at math by definition, therefore the whole study is totally biased. Surely psychology professors had easier access to their own students, but they are far from representing all types of smart people in the world and generalizing based on them is pretty stupid.
My "spontaneous answer" was that the bat is $1.00. I also knew that I was wrong right away. And then I found out the question was asking how much the ball cost.
Well, the study is also about how we're bad at seeing our own flaws, but much better at seeing other people's flaws, right?
Isn't being able to think of the right answer at all good enough? Maybe someone brilliant, way above the average, can give a correct answer to those questions without thinking about it.
On June 14 2012 01:26 Severedevil wrote: Clearly, IQ imperfectly measures a useful set of mental abilities. Clearly, IQ does not even attempt to measure every useful kind of mental ability.
Which bits you count as 'intelligence' is just semantics.
IQ measures potential for learning. The reason that many intelligent people are bad at hard work and have bad social skills is that they never actually had to develop them, since everything comes so easily. And about social skills, when you're extremely intelligent (145IQ+), you are probably smarter than your teachers and know more than them at second grade, you just have problem relating and communicating with other kids.
I am going to sound like the arrogant prick that I am: but that's almost the story of my childhood, except that the bad social skills came much later when I just stopped caring When it came to relating to other kids I learned at around the age of 10 that I should not act intelligent.
The real problem is that when success is measured by secondary school grades and you dont even need to show up to lessons to achieve top grades then you believe that you do not need to work to succeed, and that does cause big problems later.
I have no idea what my IQ is and I suspect it is significantly lower than that 145, but you really do not need to be intellectually ahead of your peers at a young age.
No... its not what people want to hear but intelligent people would actually be hard working because they know they need to be, i.e they're smart enough to know what needs to be done... Except for a selected few(I don't know any) people famous for being smart have always put in the hard work right before they achieved what made them famous.
On June 14 2012 09:43 Goldbullet wrote: someone explain the lake problem?
Think backwards, if it doubles everyday then that means on the 47th day it had to be half the lake. Think exponentially
On June 14 2012 09:11 Sablar wrote: The study is NOT about how "intelligent" people perform on cognitive bias tests. You yourself pointed this out.
No, the entire point of the study is how people perform on those cognitive bias tests. The authors present no other novel information and this certainly would never have been published if they just surveyed people on the bias blind spot which has already been studied - the point was to examine this in relation to performance on the actual bias tests (which make up a significant section of the paper) and cognitive ability. I never said otherwise, that's the only useful purpose of the entire paper if you accept the results, everything else on cognitive ability (SAT scores, the CRT, and the other cognitive surveys) is worthless data collection alone. It's the only consistent thing between study 1 and study 2 in the paper and the clear point of comparison.
What's not the point or claimed at all in the paper is, "Intelligent people do poorly on these 'trick' math problems." That's not what the study is about and it's not even true, and that is what people on the thread keep misunderstanding. The entire point, however, is about the authors' claims on the bias questions.
On June 14 2012 09:43 Goldbullet wrote: someone explain the lake problem?
The lily doubles its size every day so it's a * 2^n = 1 where "a" is the original size of the water lily compared to the whole lake which I assumed is 1. This equatation stands for when the whole lake is covered. The question asks how much is n when half the lake is covered which you get by simply dividing both sides of the equatation:
a * 2^n / 2 = 1/2 a * 2^n * 2^(- 1) = 1/2 a * 2^(n-1) = 1/2
as you see, you can get half the size of the lake covered in (n-1) days which is 47 iirc.
On June 14 2012 10:10 seg.fault wrote: So the point of the paper is that smarter people are less likely to answer this question correctly?
Five times the US budget deficit!
More to do with lazyness. In China they actually teach you how to do these exact types of question so you wouldn't get the same results for this experiment in China.
On June 14 2012 09:43 Goldbullet wrote: someone explain the lake problem?
Imagine that the lake is 64 square feet in diameter and that it took only 7 days to cover it. Start at 1 1 2 4 8 16 32 64
7 days total. But, the only relevant part is the last two numbers. Since we already know the amount of days the whole process took and the second to last day was half of the whole, subtract 1 from the total amount of days.
Bat and ball problem: x+(x+1.00)=1.10 2x+1.00=1.10 2x=0.10 x=0.05 The ball costs $0.05. To check work, re-insert numbers back into the original problem. Bat costs a dollar more than the ball so the bat costs $1.05. 1.05+0.05=1.10
This is very interesting to me. I feel like I suffer from this cognitive bias (in general life settings) and it's always a big deal for me to try and reevaluate my perspective on things.
Wait now... am I super intelligent if I failed those questions or am I super intelligent if I answered those questions correctly? Am I already confirmed stupid if I ask that question? Also, what does this study result in when the testsubjects have a low intelligence?
Anyone have a link to this paper (no pub-med sub), or at least a copy and paste of the methods section? I'm very weary when it comes to the methods used in psychology or sociology studies, and the inferences they take from the results.
On June 14 2012 01:26 Severedevil wrote: Clearly, IQ imperfectly measures a useful set of mental abilities. Clearly, IQ does not even attempt to measure every useful kind of mental ability.
Which bits you count as 'intelligence' is just semantics.
IQ measures potential for learning. The reason that many intelligent people are bad at hard work and have bad social skills is that they never actually had to develop them, since everything comes so easily. And about social skills, when you're extremely intelligent (145IQ+), you are probably smarter than your teachers and know more than them at second grade, you just have problem relating and communicating with other kids.
I am going to sound like the arrogant prick that I am: but that's almost the story of my childhood, except that the bad social skills came much later when I just stopped caring When it came to relating to other kids I learned at around the age of 10 that I should not act intelligent.
The real problem is that when success is measured by secondary school grades and you dont even need to show up to lessons to achieve top grades then you believe that you do not need to work to succeed, and that does cause big problems later.
I have no idea what my IQ is and I suspect it is significantly lower than that 145, but you really do not need to be intellectually ahead of your peers at a young age.
No... its not what people want to hear but intelligent people would actually be hard working because they know they need to be, i.e they're smart enough to know what needs to be done... Except for a selected few(I don't know any) people famous for being smart have always put in the hard work right before they achieved what made them famous.
No... you do NOT need to be smart in order to know what needs to be done. That does not take intelligence at all.
What you're thinking of is want, motivation. Without it, even the smartest and most capable learner is going to fail.
The psychiatrist told me that he didn’t want to ‘lose another one’, that people like me are intelligent, and that’s our downfall. We draw connections so well that we draw them even when they shouldn’t be there. He said it’s easy to get caught up in paranoia in our fast paced world, a constantly changing place where more and more of our interaction is simulated…
I have to give him one thing. It’s a great explanation. It neatly explains everything. It perfectly explains everything, in fact. I have every reason to shake off this nightmarish fear that some thing or consciousness or being out there wants me to open the door so it can capture me for some horrible fate worse than death. It would be foolish, after hearing that explanation, to stay in here until I starve to death just to spite the entity that might have got everyone else. It would be foolish to think that, after hearing that explanation, I might be one of the last people left alive on an empty world, hiding in my secure basement room, spiting some unthinkable deceptive entity just by refusing to be captured. It’s a perfect explanation for every single strange thing I’ve seen or heard, and I have every reason in the world to let all of my fears go, and open the door.
That's exactly why I'm not going to.
Excerpt from Psychosis.
When a psychologist starts making a hoopla over what ought to be common sense, suspicion is the proper response.
with the lily pond one, for a microsecond i thought 24 then about 0.1 seconds later i saw that it was 47. i'd say that my first "instinct" was 24 but when i put any thought into it at all i got 47.. so i'll pass myself on that one.
the bat and ball one is more worrying, haha. once again i instinctively thought 10c/$1 but it's only because i suspected a trap that i backchecked it to find that that's a 90c difference. i got 5c/$1.05 a few seconds after that. i'd count that as a fail.
On June 13 2012 13:27 Ecrilon wrote: A bat and ball cost a dollar and ten cents. The bat costs a dollar, more than the ball. How much does the ball cost? Suddenly the ball costs 10 cents instead of 5 cents. ****ing commas man. How do they work.
I like this. Nonetheless, I'd say it would be very improper english to use a comma like that.
One would probably need to use an em-dash, parenthesis, or possibly an elipsis. When english is written wrong one could consider something interpretable in multiple ways; it should be done correctly to ensure only a single proper answer. Yes, I am aware that it would [somewhat] kill the trickiness of this question, but that's kinda the point.
I got both the questions right, but I wonder if I would've had a different thought process and not read them as in depth if the topic had not been about cognitive bias. But then that could go against the argument of self awareness o_O
What I do not get is that you ask us to use shortcuts: "Answer as quickly as you can" and then lo and behold people are not able to answer correctly to word riddles designed to confound you.
Wow that's so odd. I just couldn't believe it wasn't 10 cents untill I took a pen and paper and started calculating. I guess that means I'm smart then huh? =)
I don't see exactly what would be spontaneous answering in that case. But the reactions remind me of that famous story about Pierre-Gilles de Gennes : in his first or second year, his physics teacher asked him : " If we connect a little and a big bubble, what happens ? Don't reflect and answer at once." "No, that's when I'm supposed to reflect."
If we calculate the inner pression in a bubble, heeding both superficial tension and the outer pression, we find that the pression is greater if the bull is smaller. Surprise, the little bubble shrinks and yields its air to the big one ! It's impossible to guess that result by intuition, of course.
On June 14 2012 04:16 Cirqueenflex wrote: For me being smart is trying to learn out of everything you do, finding mistakes by connecting patterns and constantly improving. This is like infinite possibilities and can never be truly measured by any kind of stupid IQ test where you suddenly seem more intelligent if you had the luck to already have heard such a question and its solution already.
You probably don't know much about IQ tests. It's a wide array of tasks that you have to complete, and the result is calculated considering the time it took you and how good were your answers. From what I remember there were logic, calculus, some general knowledge, vocabulary and even some moral issues (like, if you find a wallet with the owner ID in it, what do you do). Of course factors such as mood, weariness and maybe even luck to an extent can change the outcome. The trick, which is what I think most people don't know, is that the result isn't strictly how intelligent you are. It's more like trying to know what time is it by watching the shade of a stick in the ground. Indirect measurement, and with only 70% accuracy if I remember correctly. Still the best way we have to measure it so far, as far as I know. So, being intelligent isn't how fast/good you perform those tasks, but being intelligent helps in doing them better/faster. What you describe in the first sentence I quoted would be the smart way to use your intelligence, not being intelligent.
Also, please stop saying that IQ tests are stupid. Some people have suffered being "gifted" with high IQ, and knowing why can help them.
It is peculiar after mentioning those tests include moral questions you claim they're not stupid. Obviously they could be made better.
There are numerous studies like this one done recently but never is there such a weird spin on the conclusion as in this post. The test with the ball and bat for example shows on the contrary that intelligence and training in fact is the major difference between people who solve the problem correctly and those who don't. Ofcourse you are going to have an instant uncontrollable kneejerk response, with the lilypads your brain is instantly throwing out 24 as the answer, that is the intuitive answer but the difference between people who are educated and who understands biases is that they don't blurt out that initial reaction but keep thinking and very soon figure out the real answer.
The human condition is to jump to conclusions, this has been proven time and time again when you look at how people come to have an opinion in for example politics. Almost everyone on planet earth will sadly first pick their stance and THEN look at the arguments to find the ones that support their stance. The one consistent difference is philosophy students. They first look at the angles and then take a stance. The answer is quite easy, philosophy students have been trained to think twice, they are constantly forced to solve "moral problems" like the one with the train approaching 10 people and you have the ability to flip the switch and make it go onto the rail with only 1 person on it. This practice of being forced to look for hidden information or other angles is the difference and people who do not study philosophy can train themselves to do the same obviously.
Your intuitive response is never going to change, you can't train intuition, intuition is in most cases completely useless. The difference intelligence and practice does is that you know to ignore your intuition and keep looking for all the data.
In the end smart people can still get these questions wrong if they are not aware of how our brain fails us, it might be that they are very intelligent and they wrongfully think that their intelligence is also represented in their intution. But the intuition of a professor and a dumbass is about as good. They will vastly differ though on rational thinking. Which means that the bottom line remains whether or not you are aware of how we are biased and how our intuition fools us.
It almost seems like the argument in the OP is that your instant 0.1 millisecond reaction response is going to be wrong so you are wrong. But it is only really wrong if you stop there and go with that answer, which smart people will not do. Who cares what the initial reaction is if you immediately identify it as incorrect?
On June 15 2012 11:52 VanGarde wrote: Your intuitive response is never going to change, you can't train intuition, intuition is in most cases completely useless. The difference intelligence and practice does is that you know to ignore your intuition and keep looking for all the data.
Intuition grows with experience. It's not some magical inborn power that can never ever be altered.
On June 15 2012 11:52 VanGarde wrote: Your intuitive response is never going to change, you can't train intuition, intuition is in most cases completely useless. The difference intelligence and practice does is that you know to ignore your intuition and keep looking for all the data.
So a five year old would also answer 24 days and 10 cents? No, that intuition came from studying maths for over ten years. You can train your intuition but it takes time.
Bizarre, people used algebra. Obviously initial thought is omg ball is 10 cents! but then you realise it's only 90 cents less. A slight mental shuffle gives you 1.05/0.05 without the algebra shenanigans
as someone who considers himself reasonably intelligent, I recognized the correct answers right away... then again I'm an asian math robot and do math contests and recognize "tricky" questions like these =___=
I love how everyone on here seems to be wanting to do nothing but show how smart they are by stating the right answers, arguably inherently suggesting that they are in fact dumb. Firstly, you probably did not have time to think about your answer, and the questions are designed to try and trick you into it. I did in fact immediately think the wrong answer, before mentally correcting myself, and having a good laugh. I am sure it was the case for most, even those that stated that this had not been the case.
Also I think there is a misconception with regard to what cognitive bias entails. Please go look it up before making assumptions xD
I don't understand, the question took me couple of seconds to figure out. It's 5 cents (haven't read any answers). Maybe I know it from my subconscious because it's a simple problem, but it doesn't really argue against my logic since I've solved it before.
It's 5 cents .. then the other is $1.05 - all together $1.10
If this topic interests you, then you should read a book called "Thinking Fast and Slow" by Daniel Kahneman - probably spelt his name wrong. People make these errors because they are essentially lazy mentally; whether it's because we think we are smart or we have just become comfortable, mental laziness is the key we thus rely on our "intuitive" or "System 1" as the book puts it. The trick is to recognise this and try and amend your behaviour (i feel the book has sort of helped as i got both the lillypad and bat and ball question correct by automatically using extra mental effort to think it through, engaging "System 2" as the book puts it)
On June 15 2012 11:52 VanGarde wrote: Your intuitive response is never going to change, you can't train intuition, intuition is in most cases completely useless. The difference intelligence and practice does is that you know to ignore your intuition and keep looking for all the data.
So a five year old would also answer 24 days and 10 cents? No, that intuition came from studying maths for over ten years. You can train your intuition but it takes time.
According to all the stuff i have read on the topic, which is quite limited, but they all state that you can't train your intuition as VanGarde words it. Your brain will always produce an intuitive response without your control. It is up to you to reject it or accept it
A better question to trick you is "If a baseball bat costs 2$ plus half the price of a baseball bat, whats the price of a baseball bat?". Btw, why do everyone discuss the problems and not the actual topic?
It's 5 cents .. then the other is $1.05 - all together $1.10
If this topic interests you, then you should read a book called "Thinking Fast and Slow" by Daniel Kahneman - probably spelt his name wrong. People make these errors because they are essentially lazy mentally; whether it's because we think we are smart or we have just become comfortable, mental laziness is the key we thus rely on our "intuitive" or "System 1" as the book puts it. The trick is to recognise this and try and amend your behaviour (i feel the book has sort of helped as i got both the lillypad and bat and ball question correct by automatically using extra mental effort to think it through, engaging "System 2" as the book puts it)
On June 15 2012 11:52 VanGarde wrote: Your intuitive response is never going to change, you can't train intuition, intuition is in most cases completely useless. The difference intelligence and practice does is that you know to ignore your intuition and keep looking for all the data.
So a five year old would also answer 24 days and 10 cents? No, that intuition came from studying maths for over ten years. You can train your intuition but it takes time.
According to all the stuff i have read on the topic, which is quite limited, but they all state that you can't train your intuition as VanGarde words it. Your brain will always produce an intuitive response without your control. It is up to you to reject it or accept it
When you play Starcraft all that you are doing is training your intuition, every single game. Make a supply depot on 10. The first time I had to make a supply depot I had to think, how do I do that? Ah, you press B, S and then left mouse click on the place that you want to put it. Next time, ah yeah B, S and uhh what was the 3rd step??? I remember again B, S and left mouse click. 3rd time-->You don't have to think about it anymore because it has become intuitive. My mechanics are still the same after not playing for half a year because everything is ingrained into my brain. When I actually think about what my hands are doing, like the above example throughout the game I won't be able to give you an answer. I would actually have to stop playing and be like, what did my hands just do?
On June 21 2012 22:05 Klockan3 wrote: A better question to trick you is "If a baseball bat costs 2$ plus half the price of a baseball bat, whats the price of a baseball bat?". Btw, why do everyone discuss the problems and not the actual topic?
On June 21 2012 22:05 Klockan3 wrote: A better question to trick you is "If a baseball bat costs 2$ plus half the price of a baseball bat, whats the price of a baseball bat?". Btw, why do everyone discuss the problems and not the actual topic?
That question doesn't make any sense.
sure it does. Just simplify x = 2 + 1/2x and you will get your answer
On June 21 2012 22:05 Klockan3 wrote: A better question to trick you is "If a baseball bat costs 2$ plus half the price of a baseball bat, whats the price of a baseball bat?". Btw, why do everyone discuss the problems and not the actual topic?
That question doesn't make any sense.
sure it does. Just simplify x = 2 + 1/2x and you will get your answer
On June 21 2012 22:05 Klockan3 wrote: A better question to trick you is "If a baseball bat costs 2$ plus half the price of a baseball bat, whats the price of a baseball bat?". Btw, why do everyone discuss the problems and not the actual topic?
That question doesn't make any sense.
sure it does. Just simplify x = 2 + 1/2x and you will get your answer
$2 is the other half of the price of the baseball bat... the total price is $4.
I guess he thought the way I thought at beginning. If a baseball bat costs 2$ plus half the price of something else, how much does a baseball bat cost?
On June 21 2012 22:05 Klockan3 wrote: A better question to trick you is "If a baseball bat costs 2$ plus half the price of a baseball bat, whats the price of a baseball bat?". Btw, why do everyone discuss the problems and not the actual topic?
That question doesn't make any sense.
sure it does. Just simplify x = 2 + 1/2x and you will get your answer
$2 is the other half of the price of the baseball bat... the total price is $4.
I guess he thought the way I thought at beginning. If a baseball bat costs 2$ plus half the price of something else, how much does a baseball bat cost?
Ah, perhaps it could be written more clearly, such as: "If a baseball bat costs $2 plus half the price of itself, what's the price of the baseball bat?".
The issue with this kind of research is that it doesn't account for all the variables.
A question has been asked and a sample has been taken and these are the answers, and therefore referenceable to the population. All logical steps to take. (Apart from that Math tells us that sample sizing only works and can be referenced if ALL the variables of the habitat are taken into, and adhered/accepted for the sample size to then be effectively mirroring the whole of the research.)
Incorrect.
Because, i don't see any comparable data for 'non smart' people?
And why is that, because prove to me of somebody who is 'non smart'?
and you will be looking at a person who will find ways to see how you aren't smart.
The reason is that you define somebody to be not smart because of bias you have, and as such the circle of logic that is this piece of research goes round!
People grow and develop completely differently and have different experiences that map are conscious differently, this survey only further proves that.
On June 22 2012 04:57 xNSwarm wrote: my guess to the lily pad question was 46. The chance that the current lily pad patch times 2^x= exactly the entire lake is next to nothing.
So you rejected the premise of the brain teaser, yet decided to make up your own rule and answer the question based on that instead?
On June 22 2012 04:57 xNSwarm wrote: my guess to the lily pad question was 46. The chance that the current lily pad patch times 2^x= exactly the entire lake is next to nothing.
if it covers half the lake on the 46th day then it will cover the entire lake on the 47th day. so your answer must be incorrect since we know it takes 48 days to cover the entire lake.
On June 22 2012 04:57 xNSwarm wrote: my guess to the lily pad question was 46. The chance that the current lily pad patch times 2^x= exactly the entire lake is next to nothing.
if it covers half the lake on the 46th day then it will cover the entire lake on the 47th day. so your answer must be incorrect since we know it takes 48 days to cover the entire lake.
My bad. What I said was pretty stupid. Nevermind then.
I agree that "Cognitive Sophistication Does Not Attenuate the Bias Blind Spot," but that is not the same as "The Smarter People Get, The More Prone They Are to Cognitive Bias."
People of all levels of education are prone to bias. The only way to actually remove it is to train oneself, and that requires being able to accept the possibility that everything you know and feel might be wrong, which is the tricky part for most.
bat is a dollar and five cents, ball is five cents...
I also got the 47 days question right away without reading the answer... and I am a faily well educated high IQ person so I'm kind of skeptical of this study....
On June 25 2012 07:46 Zinroc wrote: bat is a dollar and five cents, ball is five cents...
I also got the 47 days question right away without reading the answer... and I am a faily well educated high IQ person so I'm kind of skeptical of this study....
the article states the more degrees u have the prone you are to cognitive bias, what i dont understand is the article only mentions undergraduate students and no other (noted) participants, considering almost all undergrads dont even have a degree (aside from high school) how can this propose that the more degrees the more bias?
unless i missed something this entire article is essentialy a bunch of rubbish
EDIT: as for the ball and bat question at the bottom, i smiled when i saw it, i went to a paid after-school school in grade 7 and 8 and that same question came up, 'brain teasers' was what they called it, i got it right the first time.
On June 25 2012 07:46 Zinroc wrote: bat is a dollar and five cents, ball is five cents...
I also got the 47 days question right away without reading the answer... and I am a faily well educated high IQ person so I'm kind of skeptical of this study....
EPT
