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Inside George W. Bush’s Mind: Hints at What IQ Tests Miss
I’m also not very analytical. You know I don’t spend a lot of time thinking about myself, about why I do things. —President George W. Bush, aboard Air Force One, June 4, 2003
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or years, there have been debates about George W. Bush’s intelligence. His many opponents never seem to tire of pointing out his mental shortcomings. The president’s strangled syntax, goofy phrasing (“Too many good docs are getting out of the business. Too many OB-GYNs aren’t able to practice their love with women all across this country.”—Sept. 6, 2004), and lack of familiarity with many issues have been used as evidence by his opponents to argue that this is a man of truly inferior intelligence. Even Bush’s supporters often implicitly concede the point by arguing that although he lacks “school smarts” he makes up for it with “street smarts.” Therefore, it came as something of a surprise when scores on various college placement exams and Armed Forces tests that the president had taken over the years were converted into an estimated IQ score. The president’s score was approximately 120—roughly the same as that of Bush’s opponent in the 2004 presidential election, John Kerry, when Kerry’s exam results from young adulthood were converted into IQ scores using the same formulas.1 These results surprised many critics of the president (as well as many of his supporters), but I, as a scientist who studies individual differences in cognitive skills, was not surprised. Virtually all commentators on the president’s cogni-
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Inside George W. Bush’s Mind
tion, including sympathetic commentators such as his onetime speechwriter David Frum, admit that there is something suboptimal about the president’s thinking. The mistake they make is assuming that all intellectual deficiencies are reflected in a lower IQ score. In a generally positive portrait of the president, Frum nonetheless notes that “he is impatient and quick to anger; sometimes glib, even dogmatic; often uncurious and as a result ill-informed” (2003, p. 272). Conservative commentator George Will agrees, when he states that in making Supreme Court appointments, the president “has neither the inclination nor the ability to make sophisticated judgments about competing approaches to construing the Constitution” (2005, p. 23). In short, there is considerable agreement that President Bush’s thinking has several problematic aspects: lack of intellectual engagement, cognitive inflexibility, need for closure, belief perseverance, confirmation bias, overconfidence, and insensitivity to inconsistency. These are all cognitive characteristics that have been studied by psychologists and that can be measured with at least some precision. However, they are all examples of thinking styles that are not tapped by IQ tests. Thus, it is not surprising that someone could suffer from many of these cognitive deficiencies and still have a moderately high IQ. Bush’s cognitive deficiencies do not impair performance on intelligence tests, but they do impair rational decision making. His cognitive deficiencies instead are the causes of “dysrationalia” (an analogue of the word “dyslexia”), which is a term that I coined in the mid-1990s in order to draw attention to what is missing in IQ tests. I define dysrationalia as the inability to think and behave rationally despite having adequate intelligence. The president is, in fact, not unintelligent, but he may well be dysrationalic. And he is not alone. Many people display the systematic inability to think or behave rationally despite the fact that they have more than adequate IQs. One of the reasons that many of us are dysrationalic to some extent is that, for a variety of reasons, we have come to overvalue the kinds of thinking skills that IQ tests measure and undervalue other critically important cognitive skills, such as the ability to think rationally. Although most people would say that the ability to think rationally is a clear sign of a superior intellect, standard IQ tests devote no section to ratio-
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nal thinking as cognitive scientists would define the term. To think rationally means adopting appropriate goals, taking the appropriate action given one’s goals and beliefs, and holding beliefs that are commensurate with available evidence. Although IQ tests do assess the ability to focus on an immediate goal in the face of distraction, they do not assess at all whether a person has the tendency to develop goals that are rational in the first place. Likewise, IQ tests are good measures of how well a person can hold beliefs in short-term memory and manipulate those beliefs, but they do not assess at all whether a person has the tendency to form beliefs rationally when presented with evidence. And again, similarly, IQ tests are good measures of how efficiently a person processes information that has been provided, but they do not at all assess whether the person is a critical assessor of information as it is gathered in the natural environment. Given that IQ tests measure only a small set of the thinking abilities that people need, it is amazing that they have acquired the power that they have. IQ tests determine, to an important degree, the academic and professional careers of millions of people in the United States. University admissions offices depend on indicators that are nothing but proxies for IQ scores, even if the admissions office dare not label them as such. The vaunted SAT test has undergone many name changes (from Scholastic Achievement Test, to Scholastic Aptitude Test, to Scholastic Assessment Test, to simply the letters SAT) in order to disguise one basic fact that has remained constant throughout these changes—it is a stand-in for an IQ test.2 It is the same in law school, business school, and medical school—admission assessment devices are often simply disguised proxies for IQ. Young children in affluent neighborhoods are given IQ tests to determine which of them will be admitted to exclusive preschools. Older children are given IQ tests to determine whether they will be allowed to enter a gifted program. Corporations and the military as well are dependent on assessment and sorting devices that are little more than disguised intelligence tests. Even the National Football League in the United States gives prospective quarterbacks an IQ test.3 Perhaps some of this attention to intelligence is necessary, but what is not warranted is the ignoring of capacities that are of at least equal importance—the capacities that sustain rational thought and action. It is ludicrous for society to be so fixated on assessing intelligence and to virtually ignore
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rationality when it is easy to show that the societal consequences of irrational thinking are profound. And yet, oddly enough, I have discovered that there is enormous resistance to the idea of giving full value to mental abilities other than intelligence. For instance, when I lecture on how I think society has overvalued mental traits like intelligence and undervalued other traits such as rationality, someone in the audience will invariably respond with a variant of the rhetorical question “Well, would you want someone with an IQ of 92 doing surgery?” My answer is that perhaps not—but that I also would not want someone with a rationality quotient (RQ) of 93 serving on the judicial bench, someone with an RQ of 91 heading a legislature, someone with an RQ of 76 investing my retirement funds, someone with an RQ of 94 marketing the home I am selling, or a guidance counselor with an RQ of 83 advising the children in my school district. Of course, currently, we do not have a rationality quotient, as we have an IQ, an intelligence quotient, which might explain, at least to some extent, why IQ has acquired such value in relation to other equally important cognitive skills. In our society, what gets measured gets valued. But what if we could turn things around? What if we could actually devise tests of rationality? In fact, as I will discuss in the book, there is now enough knowledge available so that we could, in theory, begin to assess rationality as systematically as we do IQ. There is no such thing as the Wechsler or Stanford Rationality Test published by The Psychological Corporation. There is no RQ test. But the point is that there could be, using the same criteria used to justify current IQ tests (psychometric criteria such as reliability of measurement and the ability to predict relevant behavior). If not for professional inertia and psychologists’ investment in the IQ concept, we could choose tomorrow to more formally assess rational thinking skills, focus more on teaching them, and redesign our environment so that irrational thinking is not so costly. Whereas just thirty years ago we knew vastly more about intelligence than we knew about rational thinking, this imbalance has been redressed in the last few decades because of some remarkable work in behavioral decision theory, cognitive science, and related areas of psychology. In the past two decades cognitive scientists have developed laboratory tasks and real-life performance indicators to measure rational thinking tendencies such as sensible goal prioritization, reflectivity, and the proper calibration of evidence.
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People have been found to differ from each other on these indicators. These processes have also been found to be separable from the kinds of cognitive operations tapped by intelligence tests. Interestingly, some people can have very high IQs but be remarkably weak when it comes to the ability to think rationally.
What This Book Is Not About At this point the reader probably expects me to reveal that this book is about the importance of the emotions (so-called emotional intelligence), or about the importance of social skills (of so-called social intelligence), or about the importance of creativity or some other supracognitive characteristic. Further, many readers might well expect me to say that IQ tests do not measure anything important, or that there are many different kinds of intelligence, or that all people are intelligent in their own way. In fact, I will be saying none of these things—and in many instances I will be saying just the opposite. First, this is not a book about social or emotional skills. Because I questioned the comprehensiveness of standard IQ tests at the outset of this chapter, some may have thought that this was a signal that I was going to emphasize noncognitive domains. This is the strategy most commonly employed by critics of intelligence as it is conventionally measured with standard IQ tests. Critics of intelligence as it is conventionally defined often point out that IQ tests fail to assess many domains of psychological functioning that are essential. For example, many largely noncognitive domains such as socioemotional abilities, motivation, empathy, and interpersonal skills are almost entirely unassessed by tests of cognitive ability. However, these standard critiques of intelligence tests often contain the unstated assumption that although intelligence tests miss certain key noncognitive areas, they encompass most of what is important cognitively. It is this unstated assumption that I am challenging. In fact, intelligence, as conventionally measured, leaves out many critical cognitive domains—domains of thinking itself. Some of the thinking domains that are missing are related to the ability to make optimal decisions at important choice points in life. In short, there is no need to look outside of the cognitive domain for things that IQ tests miss. However, when I say that intelligence, as measured with
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standard IQ tests, leaves something out, I do not mean to “blow off ” conventional views of intelligence as is common in many popular books. It is fashionable to say that intelligence has nothing to do with real life, or that the items on IQ tests are just parlor games related only “school smarts.” Decades of research in psychology contradicts this view. IQ tests measure something that is cognitively real and that does relate to real life. In fact, the way we use the term intelligence in day-to-day discourse reveals that we do not think that it is so trivial after all. People are termed “bright” and “quick” and “smart” in ways that clearly indicate that it is not social or emotional qualities that we are talking about. And these terms are used often and nearly universally with positive connotations. In fact, “bright” and “quick” and “sharp” are used in general discourse to pick out precisely a quality assessed on standard IQ tests (something termed “fluid g” in the psychological literature). It may not be politically correct to laud IQ at certain cocktail parties, but all the parents at those same cocktail parties do want that quality for their children. When their children have behavioral/cognitive difficulties, parents are much more accepting of diagnostic categories that do not have “low IQ” attached.4 In short, we seem very confused about intelligence. We value it in private, but would never say so in public.
The Source of the Confusion about Bush’s Intelligence It is telling to note that President Bush’s supporters were as surprised by his pro-rated IQ results as were his detractors. Like his detractors, they did not expect him to do well on the tests. So both groups were confused about what the tests show and do not show. Bush’s detractors described him as taking disastrously irrational actions, and they seemed to believe that the type of poor thinking that led to those disastrous actions would be picked up by the standard tests of intelligence. Otherwise, they would not have been surprised when his scores were high rather than low. Thus, the Bush detractors must have assumed that a mental quality (rational thinking tendencies) could be detected by the tests that in fact the tests do not detect at all. In contrast, Bush’s supporters like his actions but admit that he has “street smarts,” or common sense, rather than “school smarts.” Assuming his “school smarts” to be low, and further assuming that IQ tests pick up only
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“school smarts,” his supporters were likewise surprised by the high pro-rated IQ scores that were indicated. Thus, his supporters missed the fact that Bush would excel on something that was assessed by the tests. The supporters assumed the tests measured only “school smarts” in the trivial pursuit sense (“who wrote Hamlet?”) that is easily mocked and dismissed as having nothing to do with “real life.” That the tests would actually measure a quality that cast Bush in a favorable light was something his supporters never anticipated. For different reasons from those of the detractors, Bush’s supporters were quite confused about what such tests do and do not measure. There is more, however. It is not just that people are confused about what IQ tests assess and what they do not assess. People are also very confused about the concept of intelligence itself. The so-called folk language (everyday usage) of the term intelligence is an utterly inconsistent mess. It is a unique confluence of inconsistent terminology, politically infused usage, and failure to assimilate what science has found out about the nature of human cognitive abilities. A desire to help to clarify this situation was what led me to invent the term dysrationalia. It is important to point out, however, that Bush is not a typical case of dysrationalia, in the sense that he would not be the first example to come to mind. Dysrationalia is the inability to think and behave rationally despite having adequate intelligence. People were surprised when informed of Bush’s measured intelligence. In more clear-cut cases of dysrationalia, people are in no doubt about the intelligence of the individual in question. It is the blatantly irrational acts committed by people of obvious intelligence that shock and surprise us and that call out for explanation. These are the most obvious cases of dysrationalia. In the next chapter I will discuss some of these more clear-cut cases and explain why we should not expect them to be rare. That we are surprised when we hear about such cases indicates that we have confused views about what intelligence is and what IQ tests measure—and that we undervalue human rationality because we tend to deify intelligence.