What Intelligence Tests Miss (Keith Stanovich, 2009)
“Being a cognitive miser makes us vulnerable to exploitation.
We give up our thinking to those who manipulate our environments, and we let our actions be determined by those who can create the stimuli that best trigger our shallow automatic processing tendencies. (…)
In discussing the mechanisms causing framing effects, Daniel Kahneman has stated that “the basic principle of framing is the passive acceptance of the formulation given”.
The frame presented to the subject is taken as focal, and all subsequent thought derives from it rather than from alternative framings because the latter would require more thought. (…)
For example, in the tax example above they would be shown both the “reduction for children” and the “penalty for the childless” version.
It is almost uniformly the case that, after being debriefed, subjects recognize the equivalence of the two versions,
and also they realize that it is a mistake (an incoherence in people’s political attitudes) to respond differently to the two versions simply because they have been framed differently.
This finding suggests that what people need to learn to do is to think from more than one perspective—to learn to habitually reframe things for themselves.
The debriefing results show that once they do so, people will detect discrepancies in their responses to a problem posed from different perspectives and will take steps to resolve the discrepancies.
People seem to recognize that consistency is an intellectual value. What they do not do, however, is habitually generate the perspective shifts that would highlight the inconsistencies in their thinking.
Their inability to do so makes them subject to framing effects—a violation of descriptive invariance signaling a basic irrationality in people’s choice patterns.”