Richard F West
Biographic Data
| ID | 4230968 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Richard F West |
| GIVEN NAMES | Richard F |
| FAMILY NAME | West |
| SIGNATURE | WEST R F |
| AFFILIATIONS | James Madison University |
| VERIFIED | No |
| TOTAL WORKS | 20 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 135 |
| WORKS AS AUTHOR | 20 |
| WORKS AS EDITOR | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 1983 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2016 |
| H-INDEX | 7 |
The Rationality Quotient
How to assess critical aspects of cognitive functioning that are not measured by IQ tests: rational thinking skills. Why are we surprised when smart people act foolishly? Smart people do foolish things all the time. Misjudgments and bad decisions by highly educated bankers and money managers, for example, brought us the financial crisis of 2008. Smart people do foolish things because intelligence is not the same as the capacity for rational think…
Real‐World Correlates of Performance on Heuristics and Biases Tasks in a Community Sample
In the current study, we sought to examine whether performance on several heuristics and biases tasks and thinking dispositions was associated with real‐life correlates in a community sample of adults. We examined performance on five heuristics and biases tasks (ratio bias, belief bias in syllogistic reasoning, cognitive reflection, probabilistic and statistical reasoning, and rational temporal discounting), three thinking dispositions (actively …
Assessing miserly information processing
The Cognitive Reflection Test (CRT; Frederick, 2005) is designed to measure the tendency to override a prepotent response alternative that is incorrect and to engage in further reflection that leads to the correct response. It is a prime measure of the miserly information processing posited by most dual process theories. The original three-item test may be becoming known to potential participants, however. We examined a four-item version that cou…
Rational thinking and cognitive sophistication
We studied developmental trends in 5 important reasoning tasks that are critical components of the operational definition of rational thinking. The tasks measured denominator neglect, belief bias, base rate sensitivity, resistance to framing, and the tendency toward otherside thinking. In addition to age, we examined 2 other individual difference domains that index cognitive sophistication: cognitive ability (intelligence and executive functionin…
Practitioner Review
Background: Both performance‐based and rating measures are commonly used to index executive function in clinical and neuropsychological assessments. They are intended to index the same broad underlying mental construct of executive function. The association between these two types of measures was investigated in the current article. Method and Results: We examined the association between performance‐based and rating measures of executive function…
Myside Bias, Rational Thinking, and Intelligence
Myside bias occurs when people evaluate evidence, generate evidence, and test hypotheses in a manner biased toward their own prior opinions and attitudes. Research across a wide variety of myside bias paradigms has revealed a somewhat surprising finding regarding individual differences. The magnitude of the myside bias shows very little relation to intelligence. Avoiding myside bias is thus one rational thinking skill that is not assessed by inte…
Cognitive sophistication does not attenuate the bias blind spot
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 …
The Cognitive Reflection Test as a predictor of performance on heuristics-and-biases tasks
The complexity of developmental predictions from dual process models
Heuristics and biases as measures of critical thinking
In this article, the authors argue that there are a range of effects usually studied within cognitive psychology that are legitimately thought of as aspects of critical thinking: the cognitive biases studied in the heuristics and biases literature. In a study of 793 student participants, the authors found that the ability to avoid these biases was moderately correlated with a more traditional laboratory measure of critical thinking—the ability to…
On the relative independence of thinking biases and cognitive ability
In 7 different studies, the authors observed that a large number of thinking biases are uncorrelated with cognitive ability. These thinking biases include some of the most classic and well-studied biases in the heuristics and biases literature, including the conjunction effect, framing effects, anchoring effects, outcome bias, base-rate neglect, "less is more" effects, affect biases, omission bias, myside bias, sunk-cost effect, and certainty eff…
Natural myside bias is independent of cognitive ability
Natural myside bias is the tendency to evaluate propositions from within one's own perspective when given no instructions or cues (such as within-participants conditions) to avoid doing so. We defined the participant's perspective as their previously existing status on four variables: their sex, whether they smoked, their alcohol consumption, and the strength of their religious beliefs. Participants then evaluated a contentious but ultimately fac…
Individual differences in reasoning
Much research in the last two decades has demonstrated that human responses deviate from the performance deemed normative according to various models of decision making and rational judgment (e.g., the basic axioms of utility theory). This gap between the normative and the descriptive can be interpreted as indicating systematic irrationalities in human cognition. However, four alternative interpretations preserve the assumption that human behavio…
Individual differences in rational thought.
Much research in the last 2 decades has demonstrated that humans deviate from normative models of decision making and rational judgment. In 4 studies involving 954 participants, the authors explored the extent to which measures of cognitive ability and thinking dispositions can predict discrepancies from normative responding on a variety of tasks from the heuristics and biases literature including the selection task, belief bias in syllogistic re…
Reasoning independently of prior belief and individual differences in actively open-minded thinking.
A sample of 349 college students completed an argument evaluation test (AET) in which they evaluated arguments concerning real-life situations. A separate regression analysis was conducted for each student predicting his or her evaluations of argument quality from an objective indicator of argument quality and the strength of his or her prior beliefs about the target propositions. The beta weight for objective argument quality was interpreted in …
Knowledge growth and maintenance across the life span
One hundred thirty-three college students (mean age = 19.1 years) and 49 older individuals (mean age = 79.9 years) completed 2 general knowledge tasks, a vocabulary task, a working memory task, a syllogistic reasoning task, and several measures of exposure to print. A series of hierarchical regression analyses indicated that when measures of exposure to print were used as control variables, the positive relationships between age and vocabulary, a…
Reply to Taylor
In the face of such well-reasoned, humane, and scholarly arguments, a response is hardly necessary. One can only say that commentary displays all of the grace, humor, and collegiality that we have come to expect in the reading and literacy field. Prior to Taylor's commentary, we had not been informed of the rules which stipulate problems in literacy are worth studying and methods are worth using. Our only defense is to plead ignorance of the rule…
Reading in the Real World and Its Correlates
Resultats d'une enquete effectuee aupres de 217 personnes dans une salle de depart d'un aeroport. Les sujets ont ete classes en lecteurs et en non lecteurs. L'investissement dans les activites de lecture a ete correle avec l'âge et l'education, le contact avec l'ecrit est apparu comme un bon predicteur du vocabulaire et des connaissances culturelles. Ces resultats, joints aux conclusions de plusieurs etudes voisines, invitent a conferer un role p…
Exposure to Print and Orthographic Processing
The Effect of Sentence Context on Word Recognition in Second- and Sixth-Grade Children
SECONDAND SIXTH-GRADE children named words preceded by either congruous, neutral, or incongruous contexts that were either one or three sentences long, and were drawn from second-grade reading materials. Both groups displayed significant contextual facilitation and contextual inhibition effects on naming time. The effects did not depend upon the length of the prior context, indicating that within the limits of the manipulation employed in this ex…
Exposure to Print and Orthographic Processing
On the relative independence of thinking biases and cognitive ability
In 7 different studies, the authors observed that a large number of thinking biases are uncorrelated with cognitive ability. These thinking biases include some of the most classic and well-studied biases in the heuristics and biases literature, including the conjunction effect, framing effects, anchoring effects, outcome bias, base-rate neglect, "less is more" effects, affect biases, omission bias, myside bias, sunk-cost effect, and certainty eff…
Rational thinking and cognitive sophistication
We studied developmental trends in 5 important reasoning tasks that are critical components of the operational definition of rational thinking. The tasks measured denominator neglect, belief bias, base rate sensitivity, resistance to framing, and the tendency toward otherside thinking. In addition to age, we examined 2 other individual difference domains that index cognitive sophistication: cognitive ability (intelligence and executive functionin…
Reading in the Real World and Its Correlates
Resultats d'une enquete effectuee aupres de 217 personnes dans une salle de depart d'un aeroport. Les sujets ont ete classes en lecteurs et en non lecteurs. L'investissement dans les activites de lecture a ete correle avec l'âge et l'education, le contact avec l'ecrit est apparu comme un bon predicteur du vocabulaire et des connaissances culturelles. Ces resultats, joints aux conclusions de plusieurs etudes voisines, invitent a conferer un role p…
Cognitive sophistication does not attenuate the bias blind spot
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 …
Knowledge growth and maintenance across the life span
One hundred thirty-three college students (mean age = 19.1 years) and 49 older individuals (mean age = 79.9 years) completed 2 general knowledge tasks, a vocabulary task, a working memory task, a syllogistic reasoning task, and several measures of exposure to print. A series of hierarchical regression analyses indicated that when measures of exposure to print were used as control variables, the positive relationships between age and vocabulary, a…
Real‐World Correlates of Performance on Heuristics and Biases Tasks in a Community Sample
In the current study, we sought to examine whether performance on several heuristics and biases tasks and thinking dispositions was associated with real‐life correlates in a community sample of adults. We examined performance on five heuristics and biases tasks (ratio bias, belief bias in syllogistic reasoning, cognitive reflection, probabilistic and statistical reasoning, and rational temporal discounting), three thinking dispositions (actively …
The Effect of Sentence Context on Word Recognition in Second- and Sixth-Grade Children
SECONDAND SIXTH-GRADE children named words preceded by either congruous, neutral, or incongruous contexts that were either one or three sentences long, and were drawn from second-grade reading materials. Both groups displayed significant contextual facilitation and contextual inhibition effects on naming time. The effects did not depend upon the length of the prior context, indicating that within the limits of the manipulation employed in this ex…
The Effect of Sentence Context on Word Recognition in Second- and Sixth-Grade Children
SECONDAND SIXTH-GRADE children named words preceded by either congruous, neutral, or incongruous contexts that were either one or three sentences long, and were drawn from second-grade reading materials. Both groups displayed significant contextual facilitation and contextual inhibition effects on naming time. The effects did not depend upon the length of the prior context, indicating that within the limits of the manipulation employed in this ex…
Exposure to Print and Orthographic Processing
Reading in the Real World and Its Correlates
Resultats d'une enquete effectuee aupres de 217 personnes dans une salle de depart d'un aeroport. Les sujets ont ete classes en lecteurs et en non lecteurs. L'investissement dans les activites de lecture a ete correle avec l'âge et l'education, le contact avec l'ecrit est apparu comme un bon predicteur du vocabulaire et des connaissances culturelles. Ces resultats, joints aux conclusions de plusieurs etudes voisines, invitent a conferer un role p…
Reply to Taylor
In the face of such well-reasoned, humane, and scholarly arguments, a response is hardly necessary. One can only say that commentary displays all of the grace, humor, and collegiality that we have come to expect in the reading and literacy field. Prior to Taylor's commentary, we had not been informed of the rules which stipulate problems in literacy are worth studying and methods are worth using. Our only defense is to plead ignorance of the rule…
Knowledge growth and maintenance across the life span
One hundred thirty-three college students (mean age = 19.1 years) and 49 older individuals (mean age = 79.9 years) completed 2 general knowledge tasks, a vocabulary task, a working memory task, a syllogistic reasoning task, and several measures of exposure to print. A series of hierarchical regression analyses indicated that when measures of exposure to print were used as control variables, the positive relationships between age and vocabulary, a…
Reasoning independently of prior belief and individual differences in actively open-minded thinking.
A sample of 349 college students completed an argument evaluation test (AET) in which they evaluated arguments concerning real-life situations. A separate regression analysis was conducted for each student predicting his or her evaluations of argument quality from an objective indicator of argument quality and the strength of his or her prior beliefs about the target propositions. The beta weight for objective argument quality was interpreted in …
Individual differences in rational thought.
Much research in the last 2 decades has demonstrated that humans deviate from normative models of decision making and rational judgment. In 4 studies involving 954 participants, the authors explored the extent to which measures of cognitive ability and thinking dispositions can predict discrepancies from normative responding on a variety of tasks from the heuristics and biases literature including the selection task, belief bias in syllogistic re…
Individual differences in reasoning
Much research in the last two decades has demonstrated that human responses deviate from the performance deemed normative according to various models of decision making and rational judgment (e.g., the basic axioms of utility theory). This gap between the normative and the descriptive can be interpreted as indicating systematic irrationalities in human cognition. However, four alternative interpretations preserve the assumption that human behavio…
Natural myside bias is independent of cognitive ability
Natural myside bias is the tendency to evaluate propositions from within one's own perspective when given no instructions or cues (such as within-participants conditions) to avoid doing so. We defined the participant's perspective as their previously existing status on four variables: their sex, whether they smoked, their alcohol consumption, and the strength of their religious beliefs. Participants then evaluated a contentious but ultimately fac…
Heuristics and biases as measures of critical thinking
In this article, the authors argue that there are a range of effects usually studied within cognitive psychology that are legitimately thought of as aspects of critical thinking: the cognitive biases studied in the heuristics and biases literature. In a study of 793 student participants, the authors found that the ability to avoid these biases was moderately correlated with a more traditional laboratory measure of critical thinking—the ability to…
On the relative independence of thinking biases and cognitive ability
In 7 different studies, the authors observed that a large number of thinking biases are uncorrelated with cognitive ability. These thinking biases include some of the most classic and well-studied biases in the heuristics and biases literature, including the conjunction effect, framing effects, anchoring effects, outcome bias, base-rate neglect, "less is more" effects, affect biases, omission bias, myside bias, sunk-cost effect, and certainty eff…
The Cognitive Reflection Test as a predictor of performance on heuristics-and-biases tasks
The complexity of developmental predictions from dual process models
Cognitive sophistication does not attenuate the bias blind spot
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 …
Practitioner Review
Background: Both performance‐based and rating measures are commonly used to index executive function in clinical and neuropsychological assessments. They are intended to index the same broad underlying mental construct of executive function. The association between these two types of measures was investigated in the current article. Method and Results: We examined the association between performance‐based and rating measures of executive function…
Myside Bias, Rational Thinking, and Intelligence
Myside bias occurs when people evaluate evidence, generate evidence, and test hypotheses in a manner biased toward their own prior opinions and attitudes. Research across a wide variety of myside bias paradigms has revealed a somewhat surprising finding regarding individual differences. The magnitude of the myside bias shows very little relation to intelligence. Avoiding myside bias is thus one rational thinking skill that is not assessed by inte…
Assessing miserly information processing
The Cognitive Reflection Test (CRT; Frederick, 2005) is designed to measure the tendency to override a prepotent response alternative that is incorrect and to engage in further reflection that leads to the correct response. It is a prime measure of the miserly information processing posited by most dual process theories. The original three-item test may be becoming known to potential participants, however. We examined a four-item version that cou…
Rational thinking and cognitive sophistication
We studied developmental trends in 5 important reasoning tasks that are critical components of the operational definition of rational thinking. The tasks measured denominator neglect, belief bias, base rate sensitivity, resistance to framing, and the tendency toward otherside thinking. In addition to age, we examined 2 other individual difference domains that index cognitive sophistication: cognitive ability (intelligence and executive functionin…
The Rationality Quotient
How to assess critical aspects of cognitive functioning that are not measured by IQ tests: rational thinking skills. Why are we surprised when smart people act foolishly? Smart people do foolish things all the time. Misjudgments and bad decisions by highly educated bankers and money managers, for example, brought us the financial crisis of 2008. Smart people do foolish things because intelligence is not the same as the capacity for rational think…
Real‐World Correlates of Performance on Heuristics and Biases Tasks in a Community Sample
In the current study, we sought to examine whether performance on several heuristics and biases tasks and thinking dispositions was associated with real‐life correlates in a community sample of adults. We examined performance on five heuristics and biases tasks (ratio bias, belief bias in syllogistic reasoning, cognitive reflection, probabilistic and statistical reasoning, and rational temporal discounting), three thinking dispositions (actively …
Psychology (19 works) · Cognitive psychology (13 works) · Cognition (11 works) · Social Psychology (11 works) · Decision-Making and Behavioral Economics (10 works) · Computer Science (7 works) · Heuristics (7 works) · Cognitive Abilities and Testing (6 works) · Developmental psychology (5 works) · Epistemology (5 works)