Ever asked, “Why is Common Sense Such a Rarity?”

How certain are you that we get smarter as we age? Wiser? More intelligent? Well, this common adage is now being tested with scientific tests that gauge one’s cognitive performance with causal relations. One such test was in the previous article called Do We Get Smarter As We Age?” The results are quite shocking. The test was pulled from an article in Scientific American Mind, Feb/March 2007 called Jumping to Conclusions. Here is what they found…

83% of participants (adults) judged that two or more features from the list caused the sales to increase, even though only one feature had a causal relationship with the outcome. All other features had no causal relation to the outcome and are deemed completely insufficient to determine any effect on sales. Plus, most of the participants claimed they were certain of their answers.

When similar studies were performed on young children up to college students, they considerably outperformed the average adults in the cognitive performance testing. Why? What they found out is as we age and leave the world of academia, we start to “focus on getting the problem solved and allocate little attention to the mental operations we use in the process.” It seems that we bring in all our previous personal knowledge to help solve the problems while ignoring the information that lies within the presented evidence.

Adults with college degrees and various levels of education did better than those without, but the amount of time spent away from school does seem to inhibit this cognitive performance. The answers to the problem lie within the need for most students to be able to ’show’ how solutions are achieved using the data presented. Just coming up with a solution is not the intent of most tasks. When we leave the world of tests, quizzes and labs, we start to change how we solve problems. We allow our emotional attachment with prior experiences to dictate our problem solving instead of just looking at the task at hand, and the data presented.




So, is this smarter to utilize all knowledge to asses tasks — personal experiences and presented evidence as well? Well, in many situations it is a good approach, but without the know-how to turn this on and off, it could get you in trouble. What if the problem had to do with health/medical, or mechanical/physics where you may not know the actual facts of how things work? What if you were relying on was not factual or you allowed your emotional attachment to cloud your assessment of the situation?

Let’s take weight loss for example. You want to lose weight as fast as possible, and your friend recommended a certain type of workout. You go to the gym and complete the exercises, but after a couple of times your knees start to ache. If you have an emotional attachment to [a] the losing of weight and [b] the friend that recommended the exercise, you may ignore the presented evidence (hurt knees) and continue in your quest for fat reduction. On the other hand, if you had the ability to determine causal relations without the distraction of any previous experience or emotional attachment, you would discontinue the exercises and consult a professional.

Here is a very simple example of how you can “jump to conclusions”, taken from the Scientific American article:

Premise 1: All living things need water.
Premise 2: Roses need water.
Conclusion: Roses are living things.

Since we have prior knowledge that roses are living things, it is easy to assume that the conclusion is correct even though the two premises do not provide enough data to facilitate the conclusion that roses are living things. To convince you of the fact, let’s use another situation to compare.

Premise 1: All animals of the hudon class are ferocious.
Premise 2: Wampets are ferocious.
Conclusion: Wampets are animals of the hudon class.

Since most people have no prior personal knowledge of the hudon class and the animal wampet, you are naturally going to not accept this as true. So, why is this important, and what should we do about it?

One major reason I wanted to write this article is what I have been observing in our political environment and beyond. After watching people create an addiction to their “knowing what they know” (also known as metacognition) and causing error after error in making judgments, these people just won’t let go of their prior knowledge or assumptions and keep subjecting the same critical judgments to their own belief even after the facts are presented. I believe this is due to their emotional attachment to their ideology or metacognition, and total lack of using logic as their driving force in critical thinking. An example of this is…”we maintain that superior skill was the cause of our team’s victory, whereas the other team’s win was because of luck.”




If we are to improve our future, we need to reassess how we go about solving problems. The studies have shown that “reasoning of average adults regarding everyday matters is in fact highly fallible. People frequently make unwarranted inferences with unwarranted certainty, and it is likely that they act on many of these inferences.” This needs to stop being the status-quo, and we need to realize that thinking is always amenable to improvement. Standardized tests to satisfy basic literacy and mathematics under the so-called “No Child Left Behind” is leaving behind the education for making sound decisions and improving critical thinking in children.

As the world becomes more complex, and politics increasingly get more global and dynamic, we need critical thinkers that do not allow emotions and preconceived notions to cloud their ability to assess certain problems and create the answer. This is why I always insist that religion stay out of politics, as religion has an extremely powerful stranglehold on one’s emotions. Emotions and problem solving are oil and water, and we should always ask ourselves, “How certain are we of this and how exactly do we know we are right?”

Let’s put more pressure on our politicians and demand a change in our education system. “Certainly young people must become literate and numerate, but in the end, what could be a more important purpose of education than to make the kinds of careful, thoughtful judgments that will serve them well over a lifetime [and for the future of our society].”

One last thing… does this make you think about our situation in Iraq? If it does, how do you feel about the correlation with the above information and our increasingly serious quagmire in the Middle East? Are Bush, Cheney, Rove and the rest of them good critical thinkers?