Have you ever known someone who is intelligent but still makes astonishingly stupid decisions again and again? According to a recently published study in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, reasoning is a distinct skill, and not everyone possesses it in equal measure, even those people who are thought of as being intelligent. A “decision scientist” at Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh claims that while reasoning abilities are influenced by intelligence and socioeconomic status, reasoning ability may also be a skill that can be learned and improved upon with practice.
Many people are affected by the way that information is presented, marketed or spun, especially by advertisements. Most of them are affected by marketing spin, and thus exhibit poor decision-making skills, said Wändi Bruine de Bruin. But people with strong reasoning skills make the same choices regardless of how information is presented to them. For example, if a brand of beef is advertised as being 95 percent lean, a person should be equally likely to buy it as if it is advertised as being 5 percent fat, she said.
To test this, Bruine de Bruin and her colleagues asked 360 people from diverse socioeconomic backgrounds to complete standard hypothetical tests that assess reasoning skills. Then they asked the subjects about their real-life experiences and how frequently they ended up in bad situations — situations such as spending the night in jail or racking up excessive credit-card debt. They found that those people who performed better on the hypothetical reasoning tests were less likely to end up in bad predicaments.
“Performance on those hypothetical paper-and-pencil tasks is related to the decision outcomes people experience in their lives,” Bruine de Bruin said.
Then Bruine de Bruin’s team studied how different factors, such as intelligence and socioeconomic status, affect people’s decision-making. She was surprised to find that, although these variables do affect how well a person reasons, they don’t completely explain it. In short, reasoning might be a separate skill. So in fact, smart people can also make really stupid decisions.
But is reasoning a distinct skill? If so, can it be taught? Bruine de Bruin hopes to answer this question by teaching people better reasoning skills and following them over time to see how their lives change.