Individual Differences in Reasoning: BBS Call for Commentators

Fri Aug 27 16:00:52 EDT 1999

        Below is the abstract of a forthcoming BBS target article

        INDIVIDUAL DIFFERENCES IN REASONING: 
        IMPLICATIONS FOR THE RATIONALITY DEBATE?

        by Keith E. Stanovich and Richard F. West

        *** please see also 5 important announcements about new BBS
        policies and address change at the bottom of this message) ***

This article has been accepted for publication in Behavioral and Brain
Sciences (BBS), an international, interdisciplinary journal providing
Open Peer Commentary on important and controversial current research in
the biobehavioral and cognitive sciences.

Commentators must be BBS Associates or nominated by a BBS Associate. To
be considered as a commentator for this article, to suggest other
appropriate commentators, or for information about how to become a BBS
Associate, please reply by EMAIL by September 20th to:

    bbs at cogsci.soton.ac.uk

    or write to:

    Behavioral and Brain Sciences
    ECS: New Zepler Building
    University of Southampton
    Highfield, Southampton
    SO17 1BJ UNITED KINGDOM

    http://www.princeton.edu/~harnad/bbs/
    http://www.cogsci.soton.ac.uk/bbs/

If you are not a BBS Associate, please send your CV and the name of a
BBS Associate (there are currently over 10,000 worldwide) who is
familiar with your work. All past BBS authors, referees and
commentators are eligible to become BBS Associates.

To help us put together a balanced list of commentators, please give
some indication of the aspects of the topic on which you would bring
your areas of expertise to bear if you were selected as a commentator.
An electronic draft of the full text is available for inspection
with a WWW browser according to the instructions that follow after the
abstract.

_____________________________________________________________

    INDIVIDUAL DIFFERENCES IN REASONING: 
    IMPLICATIONS FOR THE RATIONALITY DEBATE?

        Keith E. Stanovich 
        Department of Human Development and Applied Psychology 
        University of Toronto 
        252 Bloor Street West 
        Toronto, ON 
        Canada M5S 1V6 
        kstanovich at oise.utoronto.ca 

        Richard F. West 
        School of Psychology 
        James Madison University
        Harrisonburg, VA 22807 USA 
        westrf at jmu.edu 

    ABSTRACT: 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
    behavior and cognition is largely rational.  According to these
	explanations, the gap is due to (1) performance errors, (2)
    computational limitations, (3) the wrong norm being applied by the
    experimenter and (4) a different construal of the task by the
    subject.  In the debates about the viability of these alternative
    explanations, attention has been focused too narrowly on the modal
    response. In a series of experiments involving most of the classic
    tasks in the heuristics and biases literature, we have examined the
    implications of individual differences in performance for each of
    the four explanations of the normative and descriptive gap.
    Performance errors are a minor factor in the gap, computational
    limitations underlie non-normative responding on several tasks,
    particularly those that involve some type of cognitive
    decontextualization. Unexpected patterns of covariance can suggest
    when the wrong norm is being applied to a task or when an
    alternative construal of the task is called for.

    KEYWORDS: rationality, normative models, descriptive models,
    heuristics, biases, reasoning, individual differences
___________________________________________________________

To help you decide whether you would be an appropriate commentator for
this article, an electronic draft is retrievable from the World Wide
Web or by anonymous ftp from the US or UK BBS Archive.
Ftp instructions follow below. Please do not prepare a commentary on
this draft. Just let us know, after having inspected it, what relevant
expertise you feel you would bring to bear on what aspect of the
article.

The URLs you can use to get to the BBS Archive:

    http://www.princeton.edu/~harnad/bbs/
    http://www.cogsci.soton.ac.uk/bbs/Archive/bbs.stanovich.html

____________________________________________________________

         ***  FIVE IMPORTANT ANNOUNCEMENTS  ***

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(1) There have been some very important developments in the 
    area of Web archiving of scientific papers very recently.
    Please see:

Science:
           http://www.cogsci.soton.ac.uk/~harnad/science.html
Nature:
           http://www.cogsci.soton.ac.uk/~harnad/nature.html
American Scientist:
           http://www.cogsci.soton.ac.uk/~harnad/amlet.html
Chronicle of Higher Education:
           http://www.chronicle.com/free/v45/i04/04a02901.htm

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(2) All authors in the biobehavioral and cognitive sciences are
    strongly encouraged to archive all their papers (on their
    Home-Servers as well as) on CogPrints:

http://cogprints.soton.ac.uk/

    It is extremely simple to do so and will make all of our papers
    available to all of us everywhere at no cost to anyone.

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(3) BBS has a new policy of accepting submissions electronically.

    Authors can specify whether they would like their submissions
    archived publicly during refereeing in the BBS under-refereeing
    Archive, or in a referees-only, non-public archive.

    Upon acceptance, preprints of final drafts are moved to the
    public BBS Archive:

ftp://ftp.princeton.edu/pub/harnad/BBS/.WWW/index.html
http://www.cogsci.soton.ac.uk/bbs/Archive/

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(4) BBS has expanded its annual page quota and is now appearing
    bimonthly, so the service of Open Peer Commentary can now be be
    offered to more target articles. The BBS refereeing procedure is
    also going to be considerably faster with the new electronic
    submission and processing procedures. Authors are invited to submit
    papers to:

    Email:   bbs at cogsci.soton.ac.uk

    Web:     http://cogprints.soton.ac.uk
             http://bbs.cogsci.soton.ac.uk/

    INSTRUCTIONS FOR AUTHORS:

http://www.princeton.edu/~harnad/bbs/instructions.for.authors.html
http://www.cogsci.soton.ac.uk/bbs/instructions.for.authors.html      

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(5) Call for Book Nominations for BBS Multiple Book Review

    In the past, Behavioral and Brain Sciences (BBS) journal had only
    been able to do 1-2 BBS multiple book treatments per year, because
    of our limited annual page quota. BBS's new expanded page quota
    will make it possible for us to increase the number of books we
    treat per year, so this is an excellent time for BBS Associates and
    biobehavioral/cognitive scientists in general to nominate books you
    would like to see accorded BBS multiple book review.

    (Authors may self-nominate, but books can only be selected on the
    basis of multiple nominations.) It would be very helpful if you
    indicated in what way a BBS Multiple Book Review of the book(s) you
    nominate would be useful to the field (and of course a rich list of
    potential reviewers would be the best evidence of its potential
    impact!).