r/science Professor | Medicine 20d ago

Neuroscience Twin study suggests rationality and intelligence share the same genetic roots - the study suggests that being irrational, or making illogical choices, might simply be another way of measuring lower intelligence.

https://www.psypost.org/twin-study-suggests-rationality-and-intelligence-share-the-same-genetic-roots/
9.7k Upvotes

457 comments sorted by

View all comments

Show parent comments

86

u/Sinai 19d ago

That's the great thing about quantitative testing, because you can show exactly how much more often dumb people make of wrong decisions in different situations, and then you have learned something about how much more or less intelligence matters in different situations.

7

u/demonicneon 19d ago

Who decides what is irrational though?

32

u/[deleted] 19d ago edited 19d ago

[deleted]

6

u/truealty 19d ago

This is just an application of conditional logic. I fail to see how it’s significantly different from an IQ test.

6

u/[deleted] 19d ago

[deleted]

5

u/truealty 19d ago

Sure. But if the study concluded “people who are good at IQ tests are also good at a subset of their material” it would seem vacuous, because it is. They’re exploiting the ambiguity of the word “rationality”.

6

u/[deleted] 19d ago

[deleted]

3

u/truealty 19d ago

Isn’t that already well-established? I think studies of, for example, the SAT or LSAT, show similar things. Being good at one section predicts your overall score pretty strongly. Personally I find it about as surprising as “your dribbling predicts your overall skill in basketball.”

Regardless, my issue isn’t with that conclusion, but more with the loaded terminology. “Rationality” colloquially means a lot more than “applied reasoning”, and in real life is often caused by psychological incentive against truth-seeking.