55
Pop quiz: should we study the dictionary to make ourselves smarter? Maybe, maybe not: lots of websites promising to build vocabulary tell us that “people with bigger vocabularies are more successful,” but is it the vocabulary that makes them successful, or some third factor, like intelligence or dedication, that leads to both success and a large vocabulary?
56
Another study, conducted before the Web existed as such, pointed in the same direction. Educational psychologist David Perkins asked people with a high school or college education to evaluate social and political questions, such as “Does violence on television significantly increase the likelihood of violence in real life?” or “Would restoring the military draft significantly increase America’s ability to influence world events?”; responses were evaluated in terms of their sophistication. How many times did people consider objections to their own arguments? How many different lines of argument did people consider? How well could people justify their main arguments? Most subjects settled for simplistic answers no matter how much the experimenters tried to push them — and the amount of education people had made surprisingly little difference. As Perkins put it, “Present educational practices do little to foster the development of informal reasoning skills.”
