Peter Drucker has been one of the most articulate and effective missionaries for management as a profession and a discipline. His major works on the subject (1955, 1973, 1985) have given generations of managers a sense of purpose and self-respect, and helped to shape the expectations of the growing legions of young would-be managers in business schools. In his 1973 book on the tasks, responsibilities and practices of management, he set out to expunge the image of the manager that held sway in the prewar ‘Heroic Age of Management’ when it was identified with responsibility for the work of others. Instead of the bowler-hatted boss exercising authority on behalf of hierarchy, Drucker portrays the tasks of management as furthering the mission of organizations, making work productive and fulfilling social responsibilities. He writes: ‘Management is a practice rather than a science. In this, it is comparable to medicine, law, and engineering. It is not knowledge but performance’ (1973, p. 17).

The components of this performance he envisages as ‘planning, organizing, integrating and measuring’ (ibid., p. 393). Within the management literature one can find this approach represented by a proliferation of bestselling practitioner cookbooks for managerial excellence, ranging from the reductio ad absurdum of ‘one-minute’ recipes for success (Blanchard and Johnson, 1982) to considered appreciations of the complexities of the managerial role such as is represented in the work of Rosemary Stewart, depicting the manager's world as bounded on the one side by demands and on the other side by constraints, with ‘choices’ the operating zone of freedom between them (1982).

No matter how hard managers try to achieve some self-control over their career paths, however radical their career moves, and whatever success they feel they experience, they do so within the confines of the very real but uneven constraints imposed by circumstances and opportunities. Managers' occupational and organizational environments are an important influence on the process of job change. We have seen evidence of this in preceding chapters, showing how career paths and adjustment processes differ widely across occupational and organizational types. We now want to look more closely at these types, and, through the eyes of the managers, examine the different qualities of career experience that are to be found in them.

In so doing it is our aim to complement an extensive literature on career development in management. Within this literature there is an abundance of rich case study reports and numerous prescriptive handbooks on how organizational careers should be managed by human resource specialists. Career development is also big business for management consultants offering guidance on personal and organizational development. Yet there is very little to be found in writings on the subject that tells us how managers experience career development or how much organizations are practising what the management scientists are preaching.

The portrait of the managerial character painted in Chapter 2 has positive and reassuring overtones. Managers care more about their families than their jobs, and more about their higher order needs than their material satisfactions, though it might be said, without being unduly cynical, that most can afford to take this stance from a position of well-paid employment. At the same time there is considerable variation in managers' expressed needs and how likely these are to be fulfilled by the positions they are in. Although we found no evidence of widespread and deeply felt frustrations, there were a number of discordant notes in some of our findings. Psychological adjustment at work is less favourable than away from work. Managers often find organizations fail to fulfil their needs for achievement, recognition and feedback, and they are also often disappointed in their senior managers. Therefore, it would not be surprising if managers sought out job change as a way of removing frustrations and improving the quality of their work lives. One major aim of our study was to find out if managers do try to do this, and if they are successful in the attempt.

We also pointed out in Chapter 1 that job change is likely to be driven by more than just the needs and desires of managers.

Innovation is a more immediate and visible mode of adjustment to mobility than is personal change, as we have seen in the preceding two chapters. Role innovation is widely reported by managers as a way of coming to terms with new jobs, while personal change is harder to detect. Our interpretation of these data is that role innovation is inherent in many managerial roles – situational adjustments are constantly required to maintain performance. It is also inherent in managerial motives, for we have seen how people are much more strongly drawn to challenge and achievement than they are toward the satisfactions of security and stability. Personal change is also widely reported but our direct measures show only small shifts in the immediate post job change period. This suggests that personal change has quite a different rhythm and pace to innovation. Innovation is immediate and direct, whereas personal change is time-lagged, incremental and cumulative.

This analysis is tantamount to a model of personal and social systems. Personal systems are anchors in the tides of change, but they shift their position over time to accommodate environmental evolution. Innovation is a direct form of exploration and creative adjustment within the immediate domain, a response that is evoked by the turbulence and uncertainty of contemporaneous environmental demands and ambiguities.

The main point of this book is that intelligent thinking is, among other things, rationally conducted. When we think intelligently, we do not hesitate to think about something when thinking can do some good. We consider possible conclusions — and possible goals for our thinking — other than the first one to enter our minds, and we are responsive to evidence, even when it goes against a possibility that we favor initially. When we seek evidence, we do not simply look for evidence that confirms our most favored possibility. We do not draw hasty and ill-considered conclusions, nor do we ruminate on irrelevancies.

When I speak of intelligence, I do not refer to just those qualities that make for high scores on IQ tests, or those that make for expertise in a particular field. Intelligent thinking can be effective in solving problems and making choices, even when pencil and paper must be substituted for a powerful memory or when the expertise of others must be relied upon instead of one's own. For example, we generally expect good administrators to think well in their work. Suppose you had to specify the intellectual traits of the president of the United States, or of whatever social unit you care most about, but without being able to specify his or her particular beliefs or knowledge.

Consider a student caught in a conflict between working some more on a homework problem in statistics, which he has so far failed to solve, and playing his favorite video game on his personal computer. On the first side is his desire to learn statistics, to get a good grade in the statistics course, to get into graduate school, to have a successful career, and to convince himself that he really is smarter than his sister. On the other side is his desire to play Pac-Man. The student might admit that the rational course of action would be to continue working on the problem, but he might give in to temptation anyway. In this chapter, I shall try to say why the first course might be the rational one (when it is). I want to try to say what it means to be rational in balancing expected costs and benefits when choosing alternative actions — especially when one choice involves thinking and the other does not — given one's goals. Beyond this, I shall ask what it means to have rational goals. In the next chapter, I shall use the ideas developed here to justify some prescriptive rules for the conduct of thinking. As in the present example, these rules will involve tradeoffs of different kinds of consequences of thinking or not thinking. I shall argue that the rational conduct of thinking involves a kind of expected-utility maximization.

I take teaching to be most narrowly what is done or could be done by teachers and professors. More broadly, it is what is done by parents and peers as well. Still more broadly, we can learn things from anything we do. So, if we are concerned with the promotion of certain kinds of knowledge, dispositions, or abilities, we can take teaching to include any attempt to arrange our environment to promote these things. I take the broadest view in this chapter, although it seems likely that discussion of the issues I raise will have its greatest effect on schools.

My purpose here is to show how the theory I have outlined (particularly in chapter 3) is relevant to the teaching of good thinking. In essence, this theory suggests that teaching should direct itself at the removal and prevention of the major biases: insufficient search (and its total absence), belief perseverance, and confirmatory bias in the search for evidence. I shall first discuss some basic issues: the question of equal opportunity, the question of generality of teaching, the question of developmental readiness. Then I shall sketch an analysis of the various objectives of instruction and the methods used to achieve them. I shall argue that only some of these objectives — principally the inculcation of beliefs and goals — are relevant to the teaching of thinking. This leads to a discussion of the relevance of beliefs and goals in a bit more detail.

The roots of this book go back to the 1960s, when I began to worry about how to make experimental psychology relevant to the problems of the world, especially through the improvement of education (Baron, 1971). The two most salient figures of my undergraduate days, Skinner and Bruner, had made me think that this was possible, and that real advances in educational technology could grow out of psychological theory. Bruner (1957) also gave me — perhaps even more than he intended — a view of what aspects of human thinking need to be corrected, namely, a rigidity resulting from first impressions.

During the political turmoil of the late sixties, my wife gave me an article by Lawrence Kohlberg, and his ideas seemed to provide much enlightenment about the conflicts of those years. I spent a few years trying to work on moral reasoning, in the tradition of Kohlberg. Much of this work was done in collaboration with John Gibbs while we were both at McMaster University. I became dissatisfied with Kohlberg's scoring methods (for reasons I explain here), and I gradually diverged from Gibbs and developed a system much along the lines of Chapter 3 here.

My interest in intelligence was inspired by my wife and by the late Klaus Riegel (in graduate school) and later by Block and Dworkin's (1976) excellent collection.

Consider an executive caught in a dilemma: How should she respond to her colleagues' unanimous decision to increase their expense accounts without informing the central office (which is unlikely to notice)? First, she wants to go along, imagining the nice restaurants she could take her clients to, but then she wonders whether it is right to do so, from the corporation's point of view. She is still tempted to go along, for it has been argued that other departments in the corporation are allowed higher accounts, and that increased entertainment and travel opportunities will benefit the corporation in various ways. However, she thinks of reasons against this view, such as the argument that any other department could do the same, on the basis of other flimsy excuses, and if all did so, the corporation would suffer considerably. (She makes use here of a heuristic or schema for moral arguments that she recognizes as one she has used before.) She considers reporting the decision to the central office, but rejects this both because of the personal danger it would involve and her feelings of loyalty to her colleagues. She decides not to go along, and to keep careful records of her own actual use of her expense account, because she has imagined what would happen if the scheme were in fact discovered.

In the present chapter, I explore the possibility of interpreting the prescriptive scheme of chapter 3 in terms of some mathematical models. If we can fix (or assume, or measure) the utilities of a subject in a laboratory experiment, and if we can fix (or measure) various subjective probabilities or degrees of belief, we can prescribe his behavior in the experiment. By comparing his behavior to what we prescribe, we can find out whether he is performing optimally, and, if not, we can perform experiments to find out why not. In addition, these models may enlighten us about the interpretation of experiments that have already been reported.

I shall begin by considering some experiments that purport to show biases in the search for evidence, other than the kind of confirmation bias I discussed in chapter 3. I shall suggest that there are other interpretations of these experiments, in terms of other biases I have mentioned, some biases I have not mentioned yet, or no biases at all. This section of the chapter also lays out a general framework that will be useful in the rest (although it need not be understood in detail). In the rest of the chapter, I discuss the experimental study of the biases discussed in chapter 3: impulsiveness, confirmation bias, and belief perseverance.

I have argued that intelligence consists in part of a disposition to follow the rules of good thinking and to avoid the biases that often interfere with such conduct. In this chapter, I ask, what is the good of being rational in this way? This question is necessary as a justification of any attempt to teach people to think more rationally (chapter 7). There are three answers. First, rationality is good because it can be expected to increase individual happiness or fulfillment. Second, rationality makes for effectiveness, in the sense of chapter 1, that is, success at achieving rationally chosen goals. This must be shown in order to complete the argument that rationality is part of intelligence. Third, I argue that rationality has a kind of external justification, in particular, a moral one, of the same sort that other moral traits such as honesty might have.

Rationality and happiness

People who are healthy, wealthy, and wise are not necessarily happy as well, but it helps; few would trade their wealth and learning for the supposed bliss of the ignorant and poor. Health, wealth, and knowledge can be thought of as “primary goods” (Rawls, 1971), which would help anyone achieve his goals, no matter what those goals might be. The relation between rationality and happiness is of a similar sort. In particular, rationality in making decisions and plans can be defined as the following of rules that are likely to lead to consequences that would be desired on reflection (chapter 1).