The Rationality Quotient: Toward a Test of Rational Thinking

ing, and the perceptions of melody. Chapters 7 and 8 provide guidance on Baroque composition and part-writing, Chapters 9 and 10 explore embellishments and the sense ofmusic leading somewhere, and Chapters 11 through 14 present additional considerations for composition, such as the perception of harmony and how we analyze auditory scenes and experiencemusical texture. Chapter 15discusses how learning and experience influence sound perception, and Chapter 16 focuses on experiments on why music is pleasing. Chapter 17 comprehensively summarizes the book. For readers who tire of marching through each principle, Huron has incorporated an explicit roadmap for reading Voice Leading in Chapters 1 and 17. He also implements parallel formatting for ease of reading: each chapter starts with a concise plan, a tangible and common example to illustrate the ideas discussed, technical exploration of the concept with key ideas italicized, extensive background to explore the ideas, and an excellent summary in a chapter reprise. Although each chapter is dense with scientific information, and the information can be quite technical at times, the explanations are easy to grasp. At the end of each chapter it will be a pleasant surprise to discover how much you have learned. You do not have to be a musician or composer interested in the cognition of music to appreciate this book. For bioacousticians, the author’s navigation of human auditory perception invokes shadows of signal analysis, peripheral nervous system constraints, central nervous system processing, multicomponent signals, and signal composition that can be applied across the animal kingdom. Huron’s neuroethological approach to understanding the perception of music will bring new appreciation to consideration of the aesthetics of sound in other animals. Furthermore, the historical commentary on musical composition throughout anchors the volume within a social context. Perhaps for Huron’s next book he could consider how auditory perception in other animals contrasts with humans to provide context for how unique—or not—human perception of music really is. Overall, Voice Leading provides a framework not just for understanding why musical compositions are perceived the way they are (or which rules musicians should follow to meet specific goals), but paints a picture of the complexity of the neurophysiological and psychological aspects of the impressive human auditory system. Kasey Fowler-Finn, Biology, Saint Louis University, St. Louis, Missouri The Rationality Quotient: Toward a Test of Rational Thinking. By Keith E. Stanovich, Richard F. West, and Maggie E. Toplak. Cambridge (Massachusetts): MIT Press. $39.00. xvii + 459 p.; ill. ; author and subject indexes. ISBN: 978-0-262-03484-5. 2016. The great Arthur Conan Doyle, author of the timeless Sherlock Holmes novels, was fooled into believing that fairies exist by two teenage girls armed with a camera and a few cardboard cutouts of fairies. How could the brilliant intellectual father of the hypercritical and discerning Sherlock Holmes take on such an extravagant conviction on such meager evidence? The reason, Stanovich et al. would tell us, is that—contrary to common belief—rationality has very little to do with intelligence. RQ (Rationality Quotient) is only weakly correlated with IQ. So what underlies rational thinking? This important question is at the core of The Rationality Quotient. In addition to providing a comprehensive overview of the major findings of four decades of research in the heuristics and biases tradition instigated by the great Kahneman and Tversky, this volume delivers a standardized test to assess rationality in individuals. The importance of the book lies both in the comprehensive overview of the research on (ir)rationality and the psychometric system it proposes to gauge rationality in individuals. For far too long, IQ has been getting all of the attention. Although IQ is an important metric and a good predictor of an individual’s occupational level and performance, RQ—as the authors point out—is both more encompassing and important. In an increasingly hostile cognitive environment (i.e., an environment that differs from the environment of evolutionary adaptedness to which our innate intuitive modes of reasoning are attuned) forming rational beliefs and taking rational decisions becomes ever more challenging. At the same time, in a world where we are constantly bombarded with informational snippets that diverge widely with respect to their trustworthiness, rationality becomes evermore important. The modern world, as the authors point out, puts a premium on rational thinking. But the importance of rational thinking on an individual level is overshadowed by its importance on a societal level. From overconfidence leading to war and financial crises to the affect heuristic making us overreact on terrorism and remain dangerously impassive to the threat of climate change, the woes of society are the result of a lack of rationality. One can only hope that putting RQ on the map will produce a Flynn effect as has been the case for IQ, where average IQ has been steadily on the rise since the test was first introduced in the beginning of the 20th century. NEW BIOLOGICAL BOOKS March 2018 43