🧠 The test of a first-rate intelligence is the ability to hold two opposed ideas at once and still function. F. Scott Fitzgerald wrote that in "The Crack-Up" (Esquire, February 1936), and psychologists have spent decades giving the intuition a name.
Developmental psychologists call it post-formal thought: a proposed stage beyond Piaget's formal logic where people stop forcing contradiction into certainty and instead stay with the tension. Dialectical thinking, tolerance of multiple truths, integrating logic with lived experience.
The default mind resists this. Research on intolerance of uncertainty and the need for cognitive closure shows ambiguity is processed as threat, which is why people reach for certainty even when it costs them accuracy.
One nuance: post-formal thought is a contested label. Some researchers argue adult development is better described as integrative thinking inside the formal stage, not a separate stage beyond it.
Read more:
... Show more...🧠The test of a first-rate intelligence is the ability to hold two opposed ideas at once and still function. F. Scott Fitzgerald wrote that in "The Crack-Up" (Esquire, February 1936), and psychologists have spent decades giving the intuition a name.
Developmental psychologists call it post-formal thought: a proposed stage beyond Piaget's formal logic where people stop forcing contradiction into certainty and instead stay with the tension. Dialectical thinking, tolerance of multiple truths, integrating logic with lived experience.
The default mind resists this. Research on intolerance of uncertainty and the need for cognitive closure shows ambiguity is processed as threat, which is why people reach for certainty even when it costs them accuracy.
One nuance: post-formal thought is a contested label. Some researchers argue adult development is better described as integrative thinking inside the formal stage, not a separate stage beyond it.
Read more:
esquire.com/lifestyle/a4310/th…
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Postform…
pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/238490…
#psychology #intelligence #cognition
One of America's most famous authors confronts the pressures of fame in a most public forum. Read The Crack-Up by F. Scott Fitzgerald in Esquire's archive.
F. Scott Fitzgerald (Esquire)
