Summary

Practical cognition is what most people call common sense. It is the skill needed to adapt to, shape, and select everyday environments. Cognition as conventionally defined may be useful in everyday life, but practical cognition is indispensable. Without some measure of it, one cannot survive in a cultural milieu or even in the natural environment. In our work, we have studied many aspects of practical cognition, although we have concentrated on one particularly important aspect of it—tacit knowledge—the procedural knowledge one learns in one's everyday life that usually is not taught and often is not even verbalized. Tacit knowledge includes things like knowing what to say to whom, knowing when to say it, and knowing how to say it for maximum effect. In our work, we have studied tacit knowledge in populations as diverse as business managers, military leaders, university professors, elementary-school teachers, janitors, secretaries, salespeople, and U.S. and rural Kenyan children. Tacit knowledge is so-called because it usually starts off tacit, although over time it can come to be verbalized. It is measured by situational-judgment tests.

Our goal is not to denigrate the importance of more academically-based types of cognition, including literacy, numeracy, academic reasoning and so on. Rather, our argument is that more academic types of cognition are not enough—that successful prediction and, more importantly, understanding of performance in the everyday world requires assessment of practical as well as academic types of cognition.