Mindware
The learned rules and concepts that good reasoning depends on having installed.
What it means
Mindware is the set of rules, strategies, procedures, and knowledge — such as the law of large numbers, base-rate logic, falsification, cost-benefit thinking, and probability — that a person has stored and can retrieve to reason well. In Stanovich's framework, many reasoning failures are not processing errors but 'mindware gaps,' where the requisite tool was never acquired, or 'contaminated mindware,' where acquired but faulty beliefs actively mislead. Unlike raw processing capacity, mindware is teachable, which is why instruction in statistics and decision rules measurably improves everyday reasoning. The concept locates a third ingredient of rationality alongside reflective disposition and algorithmic ability, explaining why intelligent people can still reason poorly in domains where they lack the right tools. It reframes debiasing as partly an education problem.
Examples
Someone who has internalized regression to the mean correctly attributes a star employee's dip after a banner year to normal variation, rather than inventing a causal story.
Told a screening test is ninety-five percent accurate for a rare disease, someone who has learned base-rate logic asks how rare it is first, and sees that most positives will be false alarms.
A team lead who has never met the idea of a control group reads that loyalty-scheme members spend more and concludes the scheme causes it; the tool to ask 'compared with whom?' was never installed.
First described in David Perkins; elaborated by Keith Stanovich.