There are many issues that can make thinking rationally harder, some of which are very hard to reproduce in controlled circumstances, and being better at dealing with one issue does not necessarily make you any better at dealing with the others. Almost anything that we would describe as stressful impairs rationality. To your list of circumstances, I would add:
Distractions: noisy environments, recent events
Altered mental states: fatigue, intoxication
Time pressure: either a hard limit on time available to decide, or thinking longer imposes a cost large enough to matter.
A few of these are easy to test; for example, you could take a written test once while rested, once while tired, once in a noisy room, once with a short time limit, etc. However, it doesn’t seem likely that these tests would generalize well, and many of the obvious strategies for training seem unlikely to generalize well either.
I said “under time” to try to factor these things out, but I just edited the post to say “by attending” to better describe them. Yes focusing more attention on a problem lets you do better, and more time, less fatigue, and fewer distractions let you focus more attention. But these attention factors seem importantly different from the other factors I listed.
There are many issues that can make thinking rationally harder, some of which are very hard to reproduce in controlled circumstances, and being better at dealing with one issue does not necessarily make you any better at dealing with the others. Almost anything that we would describe as stressful impairs rationality. To your list of circumstances, I would add:
Distractions: noisy environments, recent events
Altered mental states: fatigue, intoxication
Time pressure: either a hard limit on time available to decide, or thinking longer imposes a cost large enough to matter.
A few of these are easy to test; for example, you could take a written test once while rested, once while tired, once in a noisy room, once with a short time limit, etc. However, it doesn’t seem likely that these tests would generalize well, and many of the obvious strategies for training seem unlikely to generalize well either.
I said “under time” to try to factor these things out, but I just edited the post to say “by attending” to better describe them. Yes focusing more attention on a problem lets you do better, and more time, less fatigue, and fewer distractions let you focus more attention. But these attention factors seem importantly different from the other factors I listed.