The Intelligence Trap: Revolutionise your Thinking and Make Wiser Decisions

by David Robson

Intelligent and educated people are less likely to learn from their mistakes, for instance, or take advice from others. And when they do err, they are better able to build elaborate arguments to justify their reasoning, meaning that they become more and more dogmatic in their views. Worse still, they appear to have a bigger ‘bias blind spot’, meaning they are less able to recognise the holes in their logic.

Besides cognitive reflection, other important characteristics that can protect us from the intelligence trap include intellectual humility, actively open-minded thinking, curiosity, refined emotional awareness and a growth mindset. Together, they keep our minds on track and prevent our thinking from veering off a proverbial cliff.

His conclusion is something of a paradox: he is wise precisely because he recognised the limits of his own knowledge. The jury found him guilty nonetheless, and he was sentenced to death.4

‘The greatest minds are capable of the greatest vices as well as the greatest virtues; those who go forward but very slowly can get further, if they always follow the right road, than those who are in too much of a hurry and stray off it.’5

The great nineteenth-century psychologist William James reportedly said that ‘a great many people think they are thinking when they are merely rearranging their prejudices’. The Intelligence Trap is written for anyone, like me, who wants to escape that mistake – a user’s guide to both the science, and art, of wisdom.

If we are to explain why smart people act foolishly, we must first understand how we came to define intelligence in this way, the abilities this definition captures, and some crucial aspects of thinking that it misses – skills that are equally essential for creativity and pragmatic problem solving, but which have been completely neglected in our education system.

My conversations with Flynn and Sternberg were humbling. Despite having performed well academically, I have to admit that I lack many of the other skills that Sternberg’s tests have been measuring, including many forms of tacit knowledge that may be obvious to some people.

In the next chapters we will discover many other essential thinking styles and cognitive skills that had been neglected by psychologists – and the reasons that greater intelligence, rather than protecting us from error, can sometimes drive us to make even bigger mistakes. Sternberg’s theories only begin to scratch the surface.

Conan Doyle is particularly fascinating because we know, through his writing, that he was perfectly aware of the laws of logical deduction. Indeed, he started to dabble in spiritualism at the same time that he first created Sherlock Holmes:4 he was dreaming up literature’s greatest scientific mind during the day, but failed to apply those skills of deduction at night. If anything, his intelligence seems to have only allowed him to come up with increasingly creative arguments to dismiss the sceptics and justify his beliefs; he was bound more tightly than Houdini in his chains.

You may also have been prey to the availability heuristic, which causes us to over-estimate certain risks based on how easily the dangers come to mind, thanks to their vividness. It’s the reason that many people are more worried about flying than driving – because reports of plane crashes are often so much more emotive, despite the fact that it is actually far more dangerous to step into a car.

There is also framing: the fact that you may change your opinion based on the way information is phrased. Suppose you are considering a medical treatment for 600 people with a deadly illness and it has a 1 in 3 success rate. You can be told either that ‘200 people will be saved using this treatment’ (the gain framing) or that ‘400 people will die using this treatment’ (the loss framing). The statements mean exactly the same thing, but people are more likely to endorse the statement when it is presented in the gain framing; they passively accept the facts as they are given to them without thinking what they really mean. Advertisers have long known this: it’s the reason that we are told that foods are 95 per cent fat free (rather than being told they are ‘5 per cent fat’).

Other notable biases include the sunk cost fallacy (our reluctance to give up on a failing investment even if we will lose more trying to sustain it), and the gambler’s fallacy – the belief that if the roulette wheel has lan...

If you grow up among people who distrust scientists, for instance, you may develop a tendency to ignore empirical evidence, while putting your faith in unproven theories.

Greater intelligence wouldn’t necessarily stop you forming those attitudes in the first place, and it is even possible that your greater capacity for learning might then cause you to accumulate more and more ‘facts’ to support your views.

One study of the high-IQ society Mensa, for example, showed that 44 per cent of its members believed in astrology, and 56 per cent believed that the Earth had been visited by extra-terrestrials.10 But rigorous experiments, specifically exploring the link between intelligence and rationality, were lacking.

People with high IQs are also just as likely to face financial distress, such as missing mortgage payments, bankruptcy or credit card debt. Around 14 per cent of people with an IQ of 140 had reached their credit limit, compared to 8.3 per cent of people with an average IQ of 100. Nor were they any more likely to put money away in long-term investments or savings; their accumulated wealth each year was just a tiny fraction greater. These facts are particularly surprising, given that more intelligent (and better educated) people do tend to have more stable jobs with higher salaries, which suggests that their financial distress is a consequence of their decision making, rather than, say, a simple lack of earning power.22

The upshot, according to Kahan and other scientists studying motivated reasoning, is that smart people do not apply their superior intelligence fairly, but instead use it ‘opportunistically’ to promote their own interests and protect the beliefs that are most important to their identities. Intelligence can be a tool for propaganda rather than truth-seeking.34 It’s

The same polarisation can be seen for people’s views on vaccination,37 fracking38 and evolution.39 In each case, greater education and intelligence simply helps people to justify the beliefs that match their political, social or religious identity. (To be absolutely clear, overwhelming evidence shows that vaccines are safe and effective, carbon emissions are changing the climate, and evolution is true.)

Conan Doyle certainly claimed to be objective. ‘In these 41 years, I never lost any opportunity of reading and studying and experimenting on this matter,’44 he boasted towards the end of his life. But he was only looking for the evidence that supported his point of view, while dismissing everything else.45

Einstein himself realised as much towards the end of his life. ‘I must seem like an ostrich who forever buries its head in the relativistic sand in order not to face the evil quanta’, he once wrote to his friend, the quantum physicist Louis de Broglie. But he continued on his fool’s errand, and even on his deathbed, he scribbled pages of equations to support his erroneous theories, as the last embers of his genius faded.

Whatever your profession, the toxic combination of motivated reasoning and the bias blind spot could still lead us to justify prejudiced opinions about those around us, pursue failing projects at work, or rationalise a hopeless love affair.

That single-minded determination helped Jobs to revolutionise technology, but it also backfired in his personal life, particularly after he was diagnosed with pancreatic cancer in 2003. Ignoring his doctor’s advice, he instead opted for quack cures such as herbal remedies, spiritual healing and a strict fruit juice diet. According to all those around him, Jobs had convinced himself that his cancer was something he could cure himself, and his amazing intelligence seems to have allowed him to dismiss any opinions to the contrary.60 By the time he finally underwent surgery, the cancer had progressed too far to be treatable, and some doctors believe Jobs may still have been alive today if he had simply followed medical advice. In each case, we see that greater intellect is used for rationalisation and justification, rather than logic and reason.

We have now seen three broad reasons why an intelligent person may act stupidly. They may lack elements of creative or practical intelligence that are essential for dealing with life’s challenges; they may suffer from ‘dysrationalia’, using biased intuitive judgements to make decisions; and they may use their intelligence to dismiss any evidence that contradicts their views thanks to motivated reasoning.

It is now widely accepted that human intelligence evolved, at least in part, to deal with the cognitive demands of managing more complex societies. Evidence comes from the archaeological record, which shows that our skull size did indeed grow as our ancestors started to live in bigger groups.61 We need brainpower to keep track of others’ feelings, to know who you can trust, who will take advantage and who you need to keep sweet. And once language evolved, we needed to be eloquent, to be able to build support within the group and bring others to our way of thinking. Those arguments didn’t need to be logical to bring us those benefits; they just had to be persuasive. And that subtle difference may explain why irrationality and intelligence often go hand in hand.62

Clearly experts will still be right the majority of times, but when they are wrong, it can be disastrous, and a clear understanding of the overlooked potential for expert error is essential if we are to prevent those failings.

Dunning and Kruger wondered if ignorance often comes hand in hand with over-confidence, and set about testing the idea in a series of experiments.

Bertrand Russell’s thinking in an essay called ‘The Triumph of Stupidity’ in which he declared that ‘the fundamental cause of the trouble is that in the modern world the stupid are cocksure while the intelligent are full of doubt’.

One likely reason is that the participants simply had not realised how much they might have forgotten since their degree (a phenomenon that Fisher calls meta-forgetfulness). ‘People confuse their current level of understanding with their peak level of knowledge,’ Fisher told me. And that may suggest a serious problem with our education.

Ottati speculates that this fact could explain why some politicians become more entrenched in their opinions and fail to update their knowledge or seek compromise – a state of mind he describes as ‘myopic over-self-confidence’.

Earned dogmatism might also further explain the bizarre claims of the scientists with ‘Nobel Disease’ such as Kary Mullis. Subrahmanyan Chandrasekhar, the Nobel Prize-winning Indian-American astrophysicist, observed this tendency in his colleagues. ‘These people have had great insights and made profound discoveries. They imagine afterwards that the fact that they succeeded so triumphantly in one area means they have a special way of looking at science that must be right. But science doesn’t permit that. Nature has shown over and over again that the kinds of truth which underlie nature transcend the most powerful minds.’15

De Groot noted that over time the schemas can become deeply ‘engrained in the player’, meaning that the right solution may come to mind automatically with just a mere glance at the board, which neatly accounts for those phenomenal flashes of brilliance that we have come to associate with expert intuition. Automatic, engrained behaviours also free up more of the brain’s working memory, which might explain how experts operate in challenging environments. ‘If this were not the case,’ de Groot later wrote, ‘it would be completely impossible to explain why some chess players can still play brilliantly while under the influence of alcohol.’

It gets worse. Expert decisions, based on gist rather than careful analysis, are also more easily swayed by emotions and expectations and cognitive biases such as framing and anchoring.

Mayfield’s case perfectly illustrates the ways that the over-confidence of experts themselves, combined with our blind faith in their talents, can amplify their biases – with potentially devastating effect. The chain of failures within the FBI and the courtroom should not have been able to escalate so rapidly, given the lack of evidence that Mayfield had even left the country.

The intelligence trap shows us that it’s not good enough to be fool proof; procedures need to be expert proof too.

‘Like an alcoholic at an AA meeting, acknowledging the problem is the first step in the solution,’

‘I cannot help expressing a wish that every member of the Convention who may still have objections to it, would with me, on this occasion, doubt a little of his own infallibility, and to make manifest our unanimity, put his name to this instrument.’

Fortunately, psychologists are now beginning to study this kind of mindset in the new science of ‘evidence-based wisdom’. Providing a direct contrast to our previously narrow understanding of human reasoning, this research gives us a unifying theory that explains many of the difficulties we have explored so far, while also providing practical techniques to cultivate wiser thinking and escape the intelligence trap.

The idea that ‘I am wise because I know that I know nothing’ may have become something of a cliché, but it is still rather remarkable that qualities such as your intellectual humility and capacity to understand other people’s points of view

may predict your wellbeing better than your actual intelligence.

Grossmann agrees that a modest level of intelligence will be necessary for some of the complex thinking involved in these tasks. ‘Someone with severe learning difficulties won’t be able to apply these wisdom principles.’ But beyond a certain threshold, the other characteristics – such as intellectual humility and open-minded thinking – become more crucial for the decisions that truly matter in life.

The Germans have even coined a new word – merkeln (to Merkel) – that captures this patient, deliberative stance, though it’s not always meant flatteringly, since it can also reflect frustrating indecision.37

Interestingly, many of the super-forecasters – including Michael – had lived and worked abroad

some point in their life. Although this may have just been a coincidence, there is some good evidence that a deep engagement with other cultures can promote open-minded thinking, perhaps because it demands that you temporarily put aside your preconceptions and adopt new ways of thinking.49

Grossmann points to ethnographic evidence showing that children in Japan are taught to consider others’ perspectives and acknowledge their own weaknesses from a young age. ‘You just open an elementary school textbook and you see stories about these characters who are intellectually humble, who think of the meaning of life in interdependent terms.’

And they are finding that ‘Western, Educated, Industrialised, Rich, Democratic’ (WEIRD, for short) regions like North America and Europe score higher on various measures of individualism and the egocentric thinking that appears to lie behind our biases.

According to one of Grossmann’s recent surveys, individualism is rising across the globe, even in populations that traditionally showed a more interdependent outlook.

Benjamin Franklin continued to embody intellectual humility to the very end. The signing of the Constitution in 1787 was his final great act, and he remained content with his country’s progress. ‘We have had a most plentiful year for the fruits of the earth, and our people seem to be recovering fast from the extravagant and idle habits which the war had introduced, and to engage seriously in the contrary habits of temperance, frugality, and industry, which give the most pleasing prospects of future

Ray had never been to a burger joint like it; it was somewhere he would have happily taken his wife and children. And he saw that the operation could easily be upscaled. His excitement was visceral; he was ‘wound up like a pitcher with a no-hitter going’. He knew he had to buy the rights to franchise the operation and spread it across America.1 Within the next few years, Ray would risk all his savings to buy out the two brothers who owned it. He would keep the emblem of its golden arches, though, and despite the acrimonious split, the brothers’ name – McDonald – would still be emblazoned on every restaurant. His lawyers apparently thought he was mad; his wife’s reaction was so negative that they got divorced. But Ray was never in any doubt. ‘I felt in my funny bone that it was a sure thing.’2

History may have proven Ray Kroc’s instincts correct; McDonald’s serves nearly 70 million customers every day. In light of the science of dysrationalia, however, it’s natural to feel more than a little sceptical of a man who gambled everything on the whims of his funny bone.

Thinkers from Socrates and Plato to Confucius have argued that you cannot be wise about the world around you if you do not first know yourself. The latest scientific research shows that this is not some lofty philosophical ideal; incorporating some moments of reflection into your day will help de-bias every decision in your life.