The Intelligence Trap: Revolutionise your Thinking and Make Wiser Decisions

by David Robson

Not only do general intelligence and academic education fail to protect us from various cognitive errors; smart people may be even more vulnerable to certain kinds of foolish thinking. 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.

The vast majority of these mistakes cannot be explained by a lack of knowledge or experience; instead, they appear to arise from the particular, flawed mental habits that come with greater intelligence, education and professional expertise. Similar errors can lead spaceships to crash, stock markets to implode, and world leaders to ignore global threats like climate change. Although they may seem to be unconnected, I found that some common processes underlie all these phenomena: a pattern that I will refer to as the intelligence trap.

If you consider surveys of lawyers, accountants or engineers, for instance, the average IQ may lie around 125 – showing that intelligence does give you an advantage. But the scores cover a considerable range, between around 95 (below average) and 157 (Termite territory).33 And when you compare the individuals’ success in those professions, those different scores can, at the very most, account for around 29 per cent of the variance in performance, as measured by managers’ ratings.34 That is certainly a very significant chunk, but even if you take into account factors such as motivation, it still leaves a vast range in performance that cannot be accounted for by their intelligence.35

For any career, there are plenty of people of lower IQ who outperform those with much higher scores, and people with greater intelligence who don’t make the most of their brainpower, confirming that qualities such as creativity or wise professional judgement just can’t be accounted for by that one number alone. ‘It’s a bit like being tall and playing basketball,’ David Perkins of the Harvard Graduate School of Education told me. If you don’t meet a very basic threshold, you won’t get far, but beyond that point other factors take over, he says.

Having spoken to Sternberg, I realised that someone with practical intelligence might skilfully massage the micromanager’s sense of self-importance by suggesting two solutions to a problem: the preferred answer, and a decoy they could reject while feeling they have still left their mark on the project. It’s a strategy that had never once occurred to me.

We’ve already seen how our definition of intelligence could be expanded to include practical and creative reasoning. But those theories do not explicitly examine our rationality, defined as our capacity to make the optimal decisions needed to meet our goals, given the resources we have to hand, and to form beliefs based on evidence, logic and sound reasoning.* * Cognitive scientists such as Keith Stanovich describe two classes of rationality. Instrumental rationality is defined as ‘the optimisation of someone’s goal fulfilment’, or, less technically, as ‘behaving so that you get exactly what you want, given the resources available to you’. Epistemic rationality, meanwhile, concerns ‘how well your beliefs map onto the actual structure of the world’. By falling for fraudulent mediums, Conan Doyle was clearly lacking in the latter.

While decades of psychological research have documented humanity’s more irrational tendencies, it is only relatively recently that scientists have started to measure how that irrationality between individuals, and whether that variance is related to measures of intelligence. They are finding that the two are far from perfectly correlated: it is possible to have a very high SAT score that demonstrates good abstract thinking, for instance, while still performing badly on these new tests of rationality – a mismatch known as ‘dysrationalia’.

You have probably fallen for anchoring yourself many times while shopping in the sales. Suppose you are looking for a new TV. You had expected to pay around £100, but then you find a real bargain: a £200 item reduced to £150. Seeing the original price anchors your perception of what is an acceptable price to pay, meaning that you will go above your initial budget. If, on the other hand, you had not seen the original price, you would have probably considered it too expensive, and moved on.

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 ...

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...

Circumstantial evidence would suggest that dysrationalia is common. 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.

Using these measures, Stanovich found that the relationships between rationality and intelligence were generally very weak. SAT scores revealed a correlation of just 0.1 and 0.19 with measures of the framing bias and anchoring, for instance.12 Intelligence also appeared to play only a tiny role in the question of whether we are willing to delay immediate gratification for a greater reward in the future – a tendency known as ‘temporal discounting’. In one test, the correlation with SAT scores was as small as 0.02. That’s an extraordinarily modest correlation for a trait that many might assume comes hand in hand with a greater analytical mind. The sunk cost bias also showed almost no relationship to SAT scores in another study.

Gui Xue and colleagues at Beijing Normal University, meanwhile, have followed Stanovich’s lead, finding that the gambler’s fallacy is actually a little more common among the more academically successful participants in his sample.14 That’s worth remembering: when playing roulette, don’t think you are smarter than the wheel.

After years of careful development and verification of the various sub-tests, the first iteration of the ‘Comprehensive Assessment of Rational Thinking’ was published at the end of 2016. Besides measures of the common cognitive biases and heuristics, it also included probabilistic and statistical reasoning skills – such as the ability to assess risk – that could improve our rationality, and questionnaires concerning contaminated mindware such as anti-science attitudes.

To do so, she asked participants to declare how often they had experienced various stressful life events, from the relatively trivial (such as getting sunburnt or missing a flight), to the serious (catching an STD or cheating on your partner) and the downright awful (being put in jail).20 Although the measures of general intelligence did seem to have a small effect on these outcomes, the participants’ rationality scores were about three times more important in determining their behaviour.

The use of system 2 ‘slow thinking’ to rationalise our beliefs even when they are wrong leads us to uncover the most important and pervasive form of the intelligence trap, with many disastrous consequences; it can explain not only the foolish ideas of people such as Conan Doyle, but also the huge divides in political opinion about issues such as gun crime and climate change.

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.

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’.

The use of checklists as reminders of critical procedures – now common in many other sectors – originated in the cockpit to ensure, for instance, safer take-offs and landings.

Through the stories of the Termites, Arthur Conan Doyle, and the FBI’s forensic examiners, we have seen four potential forms of the intelligence trap: We may lack the necessary tacit knowledge and counter-factual thinking that are essential for executing a plan and pre-empting the consequences of your actions. We may suffer from dysrationalia, motivated reasoning and the bias blind spot, which allow us to rationalise and perpetuate our mistakes, without recognising the flaws in our own thinking. This results in us building ‘logic-tight compartments’ around our beliefs without considering all the available evidence. We may place too much confidence in our own judgement, thanks to earned dogmatism, so that we no longer perceive our limitations and over-reach our abilities. Finally, thanks to our expertise, we may employ entrenched, automatic behaviours that render us oblivious to the obvious warning signs that disaster is looming, and more susceptible to bias.

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. As we shall see, the same principles can help us think more clearly about everything from our most personal decisions to important world events; the same strategies may even lie behind the astonishing predictions of the world’s ‘super-forecasters’.

In place of esoteric or spiritual concepts of wisdom, this scientific research has focused on secular definitions, drawn from philosophy, including Aristotle’s view of practical wisdom – ‘the set of skills, dispositions and policies that help us understand and deliberate about what’s good in life and helps us to choose the best means for pursuing those things over the course of the life’, according to the philosopher Valerie Tiberius. (This was, incidentally, much the same definition that Franklin used.8)

A wiser response instead begins to look more deeply into the potential range of motives: Somebody might believe that we need to honour parents like this. Another person might think there isn’t anything that needs to be done. Or another person might not have the financial means to do anything. Or it could also mean that it might not be important to the brothers. It often happens that people have different perspectives on situations important to them. The high scorer could also see more possibilities for the way the conflict might be resolved: I would think there would probably be some compromise reached, that Curt and Ralph realize that it’s important to have some kind of headstone, and although Dawn went ahead and ordered it without them confirming that they’d pitch in, they would probably pitch in somehow, even if not what she wanted ideally. But hopefully, there was some kind of contribution.

Crucially, the participants’ intelligence was largely unrelated to their wise reasoning scores, and had little bearing on any of these measures of health and happiness.13 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.

One of Stanovich’s sub-tests, for instance, measured a trait called ‘actively open-minded thinking’, which overlaps with the concept of intellectual humility, and which also includes the ability to think about alternative perspectives. How strongly would you agree with the statement that ‘Beliefs should always be revised in response to new information or evidence’, for instance? Or ‘I like to gather many different types of evidence before I decide what to do’? He found that participants’ responses to these questions often proved to be a far better predictor of their overall rationality than their general intelligence – which is reassuring, considering that unbiased decision making should be a key component of wisdom.

Benjamin Franklin’s writings offer anecdotal evidence that wisdom can be cultivated. According to his autobiography, he had been a ‘disputatious’ youth, but that changed when he read an account of Socrates’ trial.19 Impressed by the Greek philosopher’s humble method of enquiry, he determined to always question his own judgement and respect other people’s, and in his conversation, he refused to use words such as ‘certainly, undoubtedly, or any others that give the air of positiveness to an opinion’. Soon it became a permanent state of mind. ‘For these fifty years past no one has ever heard a dogmatical expression escape me,’ he wrote. The result was the kind of humble and open mind that proves to be so critical for Grossman’s research on evidence-based wisdom. ‘I find a frank acknowledgement of one’s ignorance is not only the easiest way to get rid of a difficulty, but the likeliest way to obtain information, and therefore I practice it,’ Franklin wrote in 1755, while discussing his confusion over a recent scientific result. ‘Those who affect to be thought to know everything, and so undertake to explain everything, often remain long ignorant of many things that others could and would instruct them in, if they appeared less conceited.’

Clearly, wanting to be fair and objective alone isn’t enough; you also need practical methods to correct your blinkered reasoning. Luckily, Franklin had also developed some of those strategies – methods that psychologists would only come to recognise centuries later. His approach is perhaps best illustrated through a letter to Joseph Priestley in 1772. The British clergyman and scientist had been offered the job of overseeing the education of the aristocrat Lord Shelburne’s children. This lucrative opportunity would offer much-needed financial security, but it would also mean sacrificing his ministry, a position he considered ‘the noblest of all professions’ – and so he wrote to Franklin for advice. ‘In the affair of so much importance to you, where-in you ask my advice, I cannot, for want of sufficient premises, counsel you what to determine, but if you please, I will tell you how,’ Franklin replied. He called his method a kind of ‘moral algebra’, and it involved dividing a piece of paper in two and writing the advantages and disadvantages on either side – much like a modern pros and cons list. He would then think carefully about each one and assign them a number based on importance; if a pro equalled a con, he would cross them both off the list. ‘Thus proceeding I find at length where the balance lies; and if, after a day or two of farther consideration, nothing new that is of importance occurs on either side, I come to a determination accordingly.’22 Franklin conceded t...

Whether or not you follow Franklin’s moral algebra to the letter, psychologists have found that deliberately taking time to ‘consider the opposite’ viewpoint can reduce a range of reasoning errors,25 such as anchoring,26 and over-confidence,27 and, of course, the myside bias. The benefits appear to be robust across many different decisions – from helping people to critique dubious health claims28 to forming an opinion on capital punishment and reducing sexist prejudice.29 In each case, the aim was to actively argue against yourself, and consider why your initial judgement may be wrong.

We can’t know if Franklin applied his moral algebra in all situations, but the general principle of deliberate open-minded thinking seems to have dictated many of his biggest decisions. ‘All the achievements in the public’s interest ? getting a fire department organised, the streets paved, a library established, schools for the poor supported, and much more ? attest to his skill in reading others and persuading them to do what he wanted them to do’, writes the historian Robert Middlekauf.34 ‘He calculated and measured; he weighed and he assessed. There was a kind of quantification embedded in the process of his thought . . . This indeed describes what was most rational about Franklin’s mind.’

Franklin’s moral algebra is just one of many potential ways to cultivate wisdom, and further insights come from a phenomenon known as Solomon’s Paradox, which Grossmann named after the legendary king of Israel in the tenth century bc.

Like Solomon, many people reason wisely about other people’s dilemmas, but struggle to reason clearly about their own issues, as they become more arrogant in their opinions, and less able to compromise – another form of the bias blind spot.40 These kinds of errors seem to be a particular problem when we feel threatened, triggering so-called ‘hot’ emotional processing that is narrow and closed-minded. The good news is that we can use Solomon’s Paradox to our advantage by practising a process called ‘self-distancing’. To get a flavour of its power, think of a recent event that made you feel angry. Now ‘take a few steps back’, almost as if you were watching yourself from another part of the room or on a cinema screen, and describe the unfolding situation to yourself. How did you feel?

He has since repeated the finding many times, using different forms of self-distancing. You may imagine yourself as a fly on the wall, for instance, or a well-intentioned observer. Or you may try to imagine your older, wiser self looking back at the event from the distant future. Simply talking about your experiences in the third person (‘David was talking to Natasha, when . . .’) can also bring about the necessary change of perspective.

Grossmann has found that self-distancing resolved Solomon’s Paradox when thinking about personal crises (such as an unfaithful partner), meaning that people were more humble and open to compromise, and more willing to consider the conflicting viewpoints.44 ‘If you become an observer, then right away you get into this inquisitive mode and you try to make sense of the situation,’ Grossmann told me. ‘It almost always co-occurs with being intellectually humble, considering different perspectives and integrating them together.’

As the research evolves, Grossmann has now started to examine the conditions of the effect more carefully, so that he can find even more effective self-distancing techniques to improve people’s reasoning. One particularly potent method involves imagining that you are explaining the issue to a twelve-year-old child. Grossmann speculates that this may prime you to be more protective, so that you avoid any bias that could sway their young and naïve mind.

‘It’s being willing to acknowledge that you have changed your mind many times before – and you’ll be willing to change your mind many times again,’ Michael told me. The super-forecasters were also highly precise with their declarations of confidence – specifying 22 per cent certainty, as opposed to 20 per cent, say – which perhaps reflects an overall focus on detail and precision.

Often, the simplest way to avoid bias was to start out with a ‘base rate’: examining the average length of time it takes for any dictator to fall from power, for instance – before you then begin to readjust the estimate. Another simple strategy was to examine the worst- and best-case scenarios for each situation, offering some boundaries for your estimates.

Michael now works for a commercial spin-off, Good Judgment Inc., which offers courses in these principles, and he confirms that performance can improve with practice and feedback. However you perform, it’s important not to fear failure. ‘You learn by getting it wrong,’ Michael told me.

Grossmann was surprised to find that the scores from Tokyo took a completely different pattern. There was no steep increase in age, because the younger Japanese were already as wise as the oldest Americans. Somehow, by the age of twenty-five, they had already absorbed the life lessons that only come to the Americans after decades more experience.51 Reinforcing Grossmann’s finding, Emmanuel Manuelo, Takashi Kusumi and colleagues recently surveyed students in the Japanese cities of Okinawa and Kyoto, and Auckland in New Zealand, on the kinds of thinking that they thought were most important at university. Although all three groups recognised the value of having an open-minded outlook, it’s striking that the Japanese students referred to some specific strategies that sound very much like self-distancing. One student from Kyoto emphasised the value of ‘thinking from a third person’s point of view’, for instance, while a participant in Okinawa said it was important to ‘think flexibly based on the opposite opinion’.52 What could explain these cultural differences? We can only speculate, but many studies have suggested that a more holistic and interdependent view of the world may be embedded in Japanese culture; Japanese people are more likely to focus on the context and to consider the broader reasons for someone’s actions, and less likely to focus on the ‘self’.53

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.’

Other scholars have argued that this outlook may also be encoded in the Japanese language itself. The anthropologist Robert J. Smith noted that the Japanese language demands that you encode people’s relative status in every sentence, while the language lacks ‘anything remotely resembling the personal pronoun’. Although there are many possible ways to refer to yourself, ‘none of the options is clearly dominant’, particularly among children. ‘With overwhelming frequency, they use no self-referent of any kind.’ Even the pronunciation of your own name changes depending on the people with whom you are speaking. The result, Smith said, is that self-reference in Japan is ‘constantly shifting’ and ‘relational’ so that ‘there ...

We have now seen how certain dispositions – particularly intellectual humility and actively open-minded thinking – can help us to navigate our way around the intelligence trap. And with Franklin’s moral algebra and self-distancing, we have two solid techniques that can immediately improve our decision making.

You don’t need to have endured a brain injury to have lost touch with your feelings, though. Even among the healthy population, there is enormous variation in the sensitivity of people’s interoception, a fact that can explain why some people are better at making intuitive decisions than others. You can easily measure this yourself. Simply sit with your hands by your sides and ask a friend to take your pulse. At the same time, try to feel your own heart in your chest (without actually touching it) and count the number of times it beats; then, after one minute, compare the two numbers. How did you do? Most people’s estimates are out by at least 30 per cent,5 but some reach nearly 100 per cent accuracy – and your place on this scale will indicate how you make intuitive decisions in exercises like the Iowa Gambling Task, with the higher scorers naturally gravitating to the most advantageous options.6 Your score on the heartbeat counting test can translate to real-world financial success, with one study showing that it can predict the profits made by traders in an English hedge fund, and how long they survived within the financial markets.

Imagine, for instance, that you are planning to call your mum in the evening to wish her a happy birthday. If you have more attuned interoception, you might feel a knot of unease in your stomach during the day, or a tingling in your limbs, that tells you there’s something you need to remember, causing you to rack your brain until you recall what it is. Someone who was less aware of those body signals would not notice those physiological reminders and would simply forget all about them.

I hope you are now convinced that engaging with your feelings is not a distraction from good reasoning, but an essential part of it. By bringing our emotions to the mind’s surface, and dissecting their origins and influence, we can treat them as an additional and potentially vital source of information. They are only dangerous when they go unchallenged.

A Romanian study has found similar benefits with the framing effect. In games of chance, for instance, people are more likely to choose options when they are presented as a gain (i.e. 40 per cent chance of winning) compared with when they are presented as a loss (60 per cent chance of losing) – even when they mean exactly the same thing. But people with more sophisticated emotion regulation are resistant to these labelling effects and take a more rational view of the probabilities as a result.23

It should come as little surprise, then, that an emotional self-awareness should be seen as a prerequisite for the intellectually humble, open-minded thinking that we studied in the last chapter. And this is reflected in Igor Grossmann’s research on evidence-based wisdom, which has shown that the highest performers on his wise reasoning tests are indeed more attuned to their emotions, capable of distinguishing their feelings in finer detail while also regulating and balancing those emotions so that their passions do not come to rule their actions.

The good news is that most people’s reflective skills naturally improve over the course of their lifetime; in ten years’ time you’ll probably be slightly better equipped to identify and command your feelings than you are today. But are there any methods to accelerate that process? One obvious strategy is mindfulness meditation, which trains people to listen to their body’s sensations and then reflect on them in a non-judgemental way. There is now strong evidence that besides its many, well-documented health benefits, regular practise of mindfulness can improve each element of your emotional compass – interoception, differentiation and regulation – meaning that it is the quickest and easiest way to de-bias your decision making and hone your intuitive instincts.26 (If you are sceptical, or simply tired of hearing about the benefits of mindfulness, bear with me – you will soon see that there are other ways to achieve some of the same effects.)

Meditators are also more likely to make rational choices in an experimental task known as the ‘ultimatum game’ that tests how we respond to unfair treatment by others. You play it in pairs, and one partner is given some cash and offered the option to share as much of the money as they want with the other participant. The catch is that the receiver can choose to reject the offer if they think it’s unfair – and if that happens, both parties lose everything. Many people do reject small offers out of sheer spite, even though it means they are ultimately worse off – making it an irrational decision. But across multiple rounds of the game, the meditators were less likely to make this choice. For example, when the opponent offered a measly $1 out of a possible $20, only 28 per cent of the non-meditators accepted the money, compared to 54 per cent of the meditators who could set their anger aside to make the rational choice. Crucially, this tolerance correlated with the meditator’s interoceptive awareness, suggesting that their more refined emotional processing had contributed to their wiser decision making.

If mindfulness really isn’t your thing, there may be other ways to hone intuitive instincts and improve your emotion regulation. A series of recent studies has shown that musicians (including string players and singers) and professional dancers have more fine-tuned interoception.33 The scientists behind these studies suspect that training in these disciplines – which all rely on precise movements guided by sensory feedback – naturally encourages greater bodily awareness.