The Intelligence Trap: Revolutionise your Thinking and Make Wiser Decisions

by David Robson

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.’