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.
