The Intelligence Trap: Revolutionise your Thinking and Make Wiser Decisions

by David Robson

If you are really serious about fine-tuning your emotional compass, many of the researchers also suggest that you spend a few minutes to jot down your thoughts and feelings from the day and the ways they might have influenced your decisions.

Given the effort involved, no one would advise that you learn a language solely to improve your reasoning – but if you already speak one or have been tempted to resuscitate a language you left behind at school, then the foreign language effect could be one additional strategy to regulate your emotions and improve your decision making.

Currently, around 10?15 per cent of initial diagnoses are incorrect, meaning many doctors will make at least one error for every six patients they see. Often these errors can be corrected before harm is done, but it is thought that in US hospitals alone, around one in ten patient deaths – between 40,000 and 80,000 per annum – can be traced to a diagnostic mistake.

‘You organise your ideas better if you have a pencil and paper,’ she explained. (Psychological research does indeed suggest that your memory often functions better if you are allowed to doodle as you talk.

In line with the work on motivated reasoning, our broader worldviews will almost certainly determine how susceptible we are to misinformation – partly because a message that already fits with our existing opinions is processed more fluently and feels more familiar. This may help to explain why more educated people seem particularly susceptible to medical misinformation: it seems that fears about healthcare, in general, are more common among wealthier, more middle-class people, who may also be more likely to have degrees. Conspiracies about doctors – and beliefs in alternative medicine – may naturally fit into that belief system.

Instead, Cook and Lewandowsky argue that any attempt to debunk a misconception should be careful to design the page so that the fact stands out. If possible, you should avoid repeating the myth entirely. When trying to combat fears about vaccines, for instance, you may just decide to focus on the scientifically proven, positive benefits. But if it is necessary to discuss the myths, you can at least make sure that the false statements are less salient than the truth you are trying to convey. It’s better to headline your article ‘Flu vaccines are safe and effective’ than ‘Myth: Vaccines can give you the flu’.

Cognitive reflection can be measured with a simple test of just three questions, and you can get a flavour of what it involves by considering the following example: A bat and a ball cost $1.10 in total. The bat costs $1.00 more than the ball. How much does the ball cost? _____ cents In a lake, there is a patch of lily pads. Every day, the patch doubles in size. If it takes 48 days for the patch to cover the entire lake, how long would it take for the patch to cover half of the lake? _____ days If it takes 5 machines 5 minutes to make 5 widgets, how long would it take 100 machines to make 100 widgets? ____ minutes?

The maths required is not beyond the most elementary education, but the majority of people – even students at Ivy League colleges – only answer between one and two of the three questions correctly.23 That’s because they are designed with misleadingly obvious, but incorrect, answers (in this case, $0.10, 24 days, and 100 minutes). It is only once you challenge those assumptions that you can then come to the correct answer ($0.05, 47 days, and 5 minutes).

The problems come when we consider how to apply these results to our daily lives. Some of the mindfulness techniques should train you to have a more analytic point of view, and to avoid jumping to quick conclusions about the information you receive.

sex. If we are smart but want to avoid making stupid mistakes, it is therefore essential that we learn to think more critically.

The first step is to learn to ask the right questions: Who is making the claim? What are their credentials? And what might be their motives to make me think this? What are the premises of the claim? And how might they be flawed? What are my own initial assumptions? And how might they be flawed? What are the alternative explanations for their claim? What is the evidence? And how does it compare to the alternative explanation? What further information do you need before you can make a judgement? Given the research on truthiness, you should also look at the presentation of the claims. Do they actually add any further proof to the claim – or do they just give the illusion of evidence? Is the same person simply repeating the same point – or are you really hearing different voices who have converged on the same view? Are the anecdotes offering useful information and are they backed up with hard data? Or do they just increase the fluency of the story? And do you trust someone simply because their accent feels familiar and is easy to understand? Finally, you should consider reading about a few of the more common logical fallacies, since this can plant those ‘red flags’ that will alert you when you are being duped by ‘truthy’ but deceptive information. To get you started, I’ve compiled a list of the most common ones in the table below.

Having first explored the foundations of the intelligence trap in Part 1, we’ve now seen how the new field of evidence-based wisdom outlines additional thinking skills and dispositions – such as intellectual humility, actively open-minded thinking, emotion differentiation and regulation, and cognitive reflection – and helps us to take control of the mind’s powerful thinking engine, circumventing the pitfalls that typically afflict intelligent and educated people. We’ve also explored some practical strategies that allow you to improve your decision making. These include Benjamin Franklin’s moral algebra, self-distancing, mindfulness and reflective reasoning, as well as various techniques to increase your emotional self-awareness and fine-tune your intuition.

Feynman, in contrast, claimed to have started out with a ‘limited intelligence’,8 but he then applied it in the most productive way possible, as he continued to grow and expand his mind throughout adulthood. ‘The real fun of life’, he wrote to a fan in 1986, just two years before he died, ‘is this perpetual testing to realize how far out you can go with any potentialities.’

Much of that research on curiosity had examined its role in memory and learning,14 showing that someone’s curiosity can determine the amount of material that is remembered, the depth of the understanding, and the length of time that the material is retained.15 This isn’t just a question of motivation: even when their additional effort and enthusiasm is taken into consideration, people with greater curiosity still appear to be able to remember facts more easily. Brain scans can now tell us why this is, revealing that curiosity activates a network of regions known as the ‘dopaminergic system’. The neurotransmitter dopamine is usually implicated in desire for food, drugs or sex – suggesting that, at a neural level, curiosity really is a form of hunger or lust.

All of which helps us to understand how people like Darwin and Feynman could achieve so much in their lives. The hunger to explore had exposed them to new experiences and ideas that didn’t fit with the current orthodoxy; it then drove them to dig deeper to understand what they were seeing and to find novel solutions to the problems they uncovered. Someone with greater intelligence might have initially found it easier to process complex information than either of these two men, but if they lacked a natural curiosity they are unlikely to have been able to maintain that advantage. It shows us, again, that general intelligence is one crucial ingredient of good thinking – but it needs many other complementary traits to truly flourish.

puzzles. The children’s success at the puzzles was not necessarily linked to their talent; some of the brightest quickly became frustrated and gave up, while others persevered. The difference instead seemed to lie in their beliefs about their own talents. Those with the growth mindset had faith that their performance would improve with practice, while those with the fixed mindset believed that their talent was innate and could not be changed. The result was that they often fell apart with the more challenging problems, believing that if they failed now, they would fail for ever. ‘For some people, failure is the end of the world, but for others, it’s an exciting new opportunity.’23

Dweck has recently been exploring relatively brief mindset interventions that could be rolled out on a large scale, finding that an online course teaching schoolchildren about neuroplasticity – the brain’s ability to rewire itself – reduces the belief that intelligence and talent are fixed, innate qualities.

The goal, ultimately, is to appreciate the process rather than the end result – to take pleasure in the act of learning even when it’s difficult.

By enhancing our learning and pushing us to overcome failures in these ways, curiosity and the growth mindset would already constitute two important mental characteristics, independent of general intelligence, that can change the path of our lives. If you want to make the most of your intellectual potential, they are essential qualities that you should try to cultivate.

In the growth mindset, by contrast, you’re not so worried about proving your position relative to those around you, and your knowledge doesn’t represent your personal value. ‘What’s more, you are motivated to learn because it makes you smarter, so it is a lot easier to admit what you don’t know. It doesn’t threaten to pull you down from any kind of hierarchy.’

Feynman, with his curiosity and growth mindset, certainly saw no shame in admitting his own limitations – and welcomed this intellectual humility in others. ‘I can live with doubt, and uncertainty, and not knowing. I think it’s much more interesting to live not knowing anything than to have answers which might be wrong,’ he told the BBC in 1981. ‘I have approximate answers, and possible beliefs, and different degrees of certainty about different things, but I’m not absolutely sure of anything.’

This was also true of Benjamin Franklin. He was famously devoted to the development of virtues, seeing the human mind as a malleable object that could be moulded and honed.

As the historian Edward Morgan put it: ‘Franklin never stopped considering things he could not explain. He could not drink a cup of tea without wondering why tea leaves gathered in one configuration rather than another.’45 For Franklin, like Feynman, the reward was always in the discovery of new knowledge itself, and without that endlessly inquisitive attitude, he may have been less open-minded in his politics too.

If you have been inspired by this research, one of the simplest ways to boost anyone’s curiosity is to become more autonomous during learning. This can be as simple as writing out what you already know about the material to be studied and then setting down the questions you really want to answer. The idea is to highlight the gaps in your knowledge, which is known to boost curiosity by creating a mystery that needs to be solved, and it makes it personally relevant, which also increases interest.

You will find that you have learnt far more effectively than if you had simply studied the material that you believe will be most useful, rather than interesting.

The latest neuroscience, however, shows that we learn best when we are confused; deliberately limiting your performance today actually means you will perform better tomorrow. And a failure to recognise this fact is another primary reason that many people – including those with high IQs – often fail to learn well.

The Post Office had just invested heavily in machines that could sort letters according to postcodes, but to use these machines, their 10,000 postal workers had to learn how to type and use a keyboard, and Baddeley’s job was to discover the most efficient schedule for training. The assumption of many psychologists at the time had been that intensive training would be better – the postmen should be allowed to devote a few hours a day to mastering the skill. And this was indeed the way that the workers themselves preferred: they were able to see real progress during that time; at the end of their sessions, their typing felt much more fluent than at the beginning, and they assumed this carried over into long-term memory. For comparison, however, Baddeley also created a few groups that learnt in shorter stretches, over a longer period of time: just one hour a day, compared to four. The workers in this group didn’t seem to like the approach; they lacked the sense of mastery at the end of their session and didn’t feel like they were progressing as quickly as those taking the longer sessions. But they were wrong. Although the sessions themselves felt unsatisfying compared to those of the people who developed more proficiency in a single day, these subjects ended up learning and remembering much more in relation to the amount of time they were putting into it. On average, a person with the ‘spaced’ approach mastered the basics within thirty-five hours, compared to fifty hours for ...

Today, the spacing effect is well known to psychological scientists and many teachers, and it is often represented as demonstrating the benefits of rest and the dangers of cramming. But the true mechanism is more counter-intuitive, and hinges on the very frustration that had annoyed the postmen. By splitting our studies into smaller chunks, we create periods in which we can forget what we’ve learnt, meaning that at the start of the next session, we need to work harder to remember what to do. That process – of forgetting, and then forcing ourselves to relearn the material – strengthens the memory trace, leading us to remember more in the long term. People who learn in longer blocks miss out on those crucial steps – the intermediate forgetting and relearning – that would promote long-term recall precisely because it is harder.

Consider a physics class revising for an exam. In the West, it’s common for teachers to present the principles and then to get students to repeat endless series of similar questions until they reach nearly 100 per cent accuracy. The Bjorks have shown that, in reality, learning is more effective if the student solves just enough problems to refresh their mind, before moving on to a new (perhaps related) subject, and only later should they return to the initial topic. Like the spacing effect, this process of switching between tasks – known as interleaving – can lead the student to feel confused and overburdened, compared to lessons in which they are allowed to focus solely on one subject. But when they are tested later, they have learnt much more.4

You don’t need to be a teacher or a child to benefit from these findings. For work or for pleasure, most of us continue to learn into adulthood, and being able to regulate our own studying is essential if we are to make the most of our learning opportunities. The research shows that most people – even those of great intelligence – use poor learning techniques; the strategic use of desirable difficulties can improve your memory while also training your brain to be better equipped to deal with confusion and uncertainty in any context.22 You can: Space out your studies, using shorter chunks distributed over days and weeks. Like the postmen in Baddeley’s initial experiment, your progress may feel slow compared with the initial head-start offered by more intensive study. But by forcing yourself to recall the material after the delay between each session, you will strengthen the memory trace and long-term recall. Beware of fluent material. As discussed previously, superficially simple textbooks can lead you to believe that you are learning well, while, in fact, they are reducing your long-term recall. So try to study more nuanced material that will require deeper thinking, even if it is initially confusing. Give yourself a pre-test. As soon as you begin exploring a topic, force yourself to explain as much as you already know. Even if your initial understanding is abysmally wrong, experiments show that this prepares the mind for deeper learning and better memory overall, as you...

Besides aiding factual learning, desirable difficulties can also help you to master motor skills, like playing a musical instrument. The current dogma is that music practice should be a disciplined but highly repetitive affair, where you spend lengthy sessions practising the same few bars again and again until you play them to near perfection. Instead, the Bjorks’ research suggests that you would do far better to alternate a few different excerpts of music, spending a few minutes on each one. This will cause you to refresh your memory each time you come back to the exercise or excerpt.

Sure enough, Woolley has shown that – at least in her experiments in the USA – teams with a greater proportion of women have a higher collective intelligence, and that this can be linked to their higher, overall, social sensitivity, compared to groups consisting of a larger proportion of men.11 This was equally true when Woolley tested the collective intelligence of online teams playing the League of Legends computer game, when the players’ gender was obscured by their avatar: it wasn’t simply that the men were acting differently when they knew a woman was present.12

With this new understanding of collective intelligence and the too-much-talent effect, we are now very close to being able to discover some simple strategies to improve any team’s performance.

There is an apparent paradox in these findings: if team members clearly understand their place in the pecking order, overall group performance will be boosted; but this is true only if team members themselves feel that their opinions are valued, and that they can challenge their leaders in the event of problems arising or poor decisions being taken.

From Woolley and Galinsky’s research, we can change the way we recruit new team members. In light of the too-much-talent effect, it would be tempting to argue that you should simply stop selecting people of exceptional ability – particularly if your team’s composition has already passed that magic threshold of 50?60 per cent being ‘star’ players. At this stage it’s probably best not to be too fixated on that number – the specific ratio will almost certainly depend on the personalities within a group and the amount of cooperation it requires – but the scientific research at least suggests that we need to place a greater emphasis on interpersonal skills that will enhance the team’s collective intelligence, even if that means rejecting someone who scores far higher on more standard measures of ability. That may include judging someone’s emotional perceptivity and communic-ation skills – whether they draw people out and listen, or whether they have a tendency to interrupt and dominate. If you are leading a multinational team, you might also choose someone with high cultural intelligence (which we explored in Chapter 1) since they would find it easier to navigate the different social norms.

Given what we know about status conflict, we can also improve the interactions of the talent you do have. Hildreth, for instance, found strategies to avoid the clash of egos during his previous job at a global consulting firm. One example, he says, is to underline each person’s expertise at each meeting and their reason for appearing at the group, which helps ensure that they have the chance to share relevant experience. ‘Often that’s kind of lost in the melee of conflict.’

Lastly, and most importantly, the leader should embody the kinds of qualities he or she wants to see in a team – and should be particularly keen to encourage disagreement.

He soon found that these meetings generated some of the company’s most fruitful ideas. One of his groups, for instance, had suggested that the bank change its operating hours, including weekend shifts, to match other shops in the area. Within months, they were earning more from those few hours than they had in the whole of the rest of the week. With every employee able to contribute to the bank’s strategy, its entire service was transformed – and customer satisfaction rose by more than 50 per cent within two years.

We can also see this philosophy in Google’s CEO Sundar Pichai, who argues that the leader’s single role is to ‘let others succeed’. As he explained in a speech to his alma mater, the Indian Institute of Technology-Kharagpur: ‘[Leadership is] less about trying to be successful (yourself), and more about making sure you have good people, and your work is to remove that barrier, remove roadblocks for them so that they can be successful in what they do.’

Under the humbler coaches, the team players were more determined, better able to cope with failure, and won more games per season. The humility modelled by the coach pushed everyone to work a little harder and to support their other teammates. Consider John Wooden, commonly regarded as the most successful college basketball coach of all time. He led UCLA to win ten national championships in twelve years, and between 1971 and 1974, they went undefeated for eighty-eight games. Despite these successes, Wooden’s every gesture made it clear that he was not above the players on his team, as seen in the fact that he would help sweep the locker room after every game.

In parallel with the kinds of biases and errors behind the intelligence trap, Spicer and Alvesson define ‘stupidity’ as a form of narrow thinking lacking three important qualities: reflection about basic underlying assumptions, curiosity about the purpose of your actions, and a consideration of the wider, long-term consequences of your behaviours.7

‘These are really smart people, working with data, and trying really hard to do a good job.’ But NASA’s errors demonstrate just how easily your perception of risk radically shifts without you even recognising that a change has occurred. The organisation was blind to the possibility of disaster. The reason appears to be a form of cognitive miserliness known as the outcome bias, which leads us to focus on the actual consequences of a decision without even considering the alternative possible results. Like many of the other cognitive flaws that afflict otherwise intelligent people, it’s really a lack of imagination: we passively accept the most salient detail from an event (what actually happened) and don’t stop to think about what might have been, had the initial circumstances been slightly different.

Refining these findings to a set of core characteristics, Karl Weick and Kathleen Sutcliffe have shown that high-reliability organisations all demonstrate:27 Preoccupation with failure: The organisation complacent with success, and workers assume ‘each day will be a bad day’. The organisation rewards employees for self-reporting errors. Reluctance to simplify interpretations: Employees are rewarded for questioning assumptions and for being sceptical of received wisdom. At Deepwater Horizon, for instance, more engineers and managers may have raised concerns about the poor quality of the cement and asked for further tests. Sensitivity to operations: Team members continue to communicate and interact, to update their understanding of the situation at hand and search for the root causes of anomalies. On Deepwater Horizon, the rig staff should have been more curious about the anomalous pressure tests, rather than accepting the first explanation. Commitment to resilience: Building the necessary knowledge and resources to bounce back after error occurs, including regular ‘pre-mortems’ and regular discussions of near misses. Long before the Deepwater Horizon explosion, BP might have examined the underlying organisational factors leading to previous, less serious accidents, and ensured all team members were adequately prepared to deal with a blowout. Deference to expertise: This relates to the importance of communication between ranks of the hierarchy, and the intellectual humili...

Study after study has shown that encouraging people to define their own problems, explore different perspectives, imagine alternative outcomes to events, and identify erroneous arguments can boost their overall capacity to learn new material while also encouraging a wiser way of reasoning.

A Taxonomy of Stupidity Bias blind spot: Our tendency to see others’ flaws, while being oblivious to the prejudices and errors in our own reasoning. Cognitive miserliness: A tendency to base our decision making on intuition rather than analysis. Contaminated mindware: An erroneous baseline knowledge that may then lead to further irrational behaviour. Someone who has been brought up to distrust scientific evidence may then be more susceptible to quack medicines and beliefs in the paranormal, for instance. Dysrationalia: The mismatch between intelligence and rationality, as seen in the life story of Arthur Conan Doyle. This may be caused by cognitive miserliness or contaminated mindware. Earned dogmatism: Our self-perceptions of expertise mean we have gained the right to be closed-minded and to ignore other points of view. Entrenchment: The process by which an expert’s ideas become rigid and fixed. Fachidiot: Professional idiot. A German term to describe a one-track specialist who is an expert in their field but takes a blinkered approach to a multifaceted problem. Fixed mindset: The belief that intelligence and talent are innate, and exerting effort is a sign of weakness. Besides limiting our ability to learn, this attitude also seems to make us generally more closed-minded and intellectually arrogant. Functional stupidity: A general reluctance to self-reflect, question our assumptions, and reason about the consequences of our actions. Although this may incr...

A Taxonomy of Wisdom Actively open-minded thinking: The deliberate pursuit of alternative viewpoints and evidence that may question our opinions. Cognitive inoculation: A strategy to reduce biased reasoning by deliberately exposing ourselves to examples of flawed arguments. Collective intelligence: A team’s ability to reason as one unit. Although it is very loosely connected to IQ, factors such as the social sensitivity of the team’s members seem to be far more important. Desirable difficulties: A powerful concept in education: we actually learn better if our initial understanding is made harder, not easier. See also Growth mindset. Emotional compass: A combination of interoception (sensitivity to bodily signals), emotion differentiation (the capacity to label your feelings in precise detail) and emotion regulation that together help us to avoid cognitive and affective biases. Epistemic accuracy: Someone is epistemically accurate if their beliefs are supported by reason and factual evidence. Epistemic curiosity: An inquisitive, interested, questioning attitude; a hunger for information. Not only does curiosity improve learning; the latest research shows that it also protects us from motivated reasoning and bias. Foreign language effect: The surprising tendency to become more rational when speaking a second language. Growth mindset: The belief that talents can be developed and trained. Although the early scientific research on mindset focused on its role in ...