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Since the beginning of the twentieth century, psychologists have measured a relatively small range of abstract skills—factual recall, analogical reasoning, and vocabulary—in the belief that they reflect an innate general intelligence that underlies all kinds of learning, creativity, problem solving, and decision making.
Measurement Of intelligence
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.
Smart people maikng bad decisions
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 recognize the holes in their logic.
Bigger blind spot for bias
The test measures a characteristic known as cognitive reflection, which is the tendency to question our own assumptions and intuitions, and people who score badly on this test are more susceptible to bogus conspiracy theories, misinformation and fake news.
Me
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 mind-set. Together, they keep our minds on track and prevent our thinking from veering off a proverbial cliff.
Tools
“It is not enough to possess a good mind; the most important thing is to apply it correctly,” he
René Descartes
Why do smart people act stupidly? What skills and dispositions are they missing that can explain these mistakes? And how can we cultivate those qualities to protect us from those errors? And I have examined them at every level of society, starting with the individual and ending with the errors plaguing huge organizations.
Intelligence Trap
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.
William James
memory for facts, vocabulary, and spatial reasoning skills—represent an innate “general intelligence”
General intelligence
“multiple intelligences” that featured eight traits, including interpersonal and intrapersonal intelligence, bodily-kinesthetic intelligence that makes you good at sports, and even “naturalistic intelligence”—whether you are good at discerning different plants in the garden or even whether you can tell the brand of car from the sound of its engine.
Multiple intelligences
Robert Sternberg at Cornell University offers a middle ground with his Triarchic Theory of Successful Intelligence, which examines three particular types of intelligence—practical, analytical, and creative—that can together influence decision making
Triachich theory
theory of human intelligence, which he defined as “the ability to achieve success in life, according to one’s personal standards, within one’s sociocultural context.” Avoiding the (perhaps overly) broad definitions of Gardner’s multiple intelligences, he confined his theory to those three abilities—analytical, creative, and practical—and considered how they might be defined, tested, and nurtured.
Theory of human intelligence
“People may say things will change, but then things go back to the way they were before,” Sternberg said. Just like when he was a boy, teachers are still too quick to judge a child’s potential based on narrow, abstract tests—a fact he has witnessed in the education of his own children, one of whom is now a successful Silicon Valley entrepreneur. “I have five kids and all of them at one time or another have been diagnosed as potential losers,” he said, “and they’ve done fine.”
Old habits are hard to change
thinking—an element of creative intelligence that allows us to think of the alternative outcomes of an event or to momentarily imagine ourselves in a different situation. It’s the capacity to ask “what if . . . ?” and without it, you may find yourself helpless when faced with an unexpected challenge. Without being able to reappraise your past, you’ll also struggle to learn from your mistakes to find better solutions in the future. Again, that’s neglected on most academic tests. In
Counterfactual thinking
If we consider that SATs or IQ tests reflect a unitary, underlying mental energy—a “raw brainpower”—that governs all kinds of problem solving, this behavior doesn’t make much sense; people of high general intelligence should have picked up those skills. Sternberg’s theory allows us to disentangle those other components and then define and measure them with scientific rigor, showing that they are largely independent abilities.
Iq
The lower the quantity on the wheel, the smaller their estimate—the arbitrary value had planted a figure in their mind, “anchoring” their judgment.6
Anchoring
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).
Framing
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 landed on black, it’s more likely the next time to land on red.
Thibking fast and slow
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 judgments to make decisions; and they may use their intelligence to dismiss any evidence that contradicts their views thanks to motivated reasoning.
Stupidity
somatic marker hypothesis offers one of the best, biologically grounded, theories of emotion. When you feel the rush of excitement flowing to the tips of your fingers, or the unbearable pressure of grief weighing on your chest, it is due to this neurological feedback loop.
Somatic marker explanation of emotiond
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.
Intuitive Decision
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.7 Contrary to what we might have assumed, it is the people who are most sensitive to their visceral “gut” feelings—those with the most accurate interoception—who made the best possible deals. Its importance doesn’t end there. Your interoceptive accuracy will also determine your social skills: our physiology often mirrors the signals we see in others—a very
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Gut feeli g
Our bodily signals are an inescapable element of almost every decision we make, and as the experiences of people like Elliot show, we ignore them at our peril.
Bodily signals
Consider Coco Chanel’s descriptions of her nose for new designs. “Fashion is in the air, born upon the wind. One intuits it. It is in the sky and on the road.”
Coco chanel
each case, the brain was interpreting those background feelings and responding as if they were relevant to the decision at hand. “Feeling,” says Feldman Barrett, “is believing”—a phenomenon called “affective realism.”
Affective realism
This idea is, of course, no news to philosophers. 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.
Know yourself
One obvious strategy is mindfulness meditation, which trains people to listen to their body’s sensations and then reflect on them in a nonjudgmental way. There is now strong evidence that besides its many, well-documented health benefits, regular practice 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 skeptical, or simply tired of hearing about the benefits of mindfulness, bear with me—you will soon see
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Benefits of mindfull meditation
At the very basic level, you should make sure that you pick apart the tangled threads of feeling, and routinely differentiate emotions such as apprehension, fear, and anxiety; contempt, boredom, and disgust; or pride, satisfaction, and admiration. But given these findings, Feldman Barrett suggests that we also try to learn new words—or invent our own—to fill a particular niche on our emotional awareness.
Improve vocabulary
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. Not only does the writing process encourage deeper introspection and the differentiation of your feelings, which should naturally improve your intuitive instincts; it also ensures you learn and remember what worked and what didn’t, so you don’t make the same mistakes twice.
Writin g
John Dewey wrote in the early twentieth century: “If our schools turn out their pupils in that attitude of mind which is conducive to good judgment in any department of affairs in which the pupils are placed, they have done more than if they sent out their pupils merely possessed of vast stores of information, or high degrees of skill in specialized branches.”4
John Dewey
Unfortunately, the work on dysrationalia shows us this is far from being the case. While university graduates are less likely than average to believe in political conspiracy theories, they are slightly more susceptible to misinformation about medicine, believing that pharmaceutical companies are withholding cancer drugs for profit or that doctors are hiding the fact that vaccines cause illnesses, for instance.5 They are also more likely to use unproven, complementary medicines.
Morons
truthiness comes from two particular feelings: familiarity (whether we feel that we have heard something like it before) and fluency (how easy a statement is to process). Importantly, most people are not even aware that these two subtle feelings are influencing their judgment—yet they can nevertheless move us to believe a statement without questioning its underlying premises or noting its logical inconsistencies.
Truthiness
The math 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).
Math
inoculation concerning misinformation in one area (the link between cigarettes and smoking) provided protection in another (climate change). It was as if participants had planted little alarm bells in their thinking, helping them to recognize when to wake up and apply their analytic minds more effectively, rather than simply accepting any information that felt “truthy.” “It creates an umbrella of protection.”
Inoculation
“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.”
Feynman
psychologists now consider that general intelligence, curiosity and conscientiousness are together the “three pillars” of academic success; if you lack any one of these qualities, you are going to suffer.
Three pillars
actively seek as much new information as I can in new situations. • Everywhere I go, I am out looking for new things or experiences. • I am the kind of person who embraces unfamiliar people, events and places.
Seeking out things
one experiment, in which a group of kindergarten children were allowed to watch one of their parents in a separate room through one-way glass. The parents were either asked to play with the objects on a table, to simply look at the table, or to ignore the objects completely as they chatted to another adult. Later on, the children were given the objects to inspect—and they were far more likely to touch and explore them if they had seen their parents doing the same.
Kids gets curiosity from watching parents
Darwin, incidentally, had found that rigid classical education almost killed his interest, as he was forced to learn Virgil and Homer by heart. “Nothing could have been worse for the development of my mind,” he wrote. Fortunately, he had at least been encouraged to pursue his interests by his parents. But without any nourishment at home or at school, your appetite to learn and explore may slowly disappear.
Darwin
Engel points out that anxiety is also a curiosity killer, and very subtle cues may have a big impact; she has even found that the expression of interest is directly correlated with the number of times a teacher smiles during the lesson.
Anxiety kils curiousity
attitudes that might cause smart people to develop the fixed mind-set. Do you, for instance, believe that: • A failure to perform well at the task at hand will reflect your overall self-worth? • Learning a new, unfamiliar task puts you at risk of embarrassment? • Effort is only for the incompetent? • You are too smart to try hard? If you broadly agree with these statements, then you may have more of a fixed mind-set, and you may be at risk of sabotaging your own chances of later success by deliberately avoiding new challenges that would allow you to stretch beyond your comfort zone.
Fixed mind set
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. And that itself will take work and perseverance, if you have spent your whole life believing that talent is purely innate and success should come quickly and easily.
Enjoy learning
“Imagination reaches out repeatedly trying to achieve some higher level of understanding, until suddenly I find myself momentarily alone before one new corner of nature’s pattern of beauty and true majesty revealed,” he added. “That was my reward.”
Feynman
“Without humility, you are unable to learn,”
Feynman once said, “everything is interesting if you go into it deeply enough.”
By splitting our studies into smaller chunks, we create periods in which we can forget what we’ve learned, 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
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 learned much more.
Interleaving
Productive failure seems to be particularly fruitful for disciplines like math, in which teachers may ask students to solve problems before they’ve been explicitly taught the correct methods. Studies suggest they’ll learn more and understand the underlying concepts better in the long run, and they will also be better able to translate their learning to new, unfamiliar problems.
Productive failure
The introduction of desirable difficulties could also improve our reading materials. Textbooks that condense concepts and present them in the most coherent and fluent way possible, with slick diagrams and bullet point lists, actually reduce long-term recall. Many students—particularly those who are more able—learn better if the writing is more idiosyncratic and nuanced, with a greater discussion of the potential complications and contradictions within the evidence. People reading the complex prose of Oliver Sacks remembered more about the visual perception than people looking at a slick,
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Stigler has now been researching these ideas for decades, and he suggests his findings can be distilled to three stages of good teaching:11 • Productive struggle: Long periods of confusion as students wrestle with complex concepts beyond their current understanding. • Making connections: When undergoing that intellectual struggle, students are encouraged to use comparisons and analogies, helping them to see underlying patterns between different concepts. This ensures that the confusion leads to a useful lesson—rather than simply ending in frustration. • Deliberate practice: Once the initial
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How to learn
