The Intelligence Trap: Why Smart People Make Dumb Mistakes

by David Robson

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.

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.

“It is not enough to possess a good mind; the most important thing is to apply it correctly,”

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.”

Analytical intelligence is essentially the kind of thinking that Terman was studying; it includes the abilities that allowed Alice to perform so well on her SATs.

Creative intelligence, in contrast, examines our abilities “to invent, imagine, and suppose,”

Practical intelligence, meanwhile, concerns a different kind of innovation: the ability to plan and execute an idea, and to overcome life’s messy, ill-defined problems in the most pragmatic way possible.

Inspired, in part, by Robert Sternberg’s work, she developed a measure of “cultural intelligence” (CQ) that examines your general sensitivity to different cultural norms.

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.*

“Conan Doyle used his intelligence and cleverness to dismiss all counter-arguments . . . [He] was able to use his smartness to outsmart himself.”

All of this would seem to chime with research showing that beliefs may first arise from emotional needs—and it is only afterward that the intellect kicks in to rationalize the feelings, however bizarre they may be.

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.

One likely reason is that the participants simply had not realized how much they might have forgotten since their degree (a phenomenon that Fisher calls meta-forgetfulness). “People confuse their current level of understanding with their peak level of knowledge,”

The illusion of expertise may also make you more closed-minded. Victor Ottati at Loyola University in Chicago has shown that priming people to feel knowledgeable means that they were less likely to seek or listen to the views of people who disagreed with them.* Ottati notes that this makes sense when you consider the social norms surrounding expertise; we assume that an expert already has the credentials to stick to their opinions, which he calls “earned dogmatism.”14

One is flexibility: the expert may lean so heavily on existing behavioral schemas that they struggle to cope with change.25 When tested on their memories, experienced London taxi drivers appeared to struggle with the rapid development of Canary Wharf at the end of the twentieth century, for instance; they just couldn’t integrate the new landmarks and update their old mental templates of the city.

The second sacrifice may be an eye for detail. As the expert brain chunks up the raw information into more meaningful components, and works at recognizing broad underlying patterns, it loses sight of the smaller elements. This change has been recorded in real-time scans of expert radiologists brains: they tend to show greater activity in the areas of the temporal lobe associated with advanced pattern recognition and symbolic meaning, but less activity in regions of the visual cortex that are associated with combing over fine detail.27 The advantage will be the ability to filter out irrelevant information and reduce distraction, but this also means the expert is less likely to consider all the elements of a problem systematically, potentially causing them to miss important nuances that do not easily fit their mental maps.

With this knowledge in mind, we are now ready to start Part 2. 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 counterfactual thinking that are essential for executing a plan and preempting the consequences of your actions. • We may suffer from dysrationalia, motivated reasoning, and the bias blind spot, which allow us to rationalize and perpetuate our mistakes, without recognizing the flaws in our own thinking. This results in our building “logic-tight compartments” around our beliefs without considering all the available evidence. • We may place too much confidence in our own judgment, thanks to earned dogmatism, so that we no longer perceive our limitations and overreach our abilities. • Finally, thanks to our expertise, we may employ entrenched, automatic behaviors that render us oblivious to the obvious warning signs that disaster is looming, and more susceptible to bias.

“For having lived long, I have experienced many instances of being obliged by better information, or fuller consideration, to change opinions even on important subjects, which I once thought right, but found to be otherwise. It is therefore that the older I grow, the more apt I am to doubt my own judgment, and to pay more respect to the judgment of others.”

“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.”

The problem is that most people—including those with high general intelligence, education, and professional expertise—lack the adequate self-reflection to interpret the valuable signals correctly and identify the cues that are going to lead them astray. According to the research, bias doesn’t come from intuitions and emotions per se, but from an inability to recognize those feelings for what they really are and override them when necessary; we then use our intelligence and knowledge to justify erroneous judgments made on the basis of them.

Feynman, with his curiosity and growth mind-set, 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.”44

If you consider classrooms in the UK and US, for instance, our mental worth is often judged by who can put their hand up quickest—giving us the subtle signal that it’s better to go with an immediate intuitive response without reflecting on the finer details.

Worse still, the lessons are often simplified so that we can digest the material as quickly as possible—leading us to prefer “fluent” information over material that might require deeper consideration.

The twenty-first century presents complex problems that require a wiser way of reasoning, one that recognizes our current limitations, tolerates ambiguity and uncertainty, balances multiple perspectives, and bridges diverse areas of expertise. And it is becoming increasingly clear that we need more people who embody those qualities.