The Intelligence Trap: Why Smart People Make Dumb Mistakes

by David Robson

This book is about why intelligent people act stupidly—and why in some cases they are even more prone to error than the average person.

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.

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.

intelligence can help you to learn and recall facts, and process complex information quickly, but you also need the necessary checks and balances to apply that brainpower correctly. Without them, greater intelligence can actually make you more biased in your thinking.

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.

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.

he is wise precisely because he recognized the limits of his own knowledge.

none of the researchers would deny that intelligence and education are essential for good thinking. The problem is that we often don’t use that brainpower 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.”

For any career, there are plenty of people of lower IQ who outperform those with much higher scores, and people with greater intelligence who don’t make the most of their brainpower, confirming that qualities such as creativity or wise professional judgment just can’t be accounted for by that one number alone. “It’s a bit like being tall and playing basketball,” David Perkins of the Harvard Graduate School of Education told me. If you don’t meet a very basic threshold, you won’t get far, but beyond that point other factors take over, he says.

intelligence was largely inherited were dumbfounded.

general intelligence depends on the way our genes interact with the culture around us.

we need to expand our view to include many other elements—skills and styles of thinking that do not necessarily correlate strongly with IQ.

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.

There is also framing: the fact that you may change your opinion based on the way information is phrased.

“system 1,” intuitive, automatic, “fast thinking” that may be prey to unconscious biases; and “system 2,” “slow,” more analytical, deliberative thinking. According to this view—called dual-process theory—many of our irrational decisions come when we rely too heavily on system 1, allowing those biases to muddy our judgment.

academic success did not necessarily make them more rational decision makers.

you can be intelligent and irrational—

people with higher IQs tend to consume more alcohol and may be more likely to smoke or take illegal drugs, for instance—supporting the idea that intelligence does not necessarily help us to weigh up short-term benefits against the long-term consequences.

smarter people are not investing their money in the more rational manner that economists might anticipate; it is another sign that intelligence does not necessarily lead to better decision making.

using analytical reasoning from system 2 to rationalize his opinions and dismiss the evidence. Rather than thinking too little, he was thinking too much.

smart people do not apply their superior intelligence fairly, but instead use it “opportunistically” to promote their own interests and protect the beliefs that are most important to their identities. Intelligence can be a tool for propaganda rather than truth-seeking.

Many other great intellects may have lost their minds thanks to blinkered thinking.

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.

in the modern world the stupid are cocksure while the intelligent are full of doubt.”

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 limit...

we may employ entrenched, automatic behaviors that render us oblivious to the obvious warning signs that disaster is looming, and more susceptible to bias.

an awareness of the limits of our knowledge, and inherent uncertainty in our judgment;

some people base their decisions on facts that just “happened to be present in the mind,” while the best reasons were “absent.”

More than two hundred years later, the super-forecasters were again proving exactly the same point: it pays to admit the limits of your knowledge.

the super-forecasters also tended to look for outside perspectives; rather than getting stuck in the fine details of the specific situation at hand, they would read widely and look for parallels with other (seemingly unconnected) events.

there is some good evidence that a deep engagement with other cultures can promote open-minded thinking, perhaps because it demands that you temporarily put aside your preconceptions and adopt new ways of thinking.

children in Japan are taught to consider others’ perspectives and acknowledge their own weaknesses from a young age.

people in more interdependent cultures find it easier to adopt different perspectives and absorb other people’s points of view—crucial elements of wisdom that would improve people’s thinking.

In creative industries, in particular, it’s difficult to imagine how you could judge a new idea purely analytically, without some instinctual response.

engaging with your feelings is not a distraction from good reasoning, but an essential part of it.

“ultimatum game” that tests how we respond to unfair treatment by others. You play it in pairs, and one partner is given some cash and offered the option to share as much of the money as they want with the other participant. The catch is that the receiver can choose to reject the offer if they think it’s unfair—and if that happens, both parties lose everything.

foreign language effect. The effect hinges on the emotional resonances within the words we speak. Linguists and writers have long known that our emotional experience of a second language will be very different from that of our mother tongue;

“If you talk to a man in a language he understands, that goes to his head. If you talk to him in his language, that goes to his heart.”

greater experience can lead experts to rely on fuzzy, gist-based intuitions that often offer rapid and efficient decision making, but can also lead to error.

“You organize your ideas better if you have a pencil and paper,”

(Psychological research does indeed suggest that your memory often functions better if you are allowed to doodle as you talk.

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).

the most powerful strategy to boost a statement’s truthiness is simple repetition.

The power of repetition, meanwhile, allows a small but vocal minority to persuade the public that their opinion is more popular than it really is.

even a simple pause in our thinking can have a powerful effect.

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.