The Intelligence Trap: Why Smart People Make Dumb Mistakes

by David Robson

people with greater curiosity still appear to be able to remember facts more easily.

general intelligence, curiosity and conscientiousness are together the “three pillars” of academic success;

A genuine interest in the other person’s needs even improves our social skills and helps us to uncover the best potential compromise—boosting our emotional intelligence.

“Curiosity is contagious, and it’s very difficult to encourage curiosity in kids if you don’t have any experience of curiosity in your own life,”

“growth mind-set.” This concept is the brainchild of Carol Dweck, a psychologist at Stanford University,

Those with the growth mind-set had faith that their performance would improve with practice, while those with the fixed mind-set believed that their talent was innate and could not be changed.

intelligence and education can exaggerate “motivated reasoning” on subjects such as climate change—leading to increasingly polarized views.

“If you have the fixed mind-set, you are all the time trying to find out where you stand in the hierarchy; everyone’s ranked. If you’re at the top, you don’t want to fall or be taken down from the top, so any sign or suggestion that you don’t know something or that someone knows more than you—it’s threatening to dethrone you.”

In the growth mind-set, 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.”

I remember more when I feel like I am struggling than when things come easily.

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 recognize this fact is another primary reason that many people—including those with high IQs—often fail to learn well.

our memory can be aided by “desirable difficulties”—additional learning challenges that initially impair performance, but which actually promote long-term gains.

students in countries such as Japan appreciate that struggle is necessary in education. If anything, the students in these cultures are concerned if the work isn’t hard enough.

In Mandarin, for instance, the concept of chiku or “eating bitterness” describes the toil and hardship that leads to success.

Having asked the class a question, the average American teacher typically waits less than a second before picking a child to provide an answer—sending out a strong message that speed is valued over complex thinking.

Space out your studies, using shorter chunks distributed over days and weeks.

try to study more nuanced material that will require deeper thinking, even if it is initially confusing.

As soon as you begin exploring a topic, force yourself to explain as much as you already know.

Vary your environment. If you tend to study in the same place for too long, cues from that environment become associated with the material, meaning that they can act as nonconscious prompts. By ensuring that you alter the places of learning, you avoid becoming too reliant on those cues—and like other desirable difficulties, this reduces your immediate performance but boosts your long-term memory.

Learn by teaching.

we learn best when we have to teach what we have just learned, because the act of explanation forces us to process the material more deeply.

Test yourself regularly. So-called “retrieval practice” is by far the most powerful way of boosting your memory.

Varying the topic forces your memory to work harder to recall the apparently unrelated facts, and it can also help you to see underlying patterns in what you are learning.

Step outside your comfort zone and try to perform tasks that will be too difficult for your current level of expertise. And try to look for multiple solutions to a problem rather than a single answer.

When you are wrong, try to explain the source of the confusion.

besides disrupting communication and cooperation, status conflict can also interfere with the brain’s information processing ability.

we can’t separate our cognitive abilities from the social environment: all the time, our capacity to apply our brainpower will be influenced by our perceptions of those around us.

status is only harmful when we need to cooperate and bring out the best in each other.

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“England, for all their individual talents, lacked so much as one,” sports writer Ian Herbert wrote in the Independent after Iceland’s win. “The reason why the nation struggles to feel empathy or connections with many of these players is the ego. Too famous, too important, too rich, too high and mighty to discover the pace and the fight and the new dimensions to put it on when against one of Europe’s most diminutive football nations. That is this England.”

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 percent being “star” players.

employees under a humble leader of this kind are themselves more likely to share information, collaborate in times of stress and contribute to a shared vision.

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.”

“functional stupidity” in the general workplace.

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 behaviors.7 For many varied reasons, employees simply aren’t being encouraged to think.

many work practices and structures contribute to an organization’s functional stupidity, including excessive specialization and division of responsibilities.

perhaps the most pervasive—and potent—source of functional stupidity is the demand for complete corporate loyalty and an excessive focus on positivity, where the very idea of criticism may be seen as a betrayal, and admitting disappointment or anxiety is considered a weakness.

In 2007, they held around half the global market share. Six years later, however, most of their customers had turned away from the clunky Nokia interface to more sophisticated smartphones, notably Apple’s iPhone.

it pays to humbly recognize your limits and the possibility of failure, take account of ambiguity and uncertainty, remain curious and open to new information, recognize the potential to grow from errors, and actively question everything.