The Intelligence Trap: Why Smart People Make Dumb Mistakes

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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.

Intellectual Humility: Recognizing the limits of one’s knowledge and the potential for error can help maintain a healthy perspective on one’s intellectual abilities. This humility prevents the kind of hubris that can lead to significant mistakes. And so they returned to the Ambassador Hotel, closed the curtains, and waited for inspiration to strike. Jean sat in a kind of trance with a pencil in one hand as the men sat by and watched. We assume that smarter people are less prone to error. But greater education and expertise can often amplify our mistakes while rendering us blind to our biases. This is the ‘intelligence trap’. 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.

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To cultivate practical wisdom, the author suggests embracing strategies that go beyond traditional learning and information processing: Mindfulness and Reflection: Regular reflection on one’s thought processes and decisions can help to identify biases and flawed reasoning patterns. Mindfulness meditation has been shown to increase self-awareness, which is key to recognizing when we may be falling into thinking traps. Psychologists call this “motivated reasoning”—a kind of emotionally charged thinking that leads us to demolish the evidence that questions our beliefs and build increasingly ornate arguments to justify them. This is a particular problem when a belief sits at the core of our identity, and in these circumstances greater intelligence and education may actually increase your foolish thinking. (This is similar to Stanovich’s concept of “contaminated mindware”—in which our brain has been infected by an irrational idea that then skews our later thinking.)

With further development, the rationality quotient could be used in recruitment to assess the quality of a potential employee’s decision making; Stanovich told me that he has already had significant interest from law firms, financial institutions, and executive head­hunters.Intelligent and educated people are less likely to learn from their mistakes, for instance, or take advice from o“thers. 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. In the revealing work “The Intelligence Trap: Why Smart People Do Stupid Things and How to Avoid Them,” David Robson engages with the curious contradiction that despite our advanced cognitive abilities, we are all susceptible to errors in judgment and irrational biases. The book takes a deep dive into the cognitive biases and flaws that permeate our thinking processes, even among those who are highly intelligent.

Additionally, the book highlights the importance of a culture that encourages challenge and critical scrutiny, suggesting that organizations and groups should foster environments where questioning and intellectual conflict are seen as valuable for growth and truth-seeking. One of the ways “The Intelligence Trap” suggests combating motivated reasoning is through intellectual humility. Recognizing the limits of one’s knowledge and the potential for bias can open up avenues to more balanced thinking. It promotes the idea of actively seeking out opposing viewpoints and engaging with them seriously, rather than dismissing them out of hand.Robson expresses mixed feelings about intuition. On the one hand, in the appendix, he describes 'cognitive miserliness' as a tendency to base our decision- making on intuition rather than analysis. While on the other hand he devotes the chapter titled 'Your Emotional Compass' to discussing how one sort of valuable intuition can be founded on finely tuned emotional sensitivity. When combining all these sub-tests, Stanovich found that the overall correlation with commonly used measures of cognitive ability, was often moderate: on one batch of tests, the correlation coefficient with SATs was around 0.47, for instance. Some overlap was to be expected, especially given the fact that several of the rationality quotient’s measures, such as probabilistic reasoning, would be aided by mathematical ability and other aspects of cognition measured by academic tests. “But that still leaves enough room for the discrepancies between rationality and intelligence that lead to smart people acting foolishly,” Stanovich said. His findings fit with many other recent results showing that critical thinking and intelligence represent two distinct entities, and that those other measures of decision making can be useful predictors of real-world behaviors. Named after the ancient Israelite king, Solomon’s paradox describes our inability to reason wisely about our own lives, even if we demonstrate good judgement when faced with other people’s problems. Our tendency to see others’ flaws, while being oblivious to the prejudices and errors in our own reasoning.

The Intelligence Trap is a ceaselessly fascinating book written by one of our most consistently superb science writers. Its counterintuitive argument, that intelligence is no inoculation against wrongness, explains so much about the fractious and baffling times in which we live." Will Storr Deftly digs into why smart people can do so many dumb things and leads us deep into the world of our own mental booby trap. carefully selected evidence and rationalisation. Such is the stimulation of psychodynamic disagreement. In the thought-provoking book “The Intelligence Trap: Why Smart People Do Stupid Things and How to Avoid Them” by David Robson, an illuminating distinction is drawn between possessing knowledge and applying it wisely—a concept central to practical wisdom. The book unravels the paradox of how individuals with high IQs can still make poor decisions and fall prey to cognitive biases, and it goes further to explore how practical wisdom can be the solution to escaping this intelligence trap. Reactive, emotionally charged thinking that may give full rein to our biases. Potentially one source of Solomon’s paradox (see below).A form of perspective taking, in which we imagine explaining our problem to a young child. The strategy appears to reduce ‘hot’ cognition and reduce biases and motivated reasoning. An elegant survey of current thinking about thinking, and how best to do it without pride, prejudice, or arrogance. - Mail on Sunday 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. To understand his results, we need some basic statistical theory. In psychology and other sciences, the relationship between two variables is usually expressed as a correlation coefficient between 0 and 1. A perfect correlation would have a value of 1—the two parameters would essentially be measuring the same thing; this is unrealistic for most studies of human health and behavior (which are determined by so many variables), but many scientists would consider a “moderate” correlation to lie between 0.4 and 0.59. Deliberately considering the worst-case scenario, and all the factors that may have contributed towards it, before making a decision. This is one of the most well-established ‘de-biasing’ strategies.”