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Why Smart People Are Stupid
nicholast writes "There's a good piece by Jonah Lehrer at the New Yorker about why smart people are often more likely to make cognitive errors than stupid people. The article examines research about the shortcuts that our brains take while answering questions, and explains why even the smartest people take these shortcuts too. Quoting: 'One provocative hypothesis is that the bias blind spot arises because of a mismatch between how we evaluate others and how we evaluate ourselves. When considering the irrational choices of a stranger, for instance, we are forced to rely on behavioral information; we see their biases from the outside, which allows us to glimpse their systematic thinking errors. However, when assessing our own bad choices, we tend to engage in elaborate introspection. We scrutinize our motivations and search for relevant reasons; we lament our mistakes to therapists and ruminate on the beliefs that led us astray. The problem with this introspective approach is that the driving forces behind biases—the root causes of our irrationality—are largely unconscious, which means they remain invisible to self-analysis and impermeable to intelligence. In fact, introspection can actually compound the error, blinding us to those primal processes responsible for many of our everyday failings.'"
In my own experience--both by observing smart people and by being one (if I may be so bold), I've noticed that the more "smart" a person is (by several definitions; see below), the more easily he/she can convince him/herself--and others--of incorrect things. Furthermore (as these findings suggest), a person who possesses unusually great capacity for self-analysis often becomes quite accustomed to analyzing things on a much "higher level" than what actually motivates one to (erroneous) thought and action.
For example, a "stupid" person might see another person as a threat to getting into a relationship with someone he/she, him/herself, likes, and will therefore treat that person poorly--while probably having few illusions about why he/she is doing so. A "smart" person, on the other hand, will have that same "root" motivation cause him/her to come up with "rational" reasons (which aren't nearly so rational as assumed, of course) for why that rival is actually bad at his/her job, "annoying," unethical, unreliable, unintelligent, etc., and will then treat that person badly without realizing just how "base" or "primal" the root cause of the behavior is.
Notably, I've seen/experienced this with people who are "smart" by way of IQ, and "smart" by way of education (and, of course by way of the two, combined; though--as we all know here--the two aren't always the same thing). Apparently, simply engaging the analytical portion of one's brain habitually--whether by training or nature--almost invariably creates this effect--and can often lead to some truly irritating "smart" people (myself at the forefront, at times, I'll admit).
I'm glad that someone with "license to wear a lab coat" has also determined as much in a somewhat more scientific/official fashion.
Or perhaps high SAT scores do not correlate well with intelligence,
SAT scores strongly correlate with life time earnings, probability of going to prison, life expectancy, divorce rate, and many, many other things. Out of political correctness, you may not want to call it "intelligence", but you cannot deny it is measuring something much more significant than an ability to take tests.
So other people, even stupid people, will have a relatively easy time spotting my mistakes? Meaning that all I have to do is listen to them when they try to point them out to me. Problem solved.
SAT scores strongly correlate with...
That's become a self-fulfiling prophecy in the US. Hig SAT scores are required (often) to get to the next stages of education, and education correlates with success, so it makes high SAT scores correlate with success.
But even if you account for that, by only comparing people of similar education levels, people with high SAT scores do better on a wide variety of metrics. In fact, someone's SAT score is a better predictor of their success than their educational level. That is not what you would expect if a high SAT score was just a "door-opener".
The reason this "problem" will yield a common answer of 1 dollar is because so many of us have seen the same thing over and over in school. It has been over the course of 5+ years engraved into our thought process to separate pieces of the sentence into logical portions and stop as soon as we have enough information (ie: to assume most of it is useless information). So as soon as the reader sees the intentionally deceptively worded sentence, it's effectively an expected response from this programmed behavior: most people stop where I'm about to show you:
Immediately, we have a situation: a + b = 110, a = 100. We immediately deduce that b = 10, and have a solution instantaneously without completing the thought. This is what standardized testing and predictable word problems with extraneous information teaches people. This isn't a result of their intelligence, this is a result of cognitive process sculpted by years of stupid, pointless exercises. You'd have to be outrageously stupid to think this is somehow unexpected. The people who we classify as "smart" are people who perform well at these tasks (high score on standardized test, breezed through courses with similar problems). This is causation -- people who make this mental leap are considered "smart." So you ask "why are all these smart people making this stupid mistake!?" The answer is clear -- your fundamental measure of intelligence is wrong. The solution is that these so-called "smart" people aren't very smart at all. They're just good at solving tricky word problems as quickly as possible, primarily by ignoring information. In my experience, this methodology is often the inverse of an intelligent process.
Now for the second problem:
What most people will do, because this is how they've been taught, is to read sentence one. Note it as an interesting fact, then proceed. Upon finishing the second sentence, we realize we didn't come up with an answer yet, so we refer to only the information in the latter part of the question. What most people just read is:
We aren't used to thinking in terms of exponentiation, so it's natural to assume a linear growth rate when you completely discard the first sentence.
While I agree, these are both absurd questions, they have something in common: people tend to ignore part of the question and answer the question with incomplete information. This is not something I do very often, intentionally. This is something, though, that I recall being the fundamental "trick" to answering 99.99999999999% of questions on standardized tests. They gave you extraneous information. When literally every problem exposed to you has extraneous information, of 2 forms: A, B or B, A, where B = worthless information, it becomes habitual to process information in this manner, especially when the problem is worded like a problem you'd find on a high-school level standardized test (you know, you never really forget how to ride a bike, like you never forget how to solve very badly designed problems that don't test intelligence in any way).
I don't know, maybe I'm too smart for this researcher. But the answer seems obvious: years and yea
There are concrete things that can be done though. There are also "smart people patterns" of systematic errors in thinking. For example, smart people are better at arguing their position, hence better at defending bad decisions , allowing them to persist in bad choices. Or, smart people can suffer more from analysis paralysis. It helps then to be aware of these weaknesses so you can compensate for them.