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Why Smart People Are Stupid

Posted by Soulskill on from the gotta-be-the-shoes dept.

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.'"

3 of 337 comments (clear)

  1. Re:SAT socres? by ShanghaiBill · · Score: 5, Interesting

    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.

  2. Fortunately, the solution is obvious. by mosb1000 · · Score: 5, Interesting

    Perhaps our most dangerous bias is that we naturally assume that everyone else is more susceptible to thinking errors, a tendency known as the “bias blind spot.” This “meta-bias” is rooted in our ability to spot systematic mistakes in the decisions of others—we excel at noticing the flaws of friends—and inability to spot those same mistakes in ourselves.

    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.

  3. Re:SAT socres? by ShanghaiBill · · Score: 5, Interesting

    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".