The more intelligent you are, the better the decisions you make, right? Or maybe not. In his best-selling book The Intelligence Trap, science writer David Robson explores why in some situations smart people actually make worse decisions than less smart people.
As part of his research, Robson spent three years interviewing experts in psychology and neuroscience around the world. He wanted to find out how we measure intelligence and why apparently intelligent people sometimes mess up so badly. The book is full of real-life examples showing how and why intelligence alone isn’t enough to save smart people, including Nobel prize-winners, experienced doctors and successful CEOs, from making some seriously big mistakes.
The Intelligence Trap
Think Smarter
And as well as describing where intelligent people sometimes go wrong, Robson offers tips that all of us can follow in order to think smarter. We need to be aware of potential traps, Robson suggests, and engage our analytical brain power more. One simple example is the way that in day-to-day life, all of us, however intelligent, interpret information based on how it’s phrased. So, food packaging that says “95 per cent fat-free” automatically makes the product sound a lot healthier than if it says “5 per cent fat.” Unless we concentrate on thinking analytically, even smart people are susceptible to the subconscious impact of manipulative advertising.
Work As a Team
One of the most interesting areas that Robson explores is how intelligence works in group dynamics. He uses the example of the Iceland men’s football team at the Euro 2016 tournament to illustrate his point. Although Iceland has a tiny population of just 330,000, they beat several world-class teams, including England. How was it possible for Iceland to triumph against England, a team that had so many star players? Robson suggests that, surprising as it may seem, any team, whether in sport or in the workplace, can have too many high-performing individuals. If there are too many egos in a group, real teamwork doesn’t happen and people tend to make more mistakes.
Question Impulse
We met with David Robson to ask him more about some of the key issues that come up in The Intelligence Trap. He began by explaining why all of us, regardless of intelligence, are susceptible to believing fake news.
David Robson (English accent): You know fake news has always been there. It’s not just a recent phenomenon but it seems more immediate and in your face now because we have social media, it’s just the sheer amount of information we’re receiving. And there are loads of psychological factors that can affect whether we fall for it. So, some of it is just the way the information is presented. So something as simple as having an image accompanying a story, even if it provides no evidence for the story, can make that story much more believable.
So, you know, everyone is susceptible to that. We tend to skim over the surface of a story and kind of judge whether it feels right rather than analysing it and looking for the logical fallacies that might be there. And that’s all because we rely too much on this intuitive processing rather than the analytical thinking. So, we might have the intelligence but we just don’t apply it, which is why smart people as much as people with lower IQs are all vulnerable to these problems.
Evaluate the Evidence
Robson suggests that having a high IQ doesn’t always protect you from ‘black-and-white thinking’, in fact it might make it worse. Here’s why:
David Robson: Then you also have this other phenomenon called ‘motivated reasoning’ and the ‘myside bias’. And that is really where your intelligence can actually backfire, because the problem here is that once you’ve formed a kind of opinion on politics or climate change, you’ve got that kind of emotional draw, you want to be proven right. So, you just really look quite selectively for the information that’s going to support your point of view and you dismiss anything that doesn’t. You look for the loopholes or problems in the reasoning. And the problem here is that intelligent people are actually much better at doing that. They’re much better at finding the information and dismissing the evidence against them. So, actually what you find is that more intelligent people tend to be more polarised on issues such as climate change because of this.
Don't Rely On Experience
There are a lot of intriguing and counterintuitive ideas in the book. Here’s just one:
David Robson: One of the things I found really surprising about writing this book was a phenomenon called the ‘curse of expertise’. And so, I think we generally tend to expect that the more experience you have in a job, the better you’re going to be. And that to a certain extent is true, but you can see that all experts reach this kind of threshold where they’re not really improving very much… And that’s caused by this problem that actually expertise can make you rely more on those intuitive ways of thinking. It’s like you’ve got so much experience you just have a very strong gut feeling and you don’t… you stop looking analytically at the evidence in front of you.
Speak Up in English
The book is full of practical tips to help improve our critical thinking. Here’s one very positive finding, especially for Speak Up readers!:
David Robson: One of the best things you can do to improve your thinking is to ... speak in a foreign language. Now you actually don’t have to be fluent in that language for it to be effective. But the idea is that this kind of expressing yourself in another language gives you a slight emotional distance from the issues at hand. So, lots of studies have shown we’re more emotional when we talk in our native language and slightly less emotional when we talk in a foreign language. And that emotional distance just lets you be a bit more rational, a bit more objective and protects you from lots of different cognitive biases. So, it’s a really powerful thing that you can use if you can speak another language.