Tag: The Intelligence Trap: Why Smart People Do Stupid Things and how to Make Wiser Decisions

💎 On experts’ inability to say they don’t know (fear of looking stupid)

In 2010, a group of mathematicians, historians and athletes were tasked with identifying certain names that represented significant figures within each discipline. They had to discern whether Johannes de Groot or Benoit Theron were famous mathematicians, for instance, and they could answer, Yes, No, or Don’t Know. As you might hope, the experts were better at picking out the right people (such as Johannes de Groot, who really was a mathematician) if they fell within their discipline. But they were also more likely to say they recognised the made-up figures (in this case, Benoit Theron). When their self-perception of expertise was under question, they would rather take a guess and ‘over-claim’ the extent of their knowledge than admit their ignorance with a ‘don’t know’.

Excerpt from: The Intelligence Trap: Why Smart People Do Stupid Things and how to Make Wiser Decisions by David Robson

💎 On the dangers of intelligence (as identified by Houdini)

Houdini himself seems to have intuitively understood the vulnerability of the intelligent mind. ‘As a rule, I have found that the greater brain a man has, and the better he is educated, the easier it has been to mystify him,’ he once told Conan Doyle.

Excerpt from: The Intelligence Trap: Why Smart People Do Stupid Things and how to Make Wiser Decisions by David Robson

💎 On making a claim more concrete to make it more believable (in this case by adding imagery)

Sometimes, increasing a statement’s truthiness can be as simple as adding an irrelevant picture. In one rather macabre experiment from 2012, Newman showed her participants statements about a series of famous figures – such as a sentence claiming that the indie singer Nick Cave was dead. When the statement was accompanied by a stock photo of the singer, they were more likely to believe that the statement was true, compared to the participants who saw only the plain text.

The photo of Nick Cave could, of course, have been taken at any point in his life. It makes no sense that someone would use it as evidence – it just shows you that he’s a musician in a random band,’ Newman told me. ‘But from a psychological perspective it made sense. Anything that would make it easy to picture or easy to imagine something should sway someone’s judgement.’

Excerpt from: The Intelligence Trap: Why Smart People Do Stupid Things and how to Make Wiser Decisions by David Robson