Intelligence Trap by David Robson | Key Takeaways
Why smart people do stupid things and how to make wiser decisions
If I asked you who you think would win a chess match between Magnus Carlson and Elon Musk, you’d probably select Mangus, the five-time chess champion. If I were to ask you who you think would be a better person to lead a space company, you’d probably choose….. Jeff Bezos.
Now if you put your bias aside and asked yourself, “Who is more intelligent, Magnus or Elon?”, would you be able to answer the question easily? Probably not.
It’s difficult to define who’s the most intelligent because we can’t put numbers on intelligence. We can’t say that Elon Musk is more intelligent than Magnus Carlson by a certain number of points, but we can say that Magnus Carlson will win against Elon Musk at chess by a certain margin.
Like Einstein said, “Time is relative in nature”. Similarly, so is Intelligence!
How do we identify Intelligence?
Intelligence is not something that can be measured with an IQ test or with numbers. It’s more likely to be able to measure someone’s intelligence based on their field of study or profession, or based on how they’ve chosen to spend their life.
For example, if you spend your entire life studying biology, you might have a higher chance of being considered intelligent than if you spend your entire life doing crossword puzzles. But again, there are no clear answers to this question!
The author David Robson suggests we’re not always as smart as we think we are. Psychological research suggests that greater intelligence, education, and expertise might amplify our errors. Here are some key reasons why high IQ people fall under the intelligence trap:
Cognitive Miserliness
The brain’s tendency to seek solutions to problems that take the least mental effort is called Cognitive Miserliness. One common habit as seen in intelligent people is their ability to overestimate their assumptions on topics as they become more heuristics in nature. Try answering this:
A bat and ball together cost $1.10. The bat costs $1 more than the ball. How much does the ball cost?
Take a minute to think about it … Do you have the answer? Many people respond by saying that the ball must cost 10 cents. If the ball costs 10 cents and the bat costs $1.00 more than the ball, then the bat would cost $1.10 for a grand total of $1.20. In this case, people seem to unconsciously substitute the ‘more than’ statement in the problem with an absolute statement. The correct answer is that the ball costs 5 cents and the bat costs — at a dollar more — $1.05 for a grand total of $1.10,
Nasa’s Rusian Roulette
In 2003, foam insulation broke off an external tank during launch and struck the left wing of the Space Shuttle Columbia. The resulting hole caused the shuttle to disintegrate upon re-entry into the Earth’s atmosphere. Similar processes were also the cause of the Challenger crash in 1986, which exploded due to a faulty seal. The disaster would have been tragic enough had it been a fluke, a one-off occurrence without any potential warning signs. But NASA engineers had long known the insulation could break away like this; it had happened in every previous test launch. For various reasons, however, the damage had never occurred in the right place to cause a crash, meaning that the NASA staff began to ignore the danger it posed. ‘It went from being a troublesome event for engineers and managers to being classified as a housekeeping matter,’
As Richard Feynman — a member of the Presidential Commission investigating the disaster — noted, ‘when playing Russian roulette, the fact that the first shot got off safely is little comfort for the next.
Tinsley, a professor at Georgetown University who has specialized in studying corporate catastrophes, says that NASA’s errors demonstrate just how easily your perception of risk radically shifts without you even recognizing that a change has occurred. The organization was blind to the possibility of disaster. The reason appears to be a form of cognitive miserliness known as the outcome bias, which leads us to focus on the actual consequences of a decision without even considering the alternative possible results.
How to Reduce your Cognitive Miserliness
There is, of course, an upside to being a cognitive miser — it means using the brain in an energy-efficient manner. But it also means that when faced with a more complicated decision or question, we tend to give the first response that comes to mind, rather than considering carefully. Here are a few tricks to learn:
Think Slow: We’re often told that we need to think fast, act fast and live fast. But have you ever stopped to wonder if this is really true? When it comes to making good decisions and solving problems, our slow brain is actually more effective than our fast brain.
Ask Why: Take a pause, and think why you’re making the decision that you are about to take. Unpopular belief, but there is no harm in second-guessing yourself.
Devil Advocate: Cross question yourself, find edge cases to your decision. Developing a strategy of triggering the thought ‘think of the opposite’ can help prevent a host of thinking errors.
Of course, intuitive or instinctive decision-making can be good in some situations, such as figuring out whether to marry someone or to date them. There is an evolutionary reason so many of us rely on “gut feeling” decisions — they probably served our ancestors well enough for thousands of years.
Motivated Reasoning
Motivated reasoning is when we subconsciously cherry-pick facts and arguments to back up our pre-existing beliefs while simultaneously ignoring any evidence against them.
Psychologist Tom Gilovich, who studies how people make decisions, has discovered that the more intelligent you are, the more likely you are to fall prey to motivated reasoning.
A study examined the journals of 1,700 scientists and found that 75% of articles with conclusions that contradicted their prior beliefs were never published. The researchers concluded that these findings demonstrated “systematic suppression of true findings”.
Particle Physicist gets catfished
Paul Frampton, a brilliant particle physicist who co-authored papers with three Nobel laureates, tried online dating and started chatting with a woman who claimed to be a supermodel. They planned to meet in Bolivia, but she didn’t show up, so she asked him to carry her suitcase over the border, which he did, and then was arrested for carrying two kilograms of cocaine, worth $400,000. So, to put it simply, it’s a case of a lack of common sense. Perhaps he simply had his head in the clouds.
He had been cautioned about this possibility by several people, but he just dismissed their reasons. It appeared like a really clear example of motivated reasoning or you can even say cognitive bias, where you’re using your brainpower to support an argument that you want to be true, and he strongly wanted to believe that this supermodel really loved him.
How to avoid Motivational Reasoning
Luckily, there are things that you can do to avoid these thinking traps. For example,
Be more curious: When you’re curious, you’ll want to seek out new information and challenge yourself. Curiosity can help us overcome motivated reasoning because it leads us to a sea of knowledge, where we can discover facts that support our beliefs and also those that challenge them.
Self Distance yourself: Self-distancing (or “self-perspective-taking”) is a powerful tool for overcoming motivated reasoning. It simply involves putting yourself in someone else’s shoes and imagining how you would feel and think if your situation, beliefs, and values were different than they are now.
The Curse of Expertise
The more intelligent a person is, the more prone they are to their curse of expertise. This means that smarter people are more likely to get stuck in their ways and fail to look at problems from new angles. The theory behind this finds its roots in the Dunning-Kruger effect, which theorizes that less competent people often overestimate their abilities. On the other hand, highly competent people are often unaware of how good they are. Curse of expertise can make or break a company or even an entire industry.
A study of the world’s greatest chess players illustrates why intelligent people are more likely to fall prey to their curse of expertise. The study revealed that the top players in chess experience a phenomenon known as the “expert blind spot”, a diminished capacity to recognize their own mistakes or misjudgments. The expert blind spot can lead to overconfidence and poor decision-making. It is a perceptual flaw, shared by all experts, yet most experts don’t realize they suffer from it.
FBI’s Dominos Effect
In 2004 when a man called Brandon Mayfield was accused of conducting the Madrid bombings even though he had not left the USA during that time. And yet the FBI’s fingerprint examiners still accused him of the crime. The Spanish police had found fingerprints on a plastic bag near the scene of the crime. Now the FBI had put that into their computers around about 20 candidates who might have made the match. And when they looked at Brandon Mayfield, they were sure that they were identical. When you look at the fingerprints, there are some very important differences that they completely missed. Thanks to the curse of expertise, they were susceptible to confirmation bias. So they only saw the bits that matched but were completely blind to the bits that didn’t.
The lesson here is not just psychological, but social too. Mayfield’s case perfectly illustrates the ways that the over-confidence of experts themselves, combined with our blind faith in their talents, can amplify their biases — with potentially devastating effect. The chain of failures within the FBI and the courtroom should not have been able to escalate so rapidly, given the lack of evidence that Mayfield hadn’t even left the country.
“The intelligence trap shows us that it’s not good enough to be fool-proof; procedures need to be expert proof too.”
How do you overcome the Curse of Expertise?
There are several things that you can do to reduce the curse of expertise:
Practice metacognition: It is inherent upon providers to continually assess their thinking processes — in other words, to engage in meta-cognitive practices, which is literally thinking about one’s thinking. Regularly step back from a problem so you can consider your thinking process. Get curious about all aspects of the situation, continually reflecting upon how you are approaching the problem. Ask: How else might I think about this?
Consider alternatives. Make a habit of considering other possibilities by frequently asking: What else might this be? Do not be hesitant to consult with colleagues when time permits. Sometimes a fresh set of eyes or ears can detect something that you don’t.
Check your ego. Take time to reflect if you are overly invested in being right rather than discovering what you might have missed. Ask: What might I be missing? Reframe errors as opportunities to learn and grow rather than evidence of your competency, worth, or status.
The Too-much-talent Effect
A sense of conflict and competition within a group can actually reduce each team member’s problem-solving skills and creativity. Even just one or two out of all team members can completely ruin the group dynamic and reduce the performance of the whole team, especially if they are all in the same team.
The study, which took place at Virginia Tech, gathered small groups of people and gave them each some abstract problems while broadcasting their progress - relative to the other team members - on their computer interface. Despite having started out with roughly equal IQs, the participants eventually separated into two distinct strata, with some people appearing to be particularly sensitive to the competition.
The diminished brainpower was also evident in fMRI scans taken at the time of the test: it appeared to be associated with increased brain activity in the amygdala - an almond-shaped bundle of neurons, deep in the brain, associated with emotional processing - and reduced activity in prefrontal cortices behind the forehead, which is associated with problem-solving.
This is because we can't separate our cognitive abilities from the social world around us. The team concluded that they can't separate our cognitive abilities from the social environment: all the time, our capacity to apply our brainpower will be influenced by our perceptions of those around us.
Too good to fail?
Consider the early-2010s fate of the Miami Heat basketball team. The squad was brimming with natural talent after signing LeBron James, Chris Bosh, and Dwayne Wade — the 'Big Three' — yet they finished the 2010/11 season ranked twenty-ninth out of thirty teams. To see if this was a common occurrence, social psychologist Adam Galinsky looked at the performance of football (soccer) teams in the 2010 and 2014 World Cups in South Africa and Brazil, respectively. They estimated how many members of the country's team were currently on the payroll of one of the top thirty highest-earning clubs in the Deloitte Football Money League to define the country's 'best talent' (which includes Real Madrid, FC Barcelona, and Manchester United).
Galinsky’s team found a ‘curvilinear’ relationship; a team benefited from having a few stars, but the balance seemed to tip at about 60 percent, after which the team’s performance suffered.
After disappointing results in the Euro 2012 championships, the coach, Louis van Gaal, reassembled the team — reducing the percentage of ‘top talent’ from 73 percent to 43 percent. It was an extraordinary move, but it seems that he had judged the dynamics correctly: as Galinsky and his co-authors point out in their paper, the Netherlands did not lose a single game in the qualifying rounds of the 2014 World Cup.
One study found that people’s individual IQ levels actually dropped when they feel in competition with others — Just think of Iceland’s victory in the 2016 Euro championships, Iceland is a tiny country compared to the rest of Europe. And in fact, they humiliated the England football team by defeating their star-studded lineup. This is an example of the “too much talent” effect because England, with its team packed with “world-class” players, really struggled to have a cohesive group dynamic. Although they may not have been aware of Galinsky’s scientific work, football pundits noted the disastrous team dynamics at the time of the tournament.
The eventual champions, Portugal, incidentally took only four of their players from the elite clubs in the Deloitte Money League. The team may have had Cristiano Ronaldo — arguably the biggest star in the game — but it had not exceeded Galinsky’s threshold.
How to manage too-much talent?
Managing a start-studded team is often very challenging but there are certain tips to help you navigate through the tricky situations more efficiently:
Clear Understanding of Roles: There is an apparent paradox in these findings: if team members clearly understand their place in the pecking order, overall group performance will be boosted; but this is true only if team members themselves feel that their opinions are valued.
Valuing EQ over IQ: According to scientific evidence, we should place a greater focus on interpersonal skills that will improve the team’s collective intelligence, even if it means rejecting someone who scores much higher on more traditional measures of ability. This could involve assessing someone’s emotional awareness and communication abilities, such as if they draw people in and listen, or if they tend to interrupt and dominate. If you’re in charge of a global team, someone with high cultural intelligence might be a good choice because they’ll be able to negotiate through many social conventions more easily.
Humble Leadership: Using staff questionnaires to explore the top management teams of 105 technology companies, researchers have seen that employees under a humble leader are more likely to share information, collaborate in times of stress, and contribute to a shared vision. By tapping into collective intelligence, businesses were better able to overcome challenges and uncertainty, ultimately resulting in greater annual profits a year later.
“History offers us some striking examples of these dynamics at play. Abraham Lincoln’s capacity to listen to the dissenting voices in his cabinet — a ‘team of rivals’ — is famously thought to have been one of the reasons that he won the American Civil War — and it apparently inspired Barack Obama’s leadership strategy as president.”
Final Thoughts
The title makes it sound a little bit like the DaVinci code but actually, it’s full of actionable information. The book looks at traps that people fall into when trying to describe intelligence as well as offers advice on how to get around those traps. It is a talk about the scientific data on what makes us think and why people make decisions in certain ways. The author of this book takes you through a journey of science experiments that we have done to understand the human brain, and how these experiments have led to many discoveries in relation to human thinking and decision making. Each chapter in this book talks about an experiment or discovery, and then it moves on to explain the implications of this discovery on our day-to-day lives, as well as its impact.
Do comment your opinion on the book and this blog. I would love to read and go through it.
Finally, feel free to suggest any other book that you find interesting and would want me to write about it.
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