Excerpt: The Intelligence
Trap
By David Robson August 20, 2019
It is June 17, 1922, and two middle-aged men—one
short and squat, the other tall and lumbering with a walrus moustache—are
sitting on the beach in Atlantic City, New Jersey. They are Harry Houdini and
Arthur Conan Doyle—and by the end of the evening, their friendship will never
be the same again.
It ended as it began—with a séance. Spiritualism
was all the rage among London’s wealthy elite, and Conan Doyle was a firm
believer, attending five or six gatherings a week. He even claimed that his
wife Jean had some psychic talent, and that she had started to channel a spirit
guide, Phineas, who dictated where they should live and when they should
travel.
Houdini, in contrast, was a skeptic, but he
still claimed to have an open mind, and on a visit to England two years
previously, he had contacted Conan Doyle to discuss his recent book on the
subject. Now Conan Doyle was in the middle of an American book tour, and he
invited Houdini to join him in Atlantic City.
The visit had begun amicably enough. Houdini had
helped to teach Conan Doyle’s boys to dive, and the group were resting at the
seafront when Conan Doyle decided to invite Houdini up to his hotel room for an
impromptu séance, with Jean as the medium. He knew that Houdini had been
mourning the loss of his mother, and he hoped that his wife might be able to
make contact with the other side.
And so they returned to the Ambassador Hotel,
closed the curtains, and waited for inspiration to strike. Jean sat in a kind
of trance with a pencil in one hand as the men sat by and watched. She sat with
her pen poised over the writing pad, before her hand began to fly wildly across
the page. “Oh, my darling, thank God, at last I’m through,” the spirit began to
write. “I’ve tried oh so often—now I am happy…” By the end of the séance, Jean
had written around twenty pages in “angular, erratic script.”
Her husband was utterly bewitched—but Houdini
was less than impressed. Why had his mother, a Jew, professed herself to be a
Christian? How had this Hungarian immigrant written her messages in perfect
English—“a language which she had never learned!”? And why did she not bother
to mention that it was her birthday?
Meeting these two men for the first time, you
would have been forgiven for expecting Conan Doyle to be the more critical
thinker. Yet it was the professional illusionist, a Hungarian immigrant whose
education had ended at the age of twelve, who could see through the fraud.
While decades of psychological research have
documented humanity’s more irrational tendencies, it is only relatively
recently that scientists have started to measure how that irrationality varies
between individuals, and whether that variance is related to measures of
intelligence. They are finding that the two are far from perfectly correlated:
it is possible to have a very high IQ or SAT score, while still performing
badly on these new tests of rationality—a mismatch known as “dysrationalia.”
Indeed, there are some situations in which intelligence and education may
sometimes exaggerate and amplify your mistakes.
A true recognition of dysrationalia—and its
potential for harm—has taken decades to blossom, but the roots of the idea can
be found in the now legendary work of two Israeli researchers, Daniel Kahneman
and Amos Tversky, who identified many cognitive biases and heuristics
(quick-and-easy rules of thumb) that can skew our reasoning.
One of their most striking experiments asked
participants to spin a “wheel of fortune,” which landed on a number between 1
and 100, before considering general knowledge questions—such as estimating the
number of African countries that are represented in the UN. The wheel of
fortune should, of course, have had no influence on their answers—but the
effect was quite profound. The lower the quantity on the wheel, the smaller
their estimate—the arbitrary value had planted a figure in their mind,
“anchoring” their judgment.
You have probably fallen for anchoring yourself
many times while shopping during sales. Suppose you are looking for a new TV.
You had expected to pay around $150, but then you find a real bargain: a $300
item reduced to $200. Seeing the original price anchors your perception of what
is an acceptable price to pay, meaning that you will go above your initial budget.
Other notable biases include framing (the fact
that you may change your opinion based on the way information is phrased), the
sunk cost fallacy (our reluctance to give up on a failing investment even if we
will lose more trying to sustain it), and the gambler’s fallacy—the belief that
if the roulette wheel has landed on black, it’s more likely the next time to
land on red. The probability, of course, stays exactly the same.
Given these findings, many cognitive scientists
divide our thinking into two categories: “system 1,” intuitive, automatic,
“fast thinking” that may be prey to unconscious biases; and “system 2,” “slow,”
more analytical, deliberative thinking. According to this view—called dual-
process theory—many of our irrational decisions come when we rely too heavily
on system 1, allowing those biases to muddy our judgment.
It is difficult to overestimate the influence of
this work, but none of the early studies by Kahneman and Tversky had tested
whether our irrationality varies from person to person. Are some people more
susceptible to these biases, while others are immune, for instance? And how do
those tendencies relate to our general intelligence? Conan Doyle’s story is
surprising because we intuitively expect more intelligent people, with their
greater analytical minds, to act more rationally—but as Tversky and Kahneman
had shown, our intuitions can be deceptive.
If we want to understand why smart people do
dumb things, these are vital questions.
During a sabbatical at the University of
Cambridge in 1991, a Canadian psychologist called Keith Stanovich decided to
address these issues head on. With a wife specializing in learning
difficulties, he had long been interested in the ways that some mental
abilities may lag behind others, and he suspected that rationality would be no
different. The result was an influential paper introducing the idea of
dysrationalia as a direct parallel to other disorders like dyslexia and
dyscalculia.
It was a provocative concept—aimed as a nudge in
the ribs to all the researchers examining bias. “I wanted to jolt the field
into realizing that it had been ignoring individual differences,” Stanovich
told me.
Stanovich emphasizes that dysrationalia is not
just limited to system 1 thinking. Even if we are reflective enough to detect
when our intuitions are wrong, and override them, we may fail to use the right
“mindware”—the knowledge and attitudes that should allow us to reason
correctly. If you grow up among people who distrust scientists, for instance,
you may develop a tendency to ignore empirical evidence, while putting your
faith in unproven theories. Greater intelligence wouldn’t necessarily stop you
forming those attitudes in the first place, and it is even possible that your
greater capacity for learning might then cause you to accumulate more and more
“facts” to support your views.
Stanovich has now spent more than two decades
building on the concept of dysrationalia with a series of carefully controlled
experiments.
To understand his results, we need some basic
statistical theory. In psychology and other sciences, the relationship between
two variables is usually expressed as a correlation coefficient between 0 and
1. A perfect correlation would have a value of 1—the two parameters would
essentially be measuring the same thing; this is unrealistic for most studies
of human health and behavior (which are determined by so many variables), but
many scientists would consider a “moderate” correlation to lie between 0.4 and
0.59.
Using these measures, Stanovich found that the
relationships between rationality and intelligence were generally very weak.
SAT scores revealed a correlation of just 0.19 with measures of anchoring, for
instance. Intelligence also appeared to play only a tiny role in the question
of whether we are willing to delay immediate gratification for a greater reward
in the future, or whether we prefer a smaller reward sooner —a tendency known
as “temporal discounting.” In one test, the correlation with SAT scores was as
small as 0.02. That’s an extraordinarily modest correlation for a trait that
many might assume comes hand in hand with a greater analytical mind. The sunk
cost bias also shows almost no relationship to SAT scores.
You might at least expect that more intelligent
people could learn to recognize these flaws. In reality, most people assume
that they are less vulnerable than other people, and this is equally true of
the “smarter” participants. Indeed, in one set of experiments studying some of
the classic cognitive biases, Stanovich found that people with higher SAT
scores actually had a slightly larger “bias blind spot” than people who were
less academically gifted. “Adults with more cognitive ability are aware of
their intellectual status and expect to outperform others on most cognitive
tasks,” Stanovich told me. “Because these cognitive biases are presented to
them as essentially cognitive tasks, they expect to outperform on them as
well.”
Stanovich has now refined and combined many of
these measures into a single test, which is informally called the “rationality
quotient.” He emphasizes that he does not wish to devalue intelligence
tests—they “work quite well for what they do”—but to improve our understanding
of these other cognitive skills that may also determine our decision making,
and place them on an equal footing with the existing measures of cognitive
ability.
“Our goal has always been to give the concept of
rationality a fair hearing—almost as if it had been proposed prior to
intelligence,” he wrote in his scholarly book on the subject. It is, he says, a
“great irony” that the thinking skills explored in Kahneman’s Nobel
Prize-winning work are still neglected in our most well-known assessment of
cognitive ability.
After years of careful development and
verification of the various sub-tests, the first iteration of the
“Comprehensive Assessment of Rational Thinking” was published at the end of
2016. Besides measures of the common cognitive biases and heuristics, it also
included probabilistic and statistical reasoning skills—such as the ability to
assess risk—that could improve our rationality, and questionnaires concerning
contaminated mindware such as anti-science attitudes.
For a taster, consider the following question,
which aims to test the “belief bias.” Your task is to consider whether the
conclusion follows logically, based only on the opening two premises.
All living things need water.
Roses need water.
Therefore, roses are living things.
What did you answer? According to Stanovich’s
work, 70 percent of university students believe that this is a valid argument.
But it isn’t, since the first premise only says that “all living things need
water”—not that “all things that need water are living.”
If you still struggle to understand why that
makes sense, compare it to the following statements:
All insects need oxygen.
Mice need oxygen.
Therefore mice are insects.
The logic of the two statements is exactly the
same—but it is far easier to notice the flaw in the reasoning when the
conclusion clashes with your existing knowledge. In the first example, however,
you have to put aside your preconceptions and think, carefully and critically,
about the specific statements at hand—to avoid thinking that the argument is
right just because the conclusion makes sense with what you already know.
When combining all these sub-tests, Stanovich
found that the overall correlation with commonly used measures of cognitive
ability, was often moderate: on one batch of tests, the correlation coefficient
with SATs was around 0.47, for instance. Some overlap was to be expected,
especially given the fact that several of the rationality quotient's measures,
such as probabilistic reasoning, would be aided by mathematical ability and
other aspects of cognition measured by academic tests. "But that still
leaves enough room for the discrepancies between rationality and intelligence
that lead to smart people acting foolishly," Stanovich said. His findings
fit with many other recent results showing that critical thinking and intelligence represent two distinct
entities, and that those other measures of decision making can be useful
predictors of real-world behaviors.
With further development, the rationality
quotient could be used in recruitment to assess the quality of a potential
employee’s decision making; Stanovich told me that he has already had
significant interest from law firms, financial institutions, and executive headhunters.
Stanovich hopes his test may also be a useful
tool to assess how students’ reasoning changes over a school or university
course. “This, to me, would be one of the more exciting uses,” Stanovich said.
With that data, you could then investigate which interventions are most
successful at cultivating more rational thinking styles.
If we return to that séance in Atlantic City,
Arthur Conan Doyle’s behavior would certainly seem to fit neatly with theories
of dysrationalia. According to dual-process (fast/slow thinking) theories, this
could just be down to cognitive miserliness. People who believe in the
paranormal rely on their gut feelings and intuitions to think about the sources
of their beliefs, rather than reasoning in an analytical, critical way.
This may be true for many people with vaguer,
less well-defined beliefs, but there are some particular elements of Conan
Doyle’s biography that suggest his behavior can’t be explained quite so simply.
Often, it seemed as if he was using analytical reasoning from system 2 to
rationalize his opinions and dismiss the evidence. Rather than thinking too
little, he was thinking too much.
Psychologists call this “motivated reasoning”—a
kind of emotionally charged thinking that leads us to demolish the evidence
that questions our beliefs and build increasingly ornate arguments to justify
them. This is a particular problem when a belief sits at the core of our
identity, and in these circumstances greater intelligence and education may
actually increase your foolish thinking. (This is similar to Stanovich’s
concept of “contaminated mindware”—in which our brain has been infected by an
irrational idea that then skews our later thinking.)
Consider people’s beliefs about issues such as
climate change. Among Democrats, the pattern is exactly as you would hope: the
more educated someone is, the more likely they are to endorse the scientific
evidence that carbon emissions generated by humans are leading to global
warming. Among Republicans, however, the exact opposite is true: the more
educated someone is, the less likely they are to accept the scientific
evidence.
This same polarization can be seen on many other
charged issues, such as stem cell research or evolution and creationism,
with more educated individuals applying their brainpower to protect
their existing opinions, even when they disagree with the scientific
consensus. It could also be observed in beliefs about certain political conspiracy theories. When
it comes to certain tightly held beliefs, higher intelligence and knowledge is
a tool for propaganda rather than truth seeking, amplifying our errors.
The unfortunate conclusion is that, even if you
happen to be rational in general, it’s possible that you may still be prone to
flawed reasoning on certain questions that matter most to you. Conan Doyle’s
beliefs were certainly of this kind: spiritualism seems to have offered him
enormous comfort throughout his life.
Following their increasingly public disagreement,
Houdini lost all respect for Conan Doyle; he had started the friendship
believing that the writer was an “intellectual giant” and ended it by writing
that “one must be half-witted to believe some of these things.” But given what
we now know about rationality, the very opposite may be true: only an
intellectual giant could be capable of believing such things.
David Robson is a senior journalist at the BBC
and author of The Intelligence Trap: Why Smart People Make Dumb Mistakes (WW
Norton). He is @d_a_robson on Twitter. His website
is www.davidrobson.me.
Excerpted from The Intelligence Trap: Why Smart
People Make Dumb Mistakes. Copyright © 2019 by David Robson. Used with
permission of the publisher, W. W. Norton & Company, Inc. All rights
reserved.
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