The Intelligence Trap: Revolutionise your Thinking and Make Wiser Decisions

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A powerful concept in education: we actually learn better if our initial understanding is made harder, not easier. See also Growth mindset. For those who are new to these psychological-terms-concept-world thingies, this book is a great starter. I learned a lot of fascinating psychological theories. Good content; well covered via named biases, a small history lesson on IQ, recent studies, findings and quotes from scientists working on the domain for years, accompanying intriguing stories, different layers of application of its learnings from individual to teams and organizations and even to the public.

I’m not even going to begin discussing why you might want to start off here by defining ‘intelligence’ – this book covers many of the problems with that more than adequately. Rather, I want to chat about the ‘trap’ part of the title. In a lot of ways this book is a rehash of stuff which is perhaps better covered in books like Mistakes Were Made (But not by me) or Sway – there were endless books of this kind printed about a decade ago, and I would still recommend most of them. The ‘trap’ part of this is the bit where we use our intelligence to work against what might otherwise be our better judgement. The examples given in the book include lots of scientists who become convinced of some crazy nonsense about HIV-AIDS or vaccinations or alien abductions – and then, once they are so convinced, no amount of evidence is enough to convince them otherwise. The point made here is that their intelligence is actually a large part of the problem. They actually use their superior reasoning skills to find increasingly ingenious reasons to explain why the holocaust never happened, say, or why 9/11 was a false flag / inside job, or why climate change is a huge conspiracy of scientists seeking additional research funding. 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. Our brains tend to default to intuitive thinking because it is more efficient but it is important to engage rational thinking when facing complex problems or making important decisions. 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. 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.Just reading the first 5 minutes of this book, I already felt intelligent as Robson intricately delivers tidbits of information about IQ, SATs, and others. Within it are stories about the faux pas the FBI made, Einstein’s irrational behavior, Arthur Conan Doyle and his belief in seances and Steve Jobs believing how vitamins would cure his cancer for example. These brilliant people and top organizations we know make irrational life-changing decisions that would make you wonder and ask WHY? Robson explains about “bias blind spot” and “dysrationalia” are as concepts that explains the whys. 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.” A strategy to reduce biased reasoning by deliberately exposing ourselves to examples of flawed arguments. 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?

Once you form your initial opinion, you use your thinking to support your position, rather than to explore the subject to broaden your thinking. 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:

The unexpected failure of teams once their proportion of ‘star’ players reaches a certain threshold. See, for instance, the England football team in the Euro 2016 tournament.” 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.” It is important to cultivate a sense of self-awareness as this can help us recognize our own biases and emotional responses and make more rational and considered decisions. Even Einstein – whose theories are often taken to be the pinnacle of human intelligence – may have suffered from this blinkered reasoning, leading him to waste the last twenty-five years of his career with a string of embarrassing failures.”

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 capacity to accept the limits of our judgement and to try to compensate for our fallibility. Scientific research has revealed that this is a critical, but neglected, characteristic that determines much of our decision making and learning, and which may be particularly crucial for team leaders. Mindfulness or the practice of being fully present and engaged in the moment can also help us overcome the intelligence trap by allowing us to focus on the current task and avoid distractions. A tendency to embrace uncertainty and nuance, rather than seeking immediate closure on the issue at hand. In this debut book, the writer Robson examines the “flawed mental habits” of people with “greater intelligence, education, and professional expertise”—and how they can learn to “think more wisely.” The book talks about human stupidity; which hides in secret areas behind veils of pseudo or incomplete intelligence. It appears as if total stupidity is constant and when it is reduced in one cognitive field it can grow in other areas.Resistance to change and new ideas by intelligent people, is one of the main reasons change management and improvement initiatives don’t always get traction. We don’t help things along either as we have a strong tendency to defer to the views of those who can mount a convincing critical argument. Critical assessment however is only a part of the thinking that we need to embrace and use going forward. Criticism is a powerful weapon in the hands of those who suffer the intelligence trap. Criticism however is easy, it’s a simple matter to pull a new idea to pieces or critique an as yet unproven concept.