Some time back after I had returned to the United States after living in Eastern Europe I was invited to speak to a local chapter of Mensa about my experience living abroad during an exciting time in history.
Mensa is the international high-IQ society founded in 1946. Its only criterion for membership is an IQ in the 98th percentile. In other words, in a group of 100 people you’re one of the two smartest people in the room.
The first time we tried to get together they sent me to the wrong address. So we rescheduled.
The second time they’d forgotten there was a scheduling conflict so I wound up going out for a beer with the three people who did show up.
So how come the smartest people in the room couldn’t arrange something every Cub Scout den mother does on a regular basis?
I think all of us probably know some pretty smart people who have dumb ideas. And the stereotype of the unworldly impractical genius has been around for a long time.
An article in the New York Times Sunday Review of Sept. 16, by David Z. Hambrick, professor of psychology at Michigan State University, and graduate student Alexander P. Burgoyne, summarizes research that confirms what some of us have suspected for some time.
Smart people can be pretty dumb.
“As the psychologist Keith Stanovich and others observed… some people are highly rational. In other words, there are individual differences in rationality, even if we all face cognitive challenges in being rational. So who are these more rational people? Presumably, the more intelligent people, right?
“Wrong. In a series of studies, Professor Stanovich and colleagues had large samples of subjects (usually several hundred) complete judgment tests like the Linda problem, as well as an I.Q. test. The major finding was that irrationality — or what Professor Stanovich called “dysrationalia” — correlates relatively weakly with I.Q. A person with a high I.Q. is about as likely to suffer from dysrationalia as a person with a low I.Q.”
So it turns out that people with high IQs are just as prone to bias, prejudice, and rationalization as anybody else. No matter how smart we are, it’s difficult to think objectively about things we are emotionally invested in.
It’s depressing.
Though perhaps not surprising. How many smart people do you know who can be spectacularly stupid about for example, their romantic affairs? Money? Car repairs?
In fact, it seems really bright people are capable of much larger scale and much more harmful stupidity than your average-bright person.
Worse news, it doesn’t seem that higher education has an effect on how prone to cognitive bias we are. So much for those freshman logic classes.
The good news Hambrick claims, is that computerized training can affect long-term improvements in people’s ability to think objectively.
Forgive me if I’m skeptical. I haven’t looked at the experimental results in detail, but I’ve seen a lot of a tendency to label something “objective” when it seems to mean “agrees with me.”
That however could be my own bias in favor of a classical liberal arts education where logic and rhetoric are taught early. Logic is about objective thinking, rhetoric is about persuasive speaking, and the study thereof is about knowing the difference between them.
Perhaps we will find, or rediscover ways to teach objective critical thinking. One may always hope.
But one thing is for sure, we have every reason to be skeptical about the ability of other people to run our lives for us based on the argument they are smarter than we are.