For more than five decades, Daniel Kahneman, a Nobel Laureate and professor of psychology at Princeton, has been asking questions like this and analyzing our answers. His disarmingly simple experiments have profoundly changed the way we think about thinking.
Instead, their decisions depend on a long list of mental shortcuts, which often lead them to make foolish decisions. Asked about the bat and the ball, we forget our arithmetic lessons and instead default to the answer that requires the least mental effort. Although Kahneman is now widely recognized as one of the most influential psychologists of the twentieth century, his work was dismissed for years.
The philosopher, it turns out, got it backward. A new study in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology led by Richard West at James Madison University and Keith Stanovich at the University of Toronto suggests that, in many instances, smarter people are more vulnerable to these thinking errors. West and his colleagues began by giving four hundred and eighty-two undergraduates a questionnaire featuring a variety of classic bias problems.
In a lake, there is a patch of lily pads. The decisions people make as a group tend to be more prejudiced and less intelligent than the ones they make individually. In the s, the Harvard psychologist Solomon Asch demonstrated that people frequently adopt the view of the majority even when it is obviously wrong, and even when they have to deny their own senses.
In the same decade, Read Tuddenham at the University of California found that his students would give ridiculous answers to simple questions — stating, for example, that male babies have a life expectancy of 25 years — when they thought others had answered in the same way.
This happens only when members of a crowd make their judgements independently of each other, and it is most effective when a crowd is diverse. In cohesive groups, on the other hand, where members share an identity, the urge for unity overrides all. The data from tonight will help Richardson and his students test it, and explore the deeper issue of exactly how the presence of others alters our cognition and perception.
He leaves us with a thought about social media:. In at least some cases, intelligence actively abets stupidity by allowing pernicious rationalisation. It is important to distinguish this from mere error. We make mistakes for all kinds of reasons. Stupidity is rather one specific and stubborn cause of error. Historically, philosophers have worried a great deal about the irrationality of not taking the available means to my goals: Tom wants to get fit, yet his running shoes are quietly gathering dust.
Stupidity is very different from this. It is rather a lack of the necessary means, a lack of the necessary intellectual equipment. Combatting it will typically require not brute willpower but the construction of a new way of seeing our self and our world. Such stupidity is perfectly compatible with intelligence: Haig was by any standard a smart man. Consider a country that excitedly imports new conceptual tools not from a past time but from a very different place. Global debates over social justice, for example, are now dominated by a set of ideas and terms taken from the United States, a nation marked by an incredibly specific historical and cultural trajectory.
Simply transferring that framework to other countries, such as those in which class is less starkly racialised for example, states reliant on exploiting white migrant labour from eastern Europe , or in which it is racialised in much more complex ways for example, states such as South Africa is conceptually and socially risky. Unfortunately, Head Start and other public early-education programs rarely come close to this level of quality, and are nowhere near universal.
In lieu of excellent early education, we have embraced a more familiar strategy for closing the intelligence gap. Some of the money pouring into educational reform might be diverted to creating more top-notch vocational-education programs today called career and technical education, or CTE. Right now only one in 20 U. And these schools are increasingly oversubscribed. Although 2, students apply to the school annually, the CTE program has room for fewer than The applicant pool is winnowed down through a lottery, but academic test scores play a role, too.
Worse, many CTE schools are increasingly emphasizing science, technology, engineering, and mathematics, at risk of undercutting their ability to aid students who struggle academically—rather than those who want to burnish their already excellent college and career prospects.
It would be far better to maintain a focus on food management, office administration, health technology, and, sure, the classic trades—all updated to incorporate computerized tools. We must stop glorifying intelligence and treating our society as a playground for the smart minority. We should instead begin shaping our economy, our schools, even our culture with an eye to the abilities and needs of the majority, and to the full range of human capacity. The government could, for example, provide incentives to companies that resist automation, thereby preserving jobs for the less brainy.
Among other things, the less brainy are, according to studies and some business experts, less likely to be oblivious of their own biases and flaws, to mistakenly assume that recent trends will continue into the future, to be anxiety-ridden, and to be arrogant. When Michael Young, a British sociologist, coined the term meritocracy in , it was in a dystopian satire.
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