ogc163
Superstar
By David Robson
A high IQ and education won’t necessarily protect you from highly irrational behavior—and it may sometimes amplify your errors
t 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.
A high IQ and education won’t necessarily protect you from highly irrational behavior—and it may sometimes amplify your errors
t 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.
