Business cultures that inadvertently encourage it, for example, may have contributed to the economic crisis. Indeed, the effects may have been so damaging precisely because banks assumed that intelligent people act logically while at the same time rewarding rash behaviour based on intuition rather than deliberation. If we want to avoid making similar mistakes in the future, everybody — especially the most intelligent and powerful — would do well to humbly acknowledge their own weaknesses.
Trending Latest Video Free. We have all seen otherwise intelligent people doing actively stupid things. And if we are honest, we have almost certainly observed ourselves occasionally doing something really stupid even though we think of ourselves as intelligent. The unfortunate reality is that very high IQ people can act in extremely bone-headed ways.
I would expect that the SQ is distributed in a bell-shaped curve, somewhat similar to the IQ. It would be an independent measure, basically orthogonal to the IQ.
The probability of a particular person being stupid seems to be independent of any other characteristic of that person. There are stupid college professors. We tend to assume that certain people are intelligent based on superficial factors like their education level, job, or other traits we believe to be exclusive of stupidity.
However, there is a high correlation between prejudice and ignorance. It is important to recognize that stupidity is not a single measure. In particular, there are stupid errors of omission, and stupid errors of commission. Some basic categories of stupidity include confident ignorance foolhardiness ; lack of control impulsiveness, obsessive or addictive behavior ; absent-mindedness; and lack of practicality. However, when assessing our own bad choices, we tend to engage in elaborate introspection.
We scrutinize our motivations and search for relevant reasons; we lament our mistakes to therapists and ruminate on the beliefs that led us astray. The problem with this introspective approach is that the driving forces behind biases—the root causes of our irrationality—are largely unconscious, which means they remain invisible to self-analysis and impermeable to intelligence. In fact, introspection can actually compound the error, blinding us to those primal processes responsible for many of our everyday failings.
We spin eloquent stories, but these stories miss the point. The more we attempt to know ourselves, the less we actually understand. Note: This article has been modified to include mention of Shane Frederick.
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He leaves us with a thought about social media:. If you liked this story, sign up for the weekly bbc. Why people get more stupid in a crowd. Share using Email. By Michael Bond 14th January People frequently adopt the view of the majority even when it is obviously wrong. We think of the internet as an information superhighway.
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