The Intelligence Trap: Revolutionise your Thinking and Make Wiser Decisions

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After years of careful development and verification of the various sub-tests, the first iteration of the “Comprehensive Assessment of Rational Thinking” was published at the end of 2016. Well, you may also have noticed that over this summer (2019-20) in Australia we’ve had the occasional bushfire. With that data, you could then investigate which interventions are most successful at cultivating more rational thinking styles.

Robson is an award-winning science journalist working with BBC Future, where he specialises in psychology, neuroscience, and medicine. An executive may come to chase short-term gains, particularly if feeling threatened by time, financial or other constraints, giving rise to 'functional stupidity' where any criticism is discouraged and seen as negativity: employees may then find it easier to avoid thinking, to nod along, and escape being perceived as troublemakers. Although this can include meditative practice, it refers to a generally reflective and engaged state that avoids reactive, overly emotional responses to events and allows us to note and consider our intuitions more objectively. You can now choose more effectively because you’ve scanned and organized three important pieces of information: the positives, the negatives, and the interesting. When combining all these sub-tests, Stanovich found that the overall correlation with commonly used measures of cognitive ability, was often moderate: on one batch of tests, the correlation coefficient with SATs was around 0.The theory behind this finds its roots in the Dunning-Kruger effect, which theorizes that less competent people often overestimate their abilities. Some overlap was to be expected, especially given the fact that several of the rationality quotient’s measures, such as probabilistic reasoning, would be aided by mathematical ability and other aspects of cognition measured by academic tests.

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. Galinsky’s team found a ‘curvilinear’ relationship; a team benefited from having a few stars, but the balance seemed to tip at about 60 percent, after which the team’s performance suffered. A German term to describe a one-track specialist who is an expert in their field but takes a blinkered approach to a multifaceted problem. He reviews many fundamental concepts in psychology and statistics (regression to the mean, the narrative fallacy, the optimistic bias), showing how they relate to his overall concerns about how we think and why we make the decisions that we do.Now Conan Doyle was in the middle of an American book tour, and he invited Houdini to join him in Atlantic City. It appeared like a really clear example of motivated reasoning or you can even say cognitive bias, where you’re using your brainpower to support an argument that you want to be true, and he strongly wanted to believe that this supermodel really loved him. It certainly did not appear to me at the time as the pinnacle of sceptical analysis - and I suspect the GFC might have provided room for some skeptical reappraisal on Michael's behalf. 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. It is too easy to assume that intelligence is something that is both taught in schools and measurable by the length of time one has spent in school.

Without the right knowledge and equipment – the brakes, the steering wheel, the speedometer, a compass and a good map – a fast engine may just lead to you driving in circles – or straight into oncoming traffic.

So the next time you find yourself suffering from the same old stinking thinking, try the PMI technique on for size. Although some executives feel that personal humility undermines their authority, Robson argues that employees under a humble leader are more likely to share information and work together. Robson notes, from Galansky's analysis of over 5000 Himalayan expeditions, that teams likely to have had a hierarchical style of leadership were more likely to reach the summit but were also more likely to lose team members in the attempt.

This is similar to Stanovich’s concept of “contaminated mindware”—in which our brain has been infected by an irrational idea that then skews our later thinking. We can’t say that Elon Musk is more intelligent than Magnus Carlson by a certain number of points, but we can say that Magnus Carlson will win against Elon Musk at chess by a certain margin. Often, it seemed as if he was using analytical reasoning from system 2 to rationalize his opinions and dismiss the evidence. 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. The book looks at traps that people fall into when trying to describe intelligence as well as offers advice on how to get around those traps.And when they do err, they are better able to build elaborate arguments to justify their reasoning, meaning that they become more and more dogmatic in their views. The study, which took place at Virginia Tech, gathered small groups of people and gave them each some abstract problems while broadcasting their progress — relative to the other team members — on their computer interface. Some of the later chapters (dealing with risk-taking and statistics and probabilities) are denser than others (some readers may resent such demands on System 2! For example, if you spend your entire life studying biology, you might have a higher chance of being considered intelligent than if you spend your entire life doing crossword puzzles. 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.