Many smart people aren’t wise. (You’re an exception, of
course.) High I.Q. people are more likely to fall into faulty thinking. That’s
Why Smart People Can Be So Stupid concludes Yale professor, Robert J. Steinberg.
Perhaps because he is a smart-sounding expert, he remains fuzzy in defining
stupidity.
Yet you’re likely to make smarter decisions by sidestepping four traps:
1. The Egocentrism Fallacy: thinking that the world revolves, or at least should revolve, around you. Acting in ways that benefit your, regardless of how that behavior affects others.
2. The Omniscience Fallacy: believing that you know all there is to know and therefore do not have to listen to the advice and counsel of others
3. The Omnipotence Fallacy: believing that your intelligence and education somehow make you all-powerful.
4. The Invulnerability Fallacy: believing that you can do whatever you want and that others will never be able to hurt you or expose you.
Improve your performance. Get motivated to persist longer.
Consider this insight from Carol Dweck's experiment. Students were randomly assigned to read one of two articles, the first suggested that intelligence is "fixed”; the others argued that it was or "malleable" – open to improvement. Then all asked to do a difficult task.
Those who’d read that intelligence was malleable were more persistent in gaining mastery in that task.
Most gratifyingly, other studies found that: “teaching students the malleable theory of intelligence not only aided their performance in the face of obstacles on an individual intellectual task, it actually raised their college grade point average and their commitment to school.”
There's more good news.
Since, as Malcolm Gladwell and others suggest that mastery of a subject requires 10,000 hours of learning and practice, this strengthened desire to persist on a task (or subject) could evoke a self-fulfilling prophecy of mastery.
To further hone your performance, understand the Incentive Caused Bias, other decision making traps we all fall into - and how to argue better.
