We tend to think of stupidity as being something opposing to high intelligence, but highly intelligent people can still be pretty stupid. There is even a book called Why Smart People Can Be So Stupid published by Yale University Press. The idea of smart people doing stupid things is certainly not new. When we think of smart people doing stupid things, we may think of the brilliant university student who gets really drunk at a party, dances around naked, yells out profanities, then goes to class the next day and gets an ‘A’ on his physics exam. In this scenario, the actions of this person do not necessarily lead to any long-lasting consequences. Sometimes, however, highly intelligent people do stupid things that do have long-lasting and devastating consequences. Highly intelligent people can mess up their own lives with their bad decisions, and they can mess up the lives of those who are unfortunate enough to be affected by their bad decisions. All this can happen while people who are much less intelligent make much better life decisions, become much more productive members of society, and have much better lives and better relationships.
Here, when I say “stupidity”, I refer to a tendency to make bad decisions or adopt false beliefs despite the availability of sufficient information and resources. Many people are inclined to believe that highly intelligent people are less prone to stupidity, but the judgment of highly intelligent people is not always trustworthy. First, highly intelligent people can still be bad people who do not have the best interests of others in mind. Second, highly intelligent people can still be prone to irrational behaviors that can cause potential harm to themselves and/or those around them.
High intelligence offers no protection from irrationality
In an article from Psychology Today, Arthur Dobrin D.S.W. explains how intelligence is not a predictor of good judgment like we may think. Rather, intelligence and rationality are distinctly different mental processes. Nonetheless, our brains are bombarded with large amounts of information every day, and we often have to make decisions without the availability of sufficient information. Our tendencies to jump to conclusions and act irrationally, in other words, may be a coping mechanism that our brains use to allow us to function in everyday life in a sea of unnecessary information where the necessary information may not be available.
Keith Stanovich, who has authored about 300 publications and been cited 43,212 times, is one of the key researchers who coined the term dysrationalia, defined as the inability to think and behave rationally despite adequate intelligence. Stanovich and others argue that IQ tests do not measure one’s level of rationality. In this article, Stanovich defines rational thinking as adopting appropriate goals, taking appropriate actions given the goals and beliefs, and holding beliefs that correspond with evidence.
A prime real-life example of dysrationalia that Stanovich discusses in this article is the case where parents, who were former schoolteachers, pulled their children out of school because the children were being taught about the Holocaust in their history class, and the parents thought that the Holocaust was a myth. The parents even wrote about 6000 letters to local parents and local teachers, and they wrote one letter to each member of Congress, stating that Western civilization should not be continuing to live in such myths. These parents, being former schoolteachers, were presumably college educated. Despite their level of education and intelligence, they had erroneous beliefs and they acted on those beliefs.
A study by (Wagner, 1928) found that superstitious thinking among college freshman had no signficiant correlation with intelligence. In the study, the students were asked whether they had certain superstitious beliefs. Superstitious beliefs and behaviors that students were asked about included tapping wood after boasting; following signs like a falling star; the belief that dropping a food utensil or dish rag brings company; picking up pins for luck; horoscopes; four-leaf clover brings good luck; black cat brings bad luck; psalmists can foretell the future. Men had 6-7 superstitious beliefs on average while women had 11-12 superstitious beliefs on average. The correlation between intelligence (as measured by IQ tests) and the number of superstitious beliefs was -0.12, too small in magnitude to be significant. Instead, the researchers found significant correlations with younger age, being female and being more open to suggestion. Although intelligent people can learn faster, what they learn may not be aligned with reality.
Highly intelligent people are just as prone to preconceived biases as everyone else
We do not hear very often about Democrats becoming Republicans or Republicans become Democrats. We also seldom hear about people who are against abortion changing to being in favor of abortion, or vice versa. The reason is that once people adopt a certain set of beliefs or opinions, it is hard for them to change their minds even when they are presented with new information/evidence that contradicts their prior beliefs.
This article by (Stanovich et al., 2013) reviews the research literature on what is called “my-side bias” defined as evaluating evidence, generating evidence, and testing hypotheses in a manner biased toward our own prior beliefs, opinions and attitudes. (Stanovich et al., 2013) cites prior studies showing that bias in favor of one’s current opinion was the same in high and low intelligence subjects. If, however, study subjects were explicitly told at the beginning of the experiment to decouple their preconceived biases from their conclusions, then subjects with higher IQ scores were able to show less bias than subjects with lower IQ scores. What this means is that highly intelligent people may possess the cognitive capacity to think independently of their preconceived biases, but usually choose not to.
Group think
Group think is a phenomenon where individuals of a group can be reasonably smart, but still adopt beliefs characteristic of their group that defy common sense. The reason is that individuals in a group do not adopt these beliefs by their own independent reasoning, but rather because everyone else in the group has these beliefs. Individuals within a group trust that whatever their group believes, it must be right.
Group think can be dangerous because in some contexts, it can cause people to act upon certain erroneous beliefs despite the moral or ethical implications. Members of a group are sometimes afraid to express doubt of the validity of the group’s beliefs, for fear of being excluded, ridiculed or maybe even persecuted. This article gives 25 historical examples of catastrophes thought to occur because of groupthink. They include the Bay of Pigs invasion, the Challenger Space Shuttle disaster, the Salem Witch Trials, and the United States ignoring warnings regarding an imminent attack on Pearl Harbor.
Sometimes the solution to a problem is really simple
People each have their own areas of specialty, and often a person likes to think that his/her area of specialty is more central to everything than it actually is. For example, if we were to ask three different types of engineers what the core functioning of a robot system is based on, we may get three different answers. The electrical engineer may say that the core functioning of a robot system is in the electronics. The mechanical engineer may say that the core functioning of a robot system is in the mechanics. The software engineer may say that the core functioning is in the software algorithms.
The “specialty” of highly intelligent people is in the complicated. Highly intelligent people can understand very complicated concepts that the majority of other people cannot understand. Because of this, a highly intelligent person may assume that the solution to a problem is more complicated than it actually is. When the solution to a problem is simple, the less intelligent people may be more effective at solving the problem than the more intelligent people. The more intelligent people are more likely to over-complicate things and over-analyze.
Wishful thinking
Highly intelligent people can still be prone to wishful thinking where beliefs are formed based on what one wants to be true rather than based on evidence or logic. For example, maybe a smart person will believe in God, not because there is evidence that God exists, but rather because the person feels better knowing that there is an all-knowing and loving intelligent creator watching over everything.
Conversely, someone may choose to believe that God does not exist because he/she does not like the idea of a place of eternal torment awaiting anyone who does not follow this God. Such people may rather live their lives whatever way they want than to live life in obedience to some God. Indeed, people sometimes adopt beliefs to meet some psychological need, and not for the purpose of finding any objective truth.
Arrogance multiplies the stupidity that intellectuals are prone to
As stated in (Stanovich et al., 2013), when highly intelligent study subjects were told to decouple their preconceived biases from their conclusions, they were able to come to conclusions that were less biased. These results indicate that while intelligent people are just as prone to preconceived biases as less intelligent people, they can overcome these tendencies by making a conscious effort to make judgments that are more based on sound reasoning and evidence even if these judgments go against their prior beliefs.
If the highly intelligent person is arrogant, however, such a person will be less likely to be aware of his/her limitations. He/she will be less likely to admit to him/herself that he/she has tendencies to be irrational in some circumstances. When we are in denial of our limitations, our denial certainly does not make those limitations go away! Rather, the impact of our limitations can increase because we are not making the effort to mitigate those limitations. Such is more likely to happen with arrogant people.
When people are of a gifted level of intelligence, they usually know it. Just knowing that they are of gifted intelligence can enhance any already-existing tendencies towards arrogance. In other words, their gifted intelligence gives them an additional “reason” to be arrogant. Their arrogance can then give them a false sense of immunity to irrationality, preconceived biases and other limitations.
In addition to being in denial of their limitations, arrogant intellectuals also have a stunted ability to learn from others. They are generally too busy judging others as being more inferior than they actually are. They do not understand that people less intelligent than they are can still have certain kinds of skills, knowledge and wisdom that they do not possess.
An arrogant intellectual is easy to spot. Arrogant intellectuals, in general, assume that they are smarter than anybody who crosses their path. When working in groups, arrogant intellectuals will often try to take over the project. They believe that their way is the best way and that their ideas are the best ideas. They will often go around telling everybody how to do things even when they do not know what they are talking about. They do not understand that although they are highly intelligent, they do not know everything. People around them, even if they are less intelligent, will still know more about certain things than they do.
This article from BBC discusses some of the problems that can arise when the smartest people are selected for top management positions. Enron is an example of a company that made the mistake of hiring the smartest guys for the management positions, and letting them run the highest-profit divisions in the company. As the article states, “The managers, despite their smarts, were an arrogant, insecure bunch who took wild chances and lost billions of dollars. The company dissolved in 2001.” Safer positions for intellectuals are researchers, analysts and coders who stay in a room working by themselves without the need for emotional intelligence or people skills.
High intelligence can exist in the absence of character
In my opinion, to have character means to be one’s own person rather than modeling oneself after everybody else. People with character are not afraid to be different, and they tend to stand up for their moral principles, even in the face of adversity.
Malcolm from the TV series Malcolm in the Middle is an example of what genius intelligence looks like with little to no character. While it is understandable for a young boy to want to fit in with his peers, Malcolm continues to be obsessed with being like everyone else as he gets older. His obsession with being “normal” is so great that he makes himself easily manipulated by people who are far less intelligent. At one point Malcolm is so obsessed with being accepted by the in-crowd that he almost decides to have sexual intercourse with a girl after she goes unconscious. He was afraid that the other kids may think that he is a wuss.
Malcolm’s mother, on the other hand, has possibly the greatest strength of character that I have seen of any character on television. Yet in Malcolm’s world, she is the crazy lady. To people like Malcolm, being strong-minded and not being afraid to stand up for one’s moral principles against the crowd comes across as lunacy. Malcolm would rather participate in a variety of wrongful behaviors just to fit in.
High intelligence cannot be of much benefit if one just wants to “be like everybody else”. Once we decide to be like everybody else, we place onto ourselves the obligation of conforming to the ways of others, no matter how wrong and stupid those ways are.
The movie Forrest Gump, in contrast, shows how great someone’s life can be even when someone is mentally retarded. Forrest Gump had an IQ not only below average, but below normal range. Despite this, he had a great life. He played college varsity football. He served in the army and received a medal for saving the lives of a number of his comrads. He got to appear on television with President Kennedy. He found his true love, Jenny. He took up running, and he got so good at running long distances that people would gather in groups and run with him. In my opinion, Malcolm engaged in more destructive and “stupid” behaviors than Forrest Gump ever did.
Summary
There are a variety of reasons for why highly intelligent people can still fail at life while much less intelligent people succeed and thrive. High intelligence does not offer protection from irrationality, immorality, group think or preconceived biases. Being highly intelligent also does not mean that one is going to have any more life wisdom than the next person. One can be highly intelligent and still not know what is most important in life or what priorities to set. Forrest Gump, in contrast, may have been mentally retarded, but he had great life wisdom that he learned from his mother. Meanwhile, highly intelligent people may still chase after things that will never make them happy, and may even wind up as losers, as is described in the Planet Loser blog post.
Being highly intelligent does not mean that one will succeed at one’s job. In fact, highly intelligent people can still be horrible people to have on a team in the workplace, especially when they are arrogant. Arrogant intellectuals can dismiss great ideas coming from their teammates and insist on their own ideas even if their own ideas are not the greatest. They can diminish workplace morale and in the long run can ruin productivity.
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