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Offer closes 26 August 2020.opinion. While these biases may help our thinking in
certain situations, they can derail our judgement if we
rely on them uncritically. For this reason, the inability to
recognise or resist them is at the root of stupidity.
Think rationally
To truly understand human stupidity you need a separate
test that examines our susceptibility to bias. One candidate
is a test called a rationality quotient, which assesses our
ability to side-step cognitive bias and work out the
likelihood that certain things will happen.
So what determines whether you have a naturally high
rationality quotient? More than anything, it depends on
something called metacognition, which is the ability to
assess the validity of your own knowledge. People with a
high rationality quotient have acquired strategies that boost
this self-awareness.
But even the most rational among us can be tripped up by
circumstances beyond our control. Emotional distractions
are the biggest cause of error. Feelings like grief or anxiety
clutter up your working memory, leaving fewer resources for
assessing the world around you. To cope, you may find
yourself falling back on your intuition.
Group stupidity
In the end, no one is immune to the biases that lead to
stupid decisions. Yet our reverence for IQ and education
means that it is easy to rest on the laurels of our
qualifications and assume that we are, by definition,
not stupid.
That can be damaging on a personal level: regardless of
IQ , people who score badly on rationality tests are more
likely, for instance, to fall into debt. Large-scale stupidity is
even more damaging. Business cultures that inadvertently
encourage it may have contributed to the 2008 economic
crisis. 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.
Most researchers agree that, overall, the correlation
between intelligence and successful decision-making is
weak. The exception is when people are warned that they
might be vulnerable to bias, in which case those with high
IQs tend to do better. This is because while clever people
don’t always reason more than others, when they do reason
they reason better. Which just goes to say that we should all
try to be a little more aware of how we make decisions –
because you are probably more stupid than you think.
on’t accept the first thing that pops into your head. ❚