Why Smart People Can Be So Stupid

Robert J. Sternberg, Robert J. Sternberg

• Publisher: Yale University Press
• Year: 2002
• ISBN:
  9780300128208
• Topic: Psychology
• Subtopic: Cognitive Psychology & Cognition
• Index: Psychology

"A serious attempt to understand a common phenomenon" from the author of The Nature of Human Intelligence ( Psychology Today ). One need not look far to find breathtaking acts of stupidity committed by people who are smart, or even brilliant. The behavior of clever individuals—from presidents to prosecutors to professors—is at times so amazingly stupid as to seem inexplicable. Why do otherwise intelligent people think and behave in ways so stupid that they sometimes destroy their livelihoods or even their lives? This is an investigation of psychological research to see what it can tell us about stupidity in everyday life. The contributors to the volume—scholars in various areas of human intelligence—present examples of people messing up their lives, and offer insights into the reasons for such behavior. From a variety of perspectives, the contributors discuss:

• The nature and theory of stupidity
• How stupidity contributes to stupid behavior
• Whether stupidity is measurable.

While many millions of dollars are spent each year on intelligence research and testing to determine who has the ability to succeed, next to nothing is spent to determine who will make use of their intelligence and not squander it by behaving stupidly. The contributors focus on the neglected side of this discussion, reviewing the full range of theory and research on stupid behavior and analyzing what it tells us about how people can avoid stupidity and its devastating consequences. "Marvelous, devilishly clever, and culturally timely book... A fascinating exploration." — Choice "Easily readable and well referenced... May provide just enough momentum for change." — International Journal of Intelligence

RAY HYMAN

1 Why and When Are Smart People Stupid?

The Issue

The title of this book, Why Smart People Can Be So Stupid, assumes that smart people at least sometimes do stupid things. In addition, the title implies that such stupid behavior needs explaining. The first challenge to anyone who tries to provide an explanation is that the title is phrased in terms from the common vernacular. The key words smart and stupid belong to folk psychology. As such, their meanings are vague, ambiguous, and shift with person and context.

The term smart can be equated with the psychological concept of intelligence. This, in fact, is what the contributors to this volume seem to have done. Indeed, this may be the one matter upon which all these authors are in agreement. Unfortunately, the term stupid seems to have no obvious technical counterpart in psychological theory. One consequence is that the authors differ greatly on how they treat this concept.

The title makes it clear that smartness is a property of people. It is an enduring property of a person. A person who is “smart” today is expected to be smart tomorrow and into the foreseeable future. Of course, at least some of the authors make it clear that they do not consider intelligence to be fixed. People can, with effort and proper instruction, improve their intelligence. However, quick changes and major fluctuations in intelligence are rare.

Stupidity, on the other hand, can be a property of an act, behavior, state, or person. We might believe that the act of smoking is stupid regardless of the intent, motivations, and construals of the people doing the smoking. Although I believe that many people apply the label of “stupid” to acts in this way, I suspect that none of the contributors to this book consider this usage. The hint of a paradox in this book’s title resides in the possibility that “stupid” is being used as a property of a person. Because, with one exception, all the authors treat stupid as the opposite of smart; handling both these terms as properties of the person implies that the same person is both smart and stupid at the same time. So, at first blush, the title seems to pose a paradox. This, in turn, suggests a puzzle to be solved.

One way to resolve this paradox is implicit in the chapters by Wagner, Sternberg, and possibly a few others. This resolution is to treat intelligence and stupidity as domain-dependent. Thus, the same person could be smart in her professional life and stupid in her personal affairs. A more interesting way to dissolve the apparent paradox is to treat stupidity as a state or a property of behavior. This would allow for a person who is generally smart in her professional life to occasionally behave stupidly in that same professional life. Indeed, it is this latter scenario that most of the contributors to this book seem to have in mind.

All the authors focus on the behavior of smart people. This leaves open the question of whether dumb (unintelligent) people can be stupid. This is both tricky and nontrivial. I think it is fair to say that most of the contributors treat stupidity as a failure of the actor to optimally use her abilities or cognitive capacity. Although this makes sense, it also seems to be at variance with the common assumption that stupidity is a manifestation of low intelligence. If stupidity is treated as a discrepancy between actual and potential behavior, then it cannot be the case that a person who behaves in a maladaptive fashion and who is using the full potential of her low intellectual abilities is acting stupidly.

Points of Agreement and Disagreement

Most of the authors accept the challenge of answering the question of why smart people can be stupid. Both Perkins and Ayduk and Mischel deal with the matter as a failure of self-regulation. Stupid behavior, in their treatments, comes about when activity is triggered at an inappropriate time in an inappropriate situation or when the actor fails to suppress an immediate gratification in the pursuit of a more important, but longer-range, objective. For Dweck, stupidity follows from failure to fully use one’s capabilities and failure to exploit opportunities for learning. These failures, in turn, seem to follow from a belief in fixed intelligence and a defensive avoidance of tackling tasks that could lead to poor performance. Both Stanovich and Austin and Deary look for causes of stupidity in personality and other dispositional aspects of the individual, independent of intelligence. Both Wagner and Grigorenko and Lockery also find stupidity at the level of social systems. Halpern attributes the stupidity of Bill Clinton’s handling of the revelation of his affair with Monica Lewinsky to his failure to recognize changes in the environment and his reliance on old habits (mindlessness).

Three strikingly different ways of resolving the apparent paradox are evident in the chapters by Stanovich, Moldoveanu and Langer, and Sternberg, respectively. While most of the authors treat “stupid” as the opposite of “smart” (intelligent), Stanovich argues for the advantages of treating stupid as the opposite of rational. Following the lead of some other cognitive scientists, Stanovich considers mental functioning at three levels. The first, or biological level, deals with the “hardware” or implementation of activity. The second level, algorithmic, corresponds to the cognitive capabilities of the system. Stanovich locates smartness or intelligence at this level. The third level, the intentional one, is where thinking dispositions, goal setting, coping styles, and the like are found. Here is where it makes sense to speak of rational or stupid behaviors. Stupidity, in this analysis, follows from a failure to use the cognitive abilities at level two in the pursuit of goals (pragmatic or epistemic).

Moldoveanu and Langer focus on the inappropriate use of the label “stupid.” They argue that many apparent cases of stupidity result from the mindless labeling of actors by observers. They also discuss apparent stupidity stemming from mindless interactive pursuits of scripts (such as teacher-pupil scripts), and from the mindless assimilation by the actor of social biases. They argue that most, if not all, the research in which subjects fail to act according to normative standards does not justify the implication that the subjects’ behavior is “irrational” or that humans are “cognitive cripples.” Such implications merely reflect the failure of mindless experimenters to recognize that their subjects might be processing the given information differently from the way they do. Moldoveanu and Langer believe that when proper consideration of the way subjects have construed the problem is taken into account, their rationality will be vindicated. They propose that if we substitute the mindful/mindless continuum for the intelligent/nonintelligent one, the temptation to label people and behaviors as stupid will vanish.

Sternberg dissolves the paradox by simply denying that smart people can be stupid. Instead, in contrast to Stanovich, Sternberg seems to accept that stupid is the opposite of smart. However, he changes the issue from why smart people can be so stupid to why smart people can be so foolish. In this context, foolish is the opposite of wise. This enables him to bring to bear his balance theory of wisdom and his imbalance theory of foolishness. In this light, Clinton’s behavior in the Lewinsky aftermath might not have been stupid, but it certainly was foolish. Sternberg agrees with Halpern, that Clinton’s inappropriate behavior (“stupid” in Halpern’s story and “foolish” in Stern-berg’s account) resulted from defects in reading situational cues.

Moldoveanu and Langer stand out as the only authors to reject the ecological validity of the heuristics and biases research. They imply that this research has no bearing upon real-world behavior. Stanovich, on the other hand, lists several examples of how these same laboratory-discovered biases operate in the real world—physicians’ diagnoses, risk assessment, legal issues, and so on. Wagner, Halpern, and Grigorenko and Lockery explicitly acknowledge the reality of these biases in real life, while the other contributors seem to implicitly accept this extension.

The apparent disagreements among the authors can be traced, in part, to the ambiguities in the terms smart and stupid. The authors differ in just how they define and map these terms onto psychological constructs. The major source of apparent disagreement, however, results from the different exemplars, contexts, and examples that the authors use as their referents for stupidity. Most of them dismiss examples of “stupidity” resulting from lack of information, momentary lapses, fatigue, and simple “performance” executions as uninteresting. Some impulsive actions, such as a truck driver who tries to beat a train at a railroad crossing, and the failure of children to postpone gratification, are the focus of at least two chapters. The Clinton-Lewinsky affair receives prominent attention in two other chapters. Managerial incompetence, the Iran-Contra affair, smoking, Chechnya, teacher-student perceptions, stereotyping of learning disabilities, and social follies such as Vietnam and the Rodney King affair are other examples used by different authors in their explorations of stupidity.

Adaptive and maladaptive behaviors occur in an enormous variety of contexts and situations. Each of these contexts can raise a variety of different issues. In all of them, some behaviors seem to be so irresponsible, heedless, thoughtless, negligent, or outrageous that they invite the label “stupid.” Perhaps, as Moldoveanu and Langer imply, it would be better if we avoided using this pejorative label. However, if we abandon it, I suspect we will find that we will need some equivalent way to identify those acts that go beyond mere mindlessness. Not all goofs are created equal.

In his classic The Mentality of Apes, Wolfgang Köhler (1959) identified three kinds of errors in his extensive observations of chimpanzees solving problems:

1. “Good errors.” “In these, the animal does not make a stupid, but rather an almost favourable impression, if only the observer can get right away from preoccupation with human achievements, and concentrate only on the nature of the behaviour observed.”

2. “Errors caused by complete lack of comprehension of the conditions of the task.” “This can be seen when the animals, in putting a box higher up, will take it from a statically good position and put it into a bad one. The impression one gets in such cases is that of a certain innocent limitation.”

3. “Crude stupidities arising from habit.” “In situations which the animal ought to be able to survey. . . . Such behaviour is extremely annoying—it almost makes one angry, . . . This kind of behaviour never arises unless a similar procedure often took place beforehand as a real and genuine solution. The stupidities are not accidental ‘natural’ fractions, from which primarily apparent solutions can arise . . . they are the after-effects of former genuine solutions, which were often repeated, and so developed a tendency to appear secondarily in later experiments, without much consideration for the special situation. The preceding conditions for such mistakes seem to be drowsiness, exhaustion, colds, or even excitement” (pp. 173–174).

Köhler was a staunch defender of animal intelligence. His book is a spirited rebuttal to Thorndike’s attempt to account for all animal “reasoning” in terms of blind trial and error. Yet, we see that Köhler feels compelled to label some chimpanzee behaviors as “stupid.” Indeed, he needs this label precisely because he recognizes that other chimpanzee behavior can be insightful and intelligent in the context of the chimpanzee’s world. Likewise, we do not defame human cognition by recognizing some cognitive actions as stupid. It is only because we acknowledge that human cognition is usually rational and adaptive that we can identify some departures from this rational and adaptive behavior as stupid.

I previously mentioned how the apparent differences in the approaches to stupidity by the various contributor to this book are due to their use of different referents. So it might be helpful to briefly discuss a few more examples of goofs or maladaptive behavior to strengthen our grasp of the many issues arising from this consideration of why smart people can be so stupid.

Some Additional Candidates for Stupid Behavior

At times a patently smart person can blunder or go badly astray. Every field of human activity provides a multitude of examples of such behavior. Each example, in turn, suggests a number of possible reasons for departures from rational or sensible behavior. Here, I look at some examples beyond those discussed by the contributors to this volume in order to see how their discussions might help us understand these additional cases.

LEVERRIER AND THE PLANET VULCAN

On September 23, 1846, astronomers Galle and d’Arrest, both from Berlin, announced the discovery of a new planet, which was later named Neptune. The remarkable thing about this discovery was that the astronomers made their discovery by aiming their telescope at a location in the sky based on the mathematical calculations of the French astronomer Urbain Jean Joseph Leverrier. Leverrier had become interested in the problem of the orbit of the recently discovered planet Uranus. The perceived sightings of Uranus seemed to deviate somewhat from the orbit calculated from Newtonian mechanics. Some contemporary astronomers proposed various possibilities to account for this discrepancy such as unseen satellites or other planets. Some even suggested that Newton’s inverse square law might not hold for the farther reaches of space. As a strict Newtonian, Leverrier began his attack on the problem with the firm belief that Newton’s laws were inviolate (Grosser 1979; Hanson 1962).

The problem became one of squaring the reported locations of Uranus with the orbit predicted by Newtonian theory. Leverrier reexamined both the old and later sightings of Uranus. He recalculated the orbits from the data and discovered that previous astronomers had made several errors. Nevertheless, after correcting for these errors, he still found a small but real discrepancy between the observed and predicted locations for the planet. After considering and eliminating several possibilities, he surmised that the observed perturbation of the orbit was due to a previously undetected planet farther away from the sun than Uranus. His task then became to determine the size and orbit of this possible planet. This problem was inherently difficult because of several unknowns. After time-consuming and enormously difficult and sophisticated calculations, Leverrier announced the size, distance from the sun, orbit, and predicted locations for this hypothetical planet.

At first he could not persuade the major French and British observatories to look for his predicted planet. He finally convinced Galle to look for it where his calculations predicted it should be. A few days after receiving the coordinates from Leverrier, Galle and his colleague looked and found the new planet very close to where Leverrier had predicted it to be. Some luck was involved because Leverrier’s orbit deviated in parts from Neptune’s actual orbit. However, at the time of the sighting, Neptune’s actual orbit and Leverrier’s predicted orbit overlapped. With the discovery of Neptune, Leverrier became an instant celebrity. He was lionized as the second Newton and was honored by the major scientific societies throughout Europe. What especially intrigued his scientific colleagues was that Leverrier had made this important discovery without himself making any observations. The famous French astronomer Claude Flammarion wrote that Leverrier “discovered a star with the tip of his pen, without other instrument than the strength of his calculations alone” (quoted in Baum and Sheehan 1997, p. 2).

Leverrier was thirty-five years old when he achieved one of the greatest triumphs for Newtonian mechanics. To discover Neptune, he relied on Newton’s theory and almost superhuman mathematical calculations. Prior to the discovery of Neptune, Leverrier had discovered a perturbation in the orbit of Mercury. The discrepancy was very small, but he could not explain it away as simply an error. Fresh from his triumph of reconciling the perturbation in Uranus’ orbit with Newtonian mechanics, Leverrier set about to do the same for the disturbance in Mercury’s orbit. He worked on this problem another thirteen years before he was ready to announce his prediction of a new planet closer to the sun than Mercury. This planet would help to account for the perturbations in Mercury’s orbit (Baum & Sheehan 1997; Fernie 1994; Fontenrose 1973; Hanson 1962).

Leverrier announced his new theory about a hidden planet inside Mercury’s orbit on September 12, 1859. On December 22 of that same year, Edmonde Lescarbault, a physician and amateur astronomer from the rural district of Orgères, wrote a letter to Leverrier claiming that he had observed the very same planet described by Leverrier in March of that year. Leverrier visited Lescarbault, unannounced, and questioned him carefully to judge his honesty and competence. Although Leverrier discovered that Lescarbault had used crude instrumentation and had carelessly kept his records, he decided that Lescarbault was honest and sufficiently competent to have spotted the previously hidden planet. Leverrier arranged to have Lescarbault receive the Legion of Honor. He also named the new planet Vulcan.

The announcement of the discovery of Vulcan created a sensation. This was considered a second great triumph for the genius Leverrier. Leverrier made new calculations regarding the size and orbit of Vulcan and advised the astronomical world when and where to look to best view this new planet. At the appointed time, astronomers—both professional and amateur—around the world looked for Vulcan and failed to find it. Leverrier made new calculations and sent out new advisories about where and when to look. Again, no credible sightings occurred. During the next several years, this drama kept repeating itself. Leverrier would make new calculations and send out new instructions. Astronomers would aim their telescopes at the new coordinates and find nothing. On occasion, one or two professional astronomers and some amateurs did report sighting what they believed was the planet Vulcan. In most cases, the reports were inconsistent with one another and with Leverrier’s calculations.

Leverrier issued his last alert in 1877, the same year he died. He strongly maintained his belief in the reality of Vulcan right up to his death. By that time, however, most of the astronomical world no longer believed that either Vulcan or any other planetary matter lay between Mercury and the sun. Nevertheless, the problem of the perturbation in Mercury’s orbit persisted. Finally, in 1915, Einstein published his general theory of relativity, which triumphantly accounted for the orbit of Mercury. Hanson (1962) succinctly encapsulates Leverrier’s rise to fame and descent to ignomy in the following words:

Who else can be said to have raised a scientific theory to its pinnacle of achievement—and then shortly later, to have discovered those discrepancies which dashed the theory to defeat? By pressing Newton’s mechanics to the limit of its capacities to explain and predict, Leverrier revealed Uranus’ aberrations as intelligible; he also predicted the existence of the then-unseen planet Neptune, which has just those properties required dynamically to explain Uranus’ misbehavior. In history few have approached Leverrier’s achievement as a human resolution of an intricate natural problem. When he detected a somewhat analogous misbehavior in Mercury, Leverrier naturally pressed the same pattern of explanation into service. He calculated, via the law of gravitation, the elements of some as-yet-unseen planet which would do for Mercury just what Neptune had done for Uranus. In this Leverrier failed. In a sense, his failure was one for Newtonian mechanics itself. (p. 359)

Halpern’s analysis of why President Clinton believed he could have an affair with Monica Lewinsky and remain unscathed can be applied...