The Intelligence Trap: Why Smart People Make Dumb Mistakes
(Norton, $27) “Anyone who has spent time on a college campus has probably intuited that innate intelligence and common sense don’t necessarily go hand in hand,” said Emily Bobrow in The
Wall Street Journal. But David Robson’s new book is armed with specifics. The British science writer offers “a raft of studies” that show all the ways a fine mind can falter, and the howling blunders of many intellectual giants back him up. But we all could use better ways to think about thinking, especially in this age of partisanship and misinformation, and “Robson’s book would be a good place to start.”
He ought to examine his own thinking first, said Aron Barbey in ScienceMag.org. Much of Robson’s book advances a questionable argument: that people with high IQs are
possibly more prone to decision-making mistakes than people of average intelligence. But researchers have found no such thing; in fact, when they isolate IQ from decisionmaking skills, they find a high correlation between the two. Still, Robson is not wrong that smart people sometimes make big mistakes, and his engaging storytelling will awaken many readers to common mental traps, such as confirmation bias (curating evidence to fit preconceptions) and earned dogmatism (letting your expertise prevent you from considering alternate points of view). Among his many captivating examples: how Nobel winner Linus Pauling, the father of molecular biology, became convinced that vitamins could cure cancer.
Robson’s remedies might be even better, said James McConnachie in The Sunday Times (U.K.). His first tip? Slow down: Though we expect smart people to be “quick,” the intuitive answer isn’t always the right one. A pause can provide time to run through some useful checks. He’s also great on both how to stay curious and the value of struggle in learning, and he makes every insight feel exciting and cutting-edge. Still, any reader who remembers the ancient Greeks might find his advice familiar. “Curiosity, intellectual humility, reflectiveness, autonomy? It sounds like good old-fashioned skepticism.”