The Intelligence Trap: Why Smart People do Stupid Things and How to Make Wiser Decisions by David Robson (Hodder & Stoughton 2019). Review by Robert M. Ellis

It is still common to hear people assuming that poor judgement is due to lack of intelligence, or that being intelligent somehow pre-destines you to success in the challenges of the world. A little reflection would make it clear that this cannot be the case. For instance, politics abounds with highly intelligent and highly educated people making stupid decisions (Dominic Cummings, the current power behind the British throne, especially springs to mind), whilst some of the major intellectual giants of recent history, such as Charles Darwin and Richard Feynman, have had only moderate IQs. ‘Intelligence’, as measured in IQ tests, is processing power, but tells you nothing about how that power is used in relation to the circumstances. There are many circumstances where super-intelligence is about as useful as a Lamborghini in a traffic jam.

David Robson’s excellent book starts off with this insight – namely that intelligence is not only not always useful, but sometimes can ‘trap’ us in dogmatism. The most intelligent can apply their processing power readily to rationalising their assumptions in sophisticated ways, but it doesn’t mean they will question their assumptions. This can have all kinds of effects. For instance, Robson tracks a class of super-intelligent children, with IQs up to 192, selected by researcher Lewis Terman – but few of them went on to achieve anything noteworthy. Arthur Conan Doyle, the creator of Sherlock Holmes, was famously taken in by a pair of children faking photographs of fairies, as well as being obsessed by spiritualism. Highly intelligent experts can make a series of easily preventable errors resulting in disasters like the Deepwater Horizon oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico, because of a failure to apply critical thinking.

However, there is more to this book than merely an expose of the ways that intelligence is overrated. For too long, in fact, I put this book aside on the assumption that this was the main focus. Since I already didn’t believe in the inflated assumptions made about intelligence, I assumed there was relatively little to be learned from it, but in this way may have got caught in a little intelligence trap of my own (what Robson calls ‘earned dogmatism’). When I did finally sit down to read it, I found that it was just as much, if not more, about the positive ways that we can “make wiser decisions”, as the subtitle puts it. What’s more, Robson avoids the limitations of how much of the discussion of “wiser decisions” is often framed – that is, solely in terms of “rationality”. He gives full recognition to the role of biases, the negative effects of specialisation, and the role of our awareness of emotional states (which can be enhanced through mindfulness and interoception). He incorporates the valuable research of Igor Grossmann as well as many other contemporary researchers, so the book also operates as a highly readable and up-to-date summary of some of the best recent research on judgement.

This makes the book a valuable resource for the practice of the Middle Way. Not only does it see off the big distraction that an obsession with intelligence can become if we over-rate it, but it also shows how poor judgement is rooted in the absolutisation of confirmation bias – an emotional as much as a ‘cognitive’ tendency. It also presents the evidence for how many aspects of Middle Way practice work. Mindfulness is discussed in its effects of making us aware of bodily states that are unconsciously recording the accrued effects of experience, thus enabling us to better distinguish between more and less reliable intuitions. Critical thinking is discussed in a way that shows how it needs to go beyond the mere analysis of ‘informal logic’, but showing the ways in which it needs to involve addressing biases and also assessing the credibility of our sources. In addition, Robson also discusses a number of other helpful practical approaches, such as intellectual humility in leadership, the value of not being taken in by satisfaction or a sense of closure as a mark of learning, and Benjamin Franklin’s systematic exercises in considering opposing views.

The book does, however, also have some limitations as a synthesis of recent research in relation to the conditions of judgement. The biggest of these, I think, is that there is no discussion of meaning, with no mention of the embodied meaning thesis of Lakoff and Johnson and its implications, and thus no awareness shown of the ways in which the meaning resources available to us can affect our judgement. There is thus also no mention of the role of the arts in aiding judgement (although the value of learning foreign languages is mentioned). Another hole is the lack of discussion of neuroscience, particularly the effects of brain lateralisation, and the implications that the over-dominance of the left hemisphere can have for ‘the intelligence trap’. This book is highly multi-disciplinary and admirable in that respect, but in my view not quite multi-disciplinary enough.

I also have reservations about a lot of the conventional language used to frame the debate about judgement, and, although he sees the limitations of some of the way it is used, Robson does not really question this language and its negative effects on our thinking. Central here for me would be the concepts of ‘knowledge’ and ‘rationality’, both of which continue to dominate the writings of most academics on this topic. Once we are starting to come to terms with the limitations of intelligence in merely processing our experience to produce ‘knowledge’, we also need to consider the implications of the sceptical arguments against ‘knowledge’ that philosophers have been unsuccessfully trying to rationalise their way out of for millennia. The interdependent inseparability of ‘reason’ and ’emotion’ should also alert us to the limitations of the whole idea of ‘rationality’, with its implicit assumptions of accurate processing, rather than recognition of increasingly adequate judgement as embodied, synthetic and dialectical.

However, one should not go on for too long about what authors fail to do, when this is often because they have not thought of it or considered it within their scope. What this book sets out to do within the scope it has, it does very well. It offers a rich fund of examples, a variety of approaches to good judgement, and the exposure of the persistent over-rating of intelligence. David Robson was also interviewed by Barry in the Middle Way Society podcast, and you can also listen to this for more of his own account of the book.