Wisdom is far different from intelligence. Wisdom is seeing things as they actually are, without any bias, prejudice or pre-conceptions. Wisdom, therefore, is associated with intellectual humility (one genuinely knows one's own mind level and abilities). Wisdom is also associated with no self.
Important to remember:
"The harsh truth is that greater
intelligence does not equate to wiser decisions."
"People who ace cognitive tests are more likely to see past their own flaws."
"ready to admit the limits of
[their] knowledge – [their] “intellectual humility.”
"simply talking through your problems in the third person (“he”
or “she”, rather than “I”) helps create the necessary emotional distance,
reducing your prejudices and leading to wiser arguments. ....
The challenge will be getting people to admit their own foibles. If you’ve
been able to rest on the laurels of your intelligence all your life, it could
be very hard to accept that it has been blinding your judgement. As Socrates
had it: the wisest person really may be the one who can admit he knows nothing."
Source:
http://www.bbc.com/future/story/20150413-the-downsides-of-being-clever
The
surprising downsides of being clever
Can high intelligence be a burden
rather than a boon? David Robson investigates.
By
David Robson
14 April 2015
If ignorance is bliss, does a high
IQ equal misery? Popular opinion would have it so. We tend to think of geniuses
as being plagued by existential angst, frustration, and loneliness. Think of
Virginia Woolf, Alan Turing, or Lisa Simpson – lone stars, isolated even as
they burn their brightest. As Ernest Hemingway wrote: “Happiness in intelligent
people is the rarest thing I know.”
The harsh truth is that greater
intelligence does not equate to wiser decisions
The question may seem like a trivial
matter concerning a select few – but the insights it offers could have
ramifications for many. Much of our education system is aimed at improving
academic intelligence; although its limits are well known, IQ is still the
primary way of measuring cognitive abilities, and we spend millions on brain
training and cognitive enhancers that try to improve those scores. But what if
the quest for genius is itself a fool’s errand?
Anxiety can be common among the highly intelligent
(Credit: Thinkstock)
The first steps to answering these questions were taken almost a century
ago, at the height of the American Jazz Age. At the time, the new-fangled IQ
test was gaining traction, after proving itself in World War One recruitment
centres, and in 1926, psychologist Lewis Terman decided to use it to identify
and study a group of gifted children. Combing California’s schools for the
creme de la creme, he selected 1,500 pupils with an IQ of 140 or more – 80 of
whom had IQs above 170. Together, they became known as the “Termites”, and the
highs and lows of their lives are still being studied to this day.
The Termites’ average salary was twice that of the average white-collar job
As you might expect, many of the Termites did achieve wealth and fame – most
notably Jess Oppenheimer, the writer of the classic 1950s sitcom
I Love Lucy. Indeed, by the
time his series aired on CBS, the Termites’ average salary was
twice
that of the average white-collar job. But not all the group met Terman’s
expectations – there were many who pursued more “humble” professions such as
police officers, seafarers, and typists. For this reason, Terman concluded that
“intellect and achievement are far from perfectly correlated”. Nor did their
smarts endow personal happiness. Over the course of their lives, levels of
divorce,
alcoholism and suicide were about the same as the national average.
It's lonely being smart (Credit: Thinkstock)
As the Termites enter their dotage, the moral of their story – that
intelligence does not equate to a better life – has been told again and again.
At best, a great intellect makes no differences to your life satisfaction; at
worst,
it
can actually mean you are less fulfilled.
That’s not to say that everyone with a high IQ is a tortured genius, as
popular culture might suggest – but it is nevertheless puzzling. Why don’t the
benefits of sharper intelligence pay off in the long term?
A weighty burden
One possibility is that knowledge of your talents becomes something of a
ball and chain. Indeed, during the 1990s, the surviving Termites were asked to
look back at the events in their 80-year lifespan. Rather than basking in their
successes, many reported that they had been plagued by the sense that they had
somehow
failed to live up
to their youthful expectations.
Early achievers don't always go on
to be successful (Credit: Thinkstock)
Sufiah Yusof, a child prodigy,
enrolled at Oxford aged 12 but later dropped out and worked as a call girl.
Another common complaint, often
heard in student bars and internet
forums, is that smarter people somehow have a clearer vision of the world’s
failings. Whereas the rest of us are blinkered from existential angst, smarter
people lay awake agonising over the human condition or other people’s folly.
Constant worrying may, in fact, be a
sign of intelligence – but not in the way these armchair philosophers had
imagined. Interviewing students on campus about various topics of discussion,
Alexander Penney at MacEwan University in Canada found that those with the
higher IQ did indeed feel
more anxiety throughout the day. Interestingly, most worries were mundane,
day-to-day concerns, though; the high-IQ students were far more likely to be
replaying an awkward conversation, than asking the “big questions”. “It’s not
that their worries were more profound, but they are just worrying more often
about more things,” says Penney. “If something negative happened, they thought
about it more.”
Probing more deeply, Penney found
that this seemed to correlate with verbal intelligence – the kind tested by
word games in IQ tests, compared to prowess at spatial puzzles (which, in fact,
seemed to reduce the risk of anxiety). He speculates that greater eloquence
might also make you more
likely to verbalise anxieties and ruminate over them. It’s not necessarily a
disadvantage, though. “Maybe they were problem-solving a bit more than most
people,” he says – which might help them to learn from their mistakes.
Mental blind spots
The harsh truth, however, is that
greater intelligence does not equate to
wiser decisions; in fact, in some cases it might make your choices a little
more foolish. Keith Stanovich at the University of Toronto has spent the last
decade building tests for rationality, and he has found that fair, unbiased
decision-making is largely independent of IQ. Consider the “my-side bias” – our
tendency to be highly selective in the information we collect so that it
reinforces our previous attitudes. The more enlightened approach would be to
leave your assumptions at the door as you build your argument – but
Stanovich found that
smarter people are almost no more likely to do so than people with
distinctly average IQs.
People who ace cognitive tests are more likely to see past their own flaws
That’s not all. People who ace standard cognitive tests are in fact slightly
more likely to have a “bias blind spot”. That is,
they
are less able to see their own flaws, even when though they are quite capable
of criticising the foibles of others. And they have a greater tendency to
fall for the
“gambler’s
fallacy” – the idea that if a tossed coin turns heads 10 times, it will be
more likely to fall tails on the 11th. The fallacy has been the ruination of
roulette players planning for a red after a string of blacks, and it can also
lead stock investors to sell their shares before they reach peak value – in the
belief that their luck has to run out sooner or later.
Members of high IQ society Mensa are not immune to belief
in the paranormal (Credit: Thinkstock)
A tendency to rely on gut instincts rather than rational thought might also
explain why a surprisingly high number of
Mensa
members believe in the paranormal; or why someone with an IQ of 140 is about
twice
as likely to max out their credit card.
Indeed, Stanovich sees these biases in every strata of society. “There is
plenty of dysrationalia – people doing irrational things despite more than
adequate intelligence – in our world today,” he says. “The people pushing the
anti-vaccination meme on parents and spreading misinformation on websites are
generally of more than average intelligence and education.”
Clearly, clever
people can be dangerously, and foolishly, misguided.
People with an IQ above 140 are twice as likely to
overspend on their credit card (Credit: Thinkstock)
So if intelligence doesn’t lead to rational decisions and a better life,
what does?
Igor Grossmann, at the University of Waterloo in Canada, thinks we
need to turn our minds to an age-old concept: “wisdom”. His approach is more
scientific that it might at first sound.
“The concept of wisdom has an ethereal
quality to it,” he admits. “But if you look at the lay definition of wisdom,
many people would agree it’s the idea of someone who can make good unbiased
judgement.”
In one experiment, Grossmann presented his volunteers with different social
dilemmas – ranging from what to do about the war in Crimea to heartfelt crises
disclosed to
Dear
Abby, the Washington Post’s agony aunt. As the volunteers talked, a panel
of psychologists judged their reasoning and weakness to bias: whether it was a
rounded argument, whether the candidates were
ready to admit the limits of
their knowledge – their “intellectual humility” – and whether they were
ignoring important details that didn’t fit their theory.High achievers tend to lament opportunities missed in
their lives (Credit: Thinkstock) High scores turned out to predict
greater life
satisfaction, relationship quality, and, crucially, reduced anxiety and
rumination – all the qualities that seem to be absent in classically smart
people.
Wiser reasoning even seemed to ensure a longer life – those with the
higher scores were less likely to die over intervening years. Crucially,
Grossmann found that IQ was not related to any of these measures, and certainly
didn’t predict greater wisdom. “People who are very sharp may generate, very
quickly, arguments [for] why their claims are the correct ones – but may do it
in a very biased fashion.”
Learnt wisdom
In the future, employers may well begin to start testing these abilities in
place of IQ;
Google
has already announced that it plans to screen candidates for qualities like
intellectual humility, rather than sheer cognitive prowess.
Fortunately, wisdom is probably not set in stone – whatever your IQ score.
“I’m a strong believer that wisdom can be trained,” says Grossmann. He points
out that we often find it easier to leave our biases behind when we consider
other people, rather than ourselves. Along these lines, he has found that
simply talking through your problems in the third person (“he”
or “she”, rather than “I”) helps create the necessary emotional distance,
reducing your prejudices and leading to wiser arguments. Hopefully, more
research will suggest many similar tricks.
The challenge will be getting people to admit their own foibles. If you’ve
been able to rest on the laurels of your intelligence all your life, it could
be very hard to accept that it has been blinding your judgement. As Socrates
had it: the wisest person really may be the one who can admit he knows nothing.
