The Intelligence Trap: Revolutionise your Thinking and Make Wiser Decisions

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Mindfulness or the practice of being fully present and engaged in the moment can also help us overcome the intelligence trap by allowing us to focus on the current task and avoid distractions. I’m not even going to begin discussing why you might want to start off here by defining ‘intelligence’ – this book covers many of the problems with that more than adequately. Part 4 explores the reasons why talented groups can act stupidly — from the failings of the England football team to the crises of huge organisations like BP, Nokia, and NASA. If you’re in charge of a global team, someone with high cultural intelligence might be a good choice because they’ll be able to negotiate through many social conventions more easily.

When perceptions of overqualification fester, individuals become less productive at work and more prone to devious behaviors and distractibility due to feeling slighted by their employers. When it comes to making good decisions and solving problems, our slow brain is actually more effective than our fast brain. Fixed mindset involves the belief that our abilities and intelligence are fixed and cannot be changed. Abraham Lincoln’s capacity to listen to the dissenting voices in his cabinet — a ‘team of rivals’ — is famously thought to have been one of the reasons that he won the American Civil War — and it apparently inspired Barack Obama’s leadership strategy as president. The disconnect between personal and company impressions leads smart folks to believe they are overqualified (Liu et al.

Resilience is our ability to bounce back, turning adversities into opportunities, and leveraging setbacks as powerful lessons. A must read for all educators and anyone with an interest in cognitive science or personal development. It simply involves putting yourself in someone else’s shoes and imagining how you would feel and think if your situation, beliefs, and values were different than they are now.

The first step may be to consider self-knowledge, truthfulness, and other building blocks on the road to personal growth. The final stage of expertise, when we can pause and analyse our gut feelings, basing our decisions on both intuition and analysis. It takes just a handful of seconds, or a matter of moments, and it completely reopens my perspective again. In reality, most people assume that they are less vulnerable than other people, and this is equally true of the “smarter” participants.Each law, however, gets its own chapter: “Conceal Your Intentions,” “Always Say Less Than Necessary,” “Pose as a Friend, Work as a Spy,” and so on.

Similar processes were also the cause of the Challenger crash in 1986, which exploded due to a faulty seal. Robson concludes that wise decision-making for large organisations is similar to that in individuals:- Both should humbly accept their limits and the possibility of failure. People who believe in the paranormal rely on their gut feelings and intuitions to think about the sources of their beliefs, rather than reasoning in an analytical, critical way. When the going gets tough the smartest people rely on their intelligence alone to get through challenging situations. In outcome bias people dismiss a near miss, without reflection, because the outcome was benign, rather than taking it as a serious warning requiring urgent attention.Our brains tend to default to intuitive thinking because it is more efficient but it is important to engage rational thinking when facing complex problems or making important decisions. The lower the quantity on the wheel, the smaller their estimate—the arbitrary value had planted a figure in their mind, “anchoring” their judgment. Most intelligent people believe they are highly competent and as such have plenty of positive self-esteem.

According to de Bono, we can avoid the Intelligence Trap by exploring the positive, negative and interesting angles of any idea. One of my ‘friends’ posted a list of these benighted ones and also supplied their highest level of education beside a list of their anti-climate change claims. Part 2 presents solutions to these problems by introducing the new discipline of ‘evidence-based wisdom’ (EBW), which outlines those other thinking dispositions and cognitive abilities crucial for good reasoning. One common habit as seen in intelligent people is their ability to overestimate their assumptions on topics as they become more heuristics in nature.

This may be true for many people with vaguer, less well-defined beliefs, but there are some particular elements of Conan Doyle’s biography that suggest his behavior can’t be explained quite so simply. Psychological experiments have repeatedly revealed that our intuitions are generally wrong, that our assessments are based on biases and that our System 1 hates doubt and despises ambiguity.