The Intelligence Trap

by David Robson

  To find out, he first designed a scale that tested his participants’ science curiosity, which included questions about their normal reading habits (whether they would read about science for pleasure), whether they kept up to date with scientific news, and how often they would talk about science with friends or family. Strikingly, he found that some people had a large knowledge but low curiosity – and vice versa. And that finding would be crucial for explaining the next stage of the experiment, when Kahan asked the participants to give their views on politically charged subjects such as climate change.

  As he had previously shown, greater knowledge of science only increased polarisation between left and right. But this was not true for curiosity, which reduced the differences. Despite the prevailing views of most conservative thinkers, more curious Republicans were more likely to endorse the scientific consensus on global warming, for instance.

  It seemed that their natural hunger for understanding had overcome their prejudices, so that they were readier to seek out material that challenged their views. Sure enough, when given the choice between two articles, the more curious participants were more willing to read a piece that challenged rather than reinforced their ideology. ‘They displayed a marked preference for novel information, even when it was contrary to their political predispositions’, Kahan wrote in the accompanying paper.40 In other words, their curiosity allowed the evidence to seep through those ‘logic-tight compartments’ that normally protect the beliefs that are closest to our identities.

  Kahan admits to being ‘baffled’ by the results; he told me that he had fully expected that the ‘gravitational pull’ of our identities would have overpowered the lure of curiosity. But it makes sense when you consider that curiosity helps us to tolerate uncertainty. Whereas incurious people feel threatened by surprise, curious people relish the mystery. They enjoy being taken aback; finding out something new gives them that dopamine kick. And if that new information raises even more questions, they’ll rise to the bait. This makes them more open-minded and willing to change their opinions, and stops them becoming entrenched in dogmatic views.

  In ongoing research, Kahan has found similar patterns for opinions on issues such as firearm possession, illegal immigration, the legalisation of marijuana and the influence of pornography. In each case, the itch to find out something new and surprising reduced the polarisation of people’s opinions.41

  Further cutting-edge studies reveal that the growth mindset can protect us from dogmatic reasoning in a similar way, by increasing our intellectual humility. Studying for a doctorate under the supervision of Carol Dweck at Stanford University, Tenelle Porter first designed and tested a scale of intellectual humility, asking participants to rate statements such as ‘I am willing to admit if I don’t know something’, ‘I actively seek feedback on my ideas, even if it is critical’ or ‘I like to compliment others on their intellectual strengths.’ To test whether their answers reflect their behaviour, Porter showed that their scores also corresponded to the way they react to disagreement on issues like gun control – whether they would seek and process contradictory evidence.

  She then separated the participants into two groups. Half read a popular science article that emphasised the fact that our brains are malleable and capable of change, priming the growth mindset, while the others read a piece that described how our potential is innate and fixed. Porter then measured their intellectual humility. The experiment worked exactly as she had hoped: learning about the brain’s flexibility helped to promote a growth mindset, and this in turn produced greater humility, compared to those who had been primed with the fixed mindset.42

  Porter explained it to me like this: ‘If you have the fixed mindset, you are all the time trying to find out where you stand in the hierarchy; everyone’s ranked. If you’re at the top, you don’t want to fall or be taken down from the top, so any sign or suggestion that you don’t know something or that someone knows more than you – it’s threatening to dethrone you.’ And so, to protect your position, you become overly defensive. ‘You dismiss people’s ideas with the notion that “I know better so I don’t have to listen to what you have to say.” ’

  In the growth mindset, by contrast, you’re not so worried about proving your position relative to those around you, and your knowledge doesn’t represent your personal value. ‘What’s more, you are motivated to learn because it makes you smarter, so it is a lot easier to admit what you don’t know. It doesn’t threaten to pull you down from any kind of hierarchy.’

  Igor Grossmann, incidentally, has come to similar conclusions in one of his most recent studies, showing that the growth mindset is positively correlated with his participants’ everyday wise reasoning scores.43

  Feynman, with his curiosity and growth mindset, certainly saw no shame in admitting his own limitations – and welcomed this intellectual humility in others. ‘I can live with doubt, and uncertainty, and not knowing. I think it’s much more interesting to live not knowing anything than to have answers which might be wrong,’ he told the BBC in 1981. ‘I have approximate answers, and possible beliefs, and different degrees of certainty about different things, but I’m not absolutely sure of anything.’44

  This was also true of Benjamin Franklin. He was famously devoted to the development of virtues, seeing the human mind as a malleable object that could be moulded and honed. And his many ‘scientific amusements’ spanned the invention of the electric battery, the contagion of the common cold, the physics of evaporation and the physiological changes that come with exercise. As the historian Edward Morgan put it: ‘Franklin never stopped considering things he could not explain. He could not drink a cup of tea without wondering why tea leaves gathered in one configuration rather than another.’45 For Franklin, like Feynman, the reward was always in the discovery of new knowledge itself, and without that endlessly inquisitive attitude, he may have been less open-minded in his politics too.

  And Darwin? His hunger to understand did not end with the publication of On the Origin of Species, and he maintained a lengthy correspondence with sceptics and critics. He was capable of thinking independently while also always engaging with and occasionally learning from others’ arguments.

  These qualities may be more crucial than ever in today’s fast-moving world. As the journalist Tad Friend noted in the New Yorker: ‘In the nineteen-twenties, an engineer’s “half-life of knowledge”—the time it took for half of his expertise to become obsolete—was thirty-five years. In the nineteen-sixties, it was a decade. Now it’s five years at most, and, for a software engineer, less than three.’46

  Porter agrees that children today need to be better equipped to update their knowledge. ‘To learn well may be more important than knowing any particular subject or having any particular skill set. People are moving in and out of different careers a lot, and because we’re globalising we are exposed to lots of different perspectives and ways of doing things.’

  She points out that some companies, such as Google, have already announced that they are explicitly looking for people who combine passion with qualities like intellectual humility, instead of traditional measures of academic success like a high IQ or Grade Point Average. ‘Without humility, you are unable to learn,’ Laszlo Bock, the senior vice president of people operations for Google, told the New York Times.47

  ‘Successful bright people rarely experience failure, and so they don’t learn how to learn from that failure,’ he added. ‘They, instead, commit the fundamental attribution error, which is if something good happens, it’s because I’m a genius. If something bad happens, it’s because someone’s an idiot or I didn’t get the resources or the market moved . . . What we’ve seen is that the people who are the most successful here, who we want to hire, will have a fierce position. They’ll argue like hell. They’ll be zealots about their point of view. But then you say, “here’s a new fact”, and they’ll go, “Oh, well, that changes things; you’re right.” ’

  Bock’s comments show u
s that there is now a movement away from considering SAT scores and the like as the sum total of our intellectual potential. But the old and new ways of appraising the mind do not need to be in opposition, and in Chapter 8 we will explore how some of the world’s best schools already cultivate these qualities and the lessons they can teach us all about the art of deep learning.

  If you have been inspired by this research, one of the simplest ways to boost anyone’s curiosity is to become more autonomous during learning. This can be as simple as writing out what you already know about the material to be studied and then setting down the questions you really want to answer. The idea is to highlight the gaps in your knowledge, which is known to boost curiosity by creating a mystery that needs to be solved, and it makes it personally relevant, which also increases interest.

  It doesn’t matter if these are the same questions that would come up in an exam, say. Thanks to the spill-over effect from the dopamine kick, you are more likely to remember the other details too, with some studies revealing that this small attempt to spark your engagement can boost your overall recall while also making the whole process more enjoyable. You will find that you have learnt far more effectively than if you had simply studied the material that you believe will be most useful, rather than interesting.

  The wonderful thing about this research is that learning seems to beget learning: the more you learn, the more curious you become, and the easier it becomes to learn, creating a virtuous cycle. For this reason, some researchers have shown that the best predictor of how much new material you will learn – better than your IQ – is how much you already know about a subject. From a small seed, your knowledge can quickly snowball. As Feynman once said, ‘everything is interesting if you go into it deeply enough’.

  If you fear that you are too old to reignite your curiosity, you may be interested to hear about Feynman’s last great project. As with his famous Nobel Prize-winning discoveries, the spark of interest came from a seemingly trivial incident. During a dinner in the summer of 1977, Feynman’s friend Ralph Leighton had happened to mention a geography game in which each player had to name a new, independent country.

  ‘So you think you know every country in the world?’ Richard cheekily responded. ‘Then whatever happened to Tannu Tuva?’ He remembered collecting a stamp from the country as a child; it was, he said, a ‘purple splotch on the map near Outer Mongolia’. A quick check in the family atlas confirmed his memory.

  It could have ended there, but the lure of this unknown country soon became something of an obsession for the two men. They listened to Radio Moscow for any mentions of this obscure Soviet region, and scoured university libraries for records of anthropological expeditions to the place, which offered them small glimpses of the country’s beautiful saltwater and freshwater lakes in its countryside, its haunting throat singing and shamanic religion. They discovered that the capital, Kyzyl, housed a monument marking it as the ‘Centre of Asia’ – though it was unclear who had built the statue – and that the country was the source of the Soviet Union’s largest uranium deposit.

  Eventually Leighton and Feynman found a Russian?Mongolian?Tuvan phrasebook, which a friend helped to translate into English, and they began writing letters to the Tuvan Scientific Research Institute of Language, Literature and History, asking for a cultural exchange. However, each time they thought they had a chance of reaching their goal, they were rebuffed by Soviet bureaucracy – but they persevered anyway.

  By the late 1980s, Feynman and Leighton believed they had finally found a way into the country: on a trip to Moscow, Leighton managed to arrange for a Soviet exhibition of Eurasian nomadic cultures to visit the US, and as part of his role as an organiser, he bargained a research and filming trip to Tuva. The exhibition opened at the Natural History Museum of Los Angeles in February 1989, and it was a great success, introducing many more people to a culture that remains little known in the West.

  Feynman, alas, never lived to see the country; he died on 15 February 1988 from abdominal cancer, before his longed-for trip could be arranged. Right until the end, however, his passion continued to animate him. ‘When he began talking about Tuva, his malaise disappeared’, Leighton noted in his memoir, Tuva or Bust. ‘His face lit up, his eyes sparkled, his enthusiasm for life was infectious.’ Leighton recalls walking the streets with Feynman after one round of surgery, as they tested each other on Tuvan phrases and imagined themselves taking a turn through Kyzyl – a way of building Feynman’s strength and distracting him from his discomfort.

  And in his last years, Feynman had piqued the interest of many others, resulting in a small organisation, the Friends of Tuva, being founded to share his fascination; Feynman’s curiosity had built a small bridge across the Iron Curtain. When Leighton finally reached Kyzyl himself, he left a small plaque in memory of Feynman, and his daughter Michelle would make her own visit in the late 2000s. ‘Like [Ferdinand] Magellan, Richard Feynman completed his last journey in our minds and hearts’, Leighton wrote in his memoir. ‘Through his inspiration to others, his dream took on a life of its own.’

  8

  The benefits of eating bitter: East Asian education and the three principles of deep learning

  James Stigler’s heart was racing and his palms were sweaty – and he wasn’t even the one undergoing the ordeal.

  A graduate student at the University of Michigan, Stigler was on his first research trip to Japan, and he was now observing a fourth-grade lesson in Sendai. The class were learning how to draw three-dimensional cubes, a task that is not as easy as it might sound for many children, and as the teacher surveyed the students’ work, she quickly singled out a boy whose drawings were particularly sloppy and ordered him to transfer his efforts to the blackboard – in front of everyone.

  As a former teacher himself, Stigler found that his interest immediately piqued. Why would you choose the worst student – rather than the best – to demonstrate their skills, he wondered? It seemed like a public humiliation rather than a useful exercise.

  The ordeal didn’t end there. After each new attempt the boy made, his teacher would ask the rest of the class to judge whether his drawings were correct – and when they shook their heads, he had to try again. The boy ended up spending forty-five minutes standing at that blackboard, as his failings continued to be exposed to everyone around him.

  Stigler could feel himself becoming more and more uncomfortable for the poor child. ‘I thought it was like torture.’ He was sure that the boy was going to break down in tears any moment. In the USA, Stigler knew that a teacher could even be fired for treating a child this way. The boy was only around nine or ten, after all. Wasn’t it cruel to explore his flaws so publicly?1

  If you were brought up in a Western country, you will have probably shared Stigler’s reactions as you read this story: in European and American cultures, it seems almost unthinkable to discuss a child’s errors so publicly, and only the very worst teachers would dream of doing such a thing. You may even think that it only underlines some of the serious flaws in East Asian education systems.

  It is well known, true, that countries such as Japan, Mainland China, Taiwan, Hong Kong and South Korea regularly outperform many Western countries on measures of education, such as PISA (the Programme for International Student Assessment). But there is also a widely held suspicion among Western commentators that those achievements are largely the result of severe classroom environments. East Asian schools, they argue, encourage rote learning and discipline, at the expense of creativity, independent thinking and the child’s own wellbeing.2

  Stigler’s observation in Sendai would, at first, only seem to confirm those suspicions. As he continued his studies, however, he found that these assumptions about East Asian education are completely unfounded. Far from relying on dry, rote memorisation, it turns out that Japanese teaching strategies automatically encourage many of the principles of good reasoning, such as intellectual humility and actively open-minded thinking, that can protec
t us from bias, while also improving factual learning. In many ways it is the Western system of education – particularly in the USA and UK – that stifles flexible, independent thinking, while also failing to teach the factual basics.

  In this light, it becomes clear that the teacher’s behaviour in Sendai – and the boy’s struggles at the blackboard – happen to reflect the very latest neuroscience on memory.

  Building on the research we explored in the last chapter, these cross-cultural comparisons reveal some simple practical techniques that will improve our mastery of any new discipline while also offering further ways that schools could help young thinkers to avoid the intelligence trap.

  Before we return to that classroom in Sendai, you may want to consider your own intuitions about the way you personally learn, and the scientific evidence for or against those beliefs.

  Imagine you are learning any new skill – piano, a language, or a professional task – and then decide whether you agree or disagree with each of the following statements:

  The more I improve my performance today, the more I will have learnt.

  The easier material is to understand, the more I will memorise.

  Confusion is the enemy of good learning and should be avoided.

  Forgetting is always counter-productive.

  To improve quickly, we should only learn one thing at a time.

  I remember more when I feel like I am struggling than when things come easily.

  Only the last statement is supported by neuroscience and psychology, and the rest all reflect common myths about learning.

  Although these beliefs are related to Carol Dweck’s work on the growth and fixed mindsets, they are also quite different. Remember that a growth mindset concerns the beliefs about yourself, and whether your talents can improve over time. And while that may mean that you are more likely to embrace challenge when necessary, it’s perfectly possible – and indeed likely – that you could have a growth mindset without necessarily thinking that confusion and frustration will, in and of themselves, improve your learning.