The Intelligence Trap

by David Robson

  23 Nee, C. and Ward, T. (2015), ‘Review of Expertise and Its General Implications for Correctional Psychology and Criminology’, Aggression and Violent Behavior, 20, 1–9.

  24 Nee, C. and Meenaghan, A. (2006), ‘Expert Decision Making in Burglars’, British Journal of Criminology, 46(5), 935?49.

  25 For a comprehensive review of the evidence, see Dane, E. (2010), ‘Reconsidering the Trade-Off between Expertise and Flexibility: A Cognitive Entrenchment Perspective’, Academy of Management Review, 35(4), 579?603.

  26 Woollett, K. and Maguire, E.A. (2010), ‘The Effect of Navigational Expertise on Wayfinding in New Environments’, Journal of Environmental Psychology, 30(4), 565?73.

  27 Harley, E.M., Pope, W.B., Villablanca, J.P., Mumford, J., Suh, R., Mazziotta, J.C., Enzmann, D. and Engel, S.A. (2009), ‘Engagement of Fusiform Cortex and Disengagement of Lateral Occipital Cortex in The Acquisition of Radiological Expertise’, Cerebral Cortex, 19(11), 2746?54.

  28 See, for instance: Corbin, J.C., Reyna, V.F., Weldon, R.B. and Brainerd, C.J. (2015), ‘How Reasoning, Judgment, and Decision Making Are Colored By Gist-Based Intuition: A Fuzzy-Trace Theory Approach’, Journal of Applied Research in Memory and Cognition, 4(4), 344?55. The following chapter also gives a more complete description of many of the findings in the preceding paragraphs: Dror, I.E. (2011), ‘The Paradox of Human Expertise: Why Experts Get It Wrong’, in The Paradoxical Brain, ed. Narinder Kapur, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

  29 Northcraft, G.B. and Neale, M.A. (1987), ‘Experts, Amateurs, and Real Estate: An Anchoring-and-Adjustment Perspective on Property Pricing Decisions’, Organizational Behavior and Human Decision Processes, 39(1), 84?97.

  30 Busey, T.A. and Parada, F.J. (2010), ‘The Nature of Expertise in Fingerprint Examiners’, Psychonomic Bulletin and Review, 17(2), 155?60.

  31 Busey, T.A. and Vanderkolk, J.R. (2005), ‘Behavioral and Electrophysiological Evidence for Configural Processing in Fingerprint Experts’, Vision Research, 45(4), 431?48.

  32 Dror, I.E. and Charlton, D. (2006), ‘Why Experts Make Errors’, Journal of Forensic Identification, 56(4), 600?16.

  33 Dror, I.E., Péron, A.E., Hind, S.-L. and Charlton, D. (2005), ‘When Emotions Get the Better of Us: The Effect of Contextual Top-Down Processing on Matching Fingerprints’, Applied Cognitive Psychology, 19(6), 799–809.

  34 Office of the Inspector General, ‘A Review of the FBI’s Handling of the Brandon Mayfield Case’, p. 192.

  35 Office of the Inspector General, ‘A Review of the FBI’s Handling of the Brandon Mayfield Case’, p. 164.

  36 Dror, I.E., Morgan, R., Rando, C. and Nakhaeizadeh, S. (2017), ‘The Bias Snowball and the Bias Cascade Effects: Two Distinct Biases That May Impact Forensic Decision Making’, Journal of Forensic Science, 62(3), 832?3.

  37 Office of the Inspector General, ‘A Review of the FBI’s Handling of the Brandon Mayfield Case’, p. 179.

  38 Kershaw, S. (5 June 2004), ‘Spain at Odds on Mistaken Terror Arrest’, New York Times, http://www.nytimes.com/learning/students/pop/articles/05LAWY.html.

  39 Office of the Inspector General, ‘A Review of the FBI’s Handling of the Brandon Mayfield Case’, p. 52.

  40 Dismukes, K., Berman, B.A. and Loukopoulos, L.D. (2007), The Limits of Expertise: Rethinking Pilot Error and the Causes of Airline Accidents, Aldershot: Ashgate, pp. 76?81.

  41 National Transport Safety Board [NTSB] (2008), ‘Attempted Takeoff From Wrong Runway Comair Flight 5191, 27 August 2006’, Accident Report NTSB/AAR-07/05. This report specifically cites confirmation bias – the kind explored by Stephen Walmsley and Andrew Gilbey as one of the primary sources of the error – and Walmsley and Gilbey cite it as an inspiration for their paper.

  42 Walmsley, S. and Gilbey, A. (2016), ‘Cognitive Biases in Visual Pilots’ Weather-Related Decision Making’, Applied Cognitive Psychology, 30(4), 532–43.

  43 Levinthal, D. and Rerup, C. (2006), ‘Crossing an Apparent Chasm: Bridging Mindful and Less-Mindful Perspectives on Organizational Learning’, Organization Science, 17(4), 502–13.

  44 Kirkpatrick, G. (2009), ‘The Corporate Governance Lessons from the Financial Crisis’, OECD Journal: Financial Market Trends, 2009(1), 61?87.

  45 Minton, B. A., Taillard, J. P. and Williamson, R. (2014). Financial Expertise Of the Board, Risk Taking, and Performance: Evidence from Bank Holding Companies. Journal of Financial and Quantitative Analysis, 49(2), 351-380. Juan Almandoz at the IESE Business School in Barcelona and András Tilcsik at the University of Toronto have found the same patterns in the board members and CEOs of local banks in the United States. Like Williamson, they found that the more experts the banks had on their board, the more likely they were to fail during times of uncertainty, due to entrenchment, over-confidence and the suppression of alternative ideas. Almandoz, J. and Tilcsik, A. (2016), ‘When Experts Become Liabilities: Domain Experts on Boards and Organizational Failure’, Academy of Management Journal, 59(4), 1124–49. Monika Czerwonka at the Warsaw School of Economics, meanwhile, has found that expert stock market investors are more susceptible to the sunk cost bias – the tendency to pour more money into a failing investment, even if we know it is making a loss. Again, the greater their expertise, the greater their vulnerability. Rzeszutek, M., Szyszka, A. and Czerwonka, M. (2015), ‘Investors’ Expertise, Personality Traits and Susceptibility to Behavioral Biases in the Decision Making Process’, Contemporary Economics, 9, 337–52.

  46 Jennifer Mnookin of UCLA, in Fingerprints on Trial, BBC World Service, 29 March 2011, http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/p00fvhl3.

  47 Dror, I.E., Thompson, W.C., Meissner, C.A., Kornfield, I., Krane, D., Saks, M. and Risinger, M. (2015), ‘Letter to the Editor ? Context Management Toolbox: A Linear Sequential Unmasking (LSU) Approach for Minimizing Cognitive Bias in Forensic Decision Making’, Journal of Forensic Sciences, 60(4), 1111?12.

  Chapter 4

  1 Brown, B. (2012), ‘Hot, Hot, Hot: The Summer of 1787’, National Constitution Center blog, https://constitutioncenter.org/blog/hot-hot-hot-the-summer-of-1787.

  2 For much of the background detail on the US Constitution I am indebted to Isaacson, W. (2003), Benjamin Franklin: An American Life, New York: Simon & Schuster.

  3 Franklin, B. (19 April 1787), Letter to Thomas Jefferson, Philadelphia. Retrieved from Franklin’s online archives, courtesy of the American Philosophical Society and Yale University, http://franklinpapers.org/franklin/framedVolumes.jsp?vol=44&page=613.

  4 Madison Debates (30 June 1787). Retrieved from the Avalon project at Yale Law School, http://avalon.law.yale.edu/18th_century/debates_630.asp.

  5 Madison Debates (17 September 1787). Retrieved from the Avalon project at Yale Law School, http://avalon.law.yale.edu/18th_century/debates_917.asp.

  6 Isaacson, W. (2003), Benjamin Franklin: An American Life, New York: Simon & Schuster, p. 149.

  7 Lynch, T.J., Boyer, P.S., Nichols, C. and Milne, D. (2013), The Oxford Encyclopedia of American Military and Diplomatic History, New York: Oxford University Press, p. 398.

  8 Proceedings from Benjamin Franklin’s debating club define wisdom as ‘The Knowledge of what will be best for us on all Occasions and of the best Ways of attaining it.’ They also declared that no man is ‘wise at all Times or in all Things’ though ‘some are much more frequently wise than others’ (Proposals and Queries to be Asked the Junto, 1732).

  9 ‘Conversations on Wisdom: UnCut Interview with Valerie Tiberius’, from the Chicago Center for Practical Wisdom, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oFuT0yY2otw. See also Tiberius, V. (2016), ‘Wisdom and Humility’, Annals of the New York Academy of Sciences, 1384, 113–16.

  10 Birren, J.E. and Svensson, C.M. (2005), in Sternberg, R. and Jordan, J. (eds), A Handbook of Wisdom: Psychological Perspectives, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, pp. 12?13. As Birren and Svensson point out, early psychologists preferred to look at ‘psychophysics’ – exploring, for instance, the basic elements of perception ? and they would have considered wisdom too compl
ex to pin down in a laboratory. And the topic tended to be shunned until well into the twentieth century, with a notable absence in many of the major textbooks, including An Intellectual History of Psychology (Daniel Robinson, 1976) and the Handbook of General Psychology (Benjamin Wolman, 1973).

  11 Sternberg, R.J., Bonney, C.R., Gabora, L. and Merrifield, M. (2012), ‘WICS: A Model for College and University Admissions’, Educational Psychologist, 47(1), 30?41.

  12 Grossmann, I. (2017), ‘Wisdom in Context’, Perspectives on Psychological Science, 12(2), 233?57.

  13 Grossmann, I., Na, J., Varnum, M.E.W., Kitayama, S. and Nisbett, R.E. (2013), ‘A Route to Well-Being: Intelligence vs. Wise Reasoning’, Journal of Experimental Psychology. General, 142(3), 944–53.

  14 Bruine de Bruin, W., Parker A.M. and Fischhoff B. (2007), ‘Individual Differences in Adult Decision Making Competence’, Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 92(5), 938?56.

  15 Stanovich, K.E.E., West, R.F. and Toplak, M. (2016), The Rationality Quotient, Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Along similar lines, various studies have shown that open-minded reasoning – an important component of Grossmann’s definition of wisdom ? leads to greater wellbeing and happiness. It also seems to make people more inquisitive about potential health risks: Lambie, J. (2014), How to Be Critically Open-Minded: A Psychological and Historical Analysis, Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, pp. 89?90.

  16 See http://wici.ca/new/2016/06/igor-grossmann/.

  17 At the time of writing this was a pre-print of the paper, awaiting peer review and publication. Santos, H.C., and Grossmann, I. (2018), ‘Relationship of Wisdom-Related Attitudes and Subjective Well-Being over Twenty Years: Application of the Train-Preregister-Test (TPT) Cross-Validation Approach to Longitudinal Data’. Available at https://psyarxiv.com/f4thj/.

  18 Grossmann, I., Gerlach, T.M. and Denissen, J.J.A. (2016), ‘Wise Reasoning in the Face of Everyday Life Challenges’, Social Psychological and Personality Science, 7(7), 611–22.

  19 Franklin, B. (1909), The Autobiography of Benjamin Franklin, p. 17. Public domain ebook of the 1909 Collier & Son edition.

  20 Letter from Benjamin Franklin to John Lining (18 March 1775). Retrieved from the website of the US National Archives, https://founders.archives.gov/documents/Franklin/01-05-02-0149.

  21 Lord, C.G., Ross, L. and Lepper, M.R. (1979), ‘Biased Assimilation and Attitude Polarization: The Effects of Prior Theories on Subsequently Considered Evidence’, Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 37(11), 2098?2109. Thanks to Tom Stafford for pointing me towards this paper and its interpretation, in his article for BBC Future: Stafford, T. (2017), ‘How to Get People to Overcome Their Bias’, http://www.bbc.com/future/story/20170131-why-wont-some-people-listen-to-reason.

  22 Isaacson, W. (2003), ‘A Benjamin Franklin Reader’, p. 236. New York: Simon & Schuster.

  23 Letter from Benjamin Franklin to Jonathan Williams, Jr, (8 April 1779). Retrieved from Franklin’s online archives, courtesy of the American Philosophical Society and Yale University, http://franklinpapers.org/franklin//framedVolumes.jsp?vol=29&page=283a.

  24 Jonas, E., Schulz-Hardt, S., Frey, D. and Thelen, N. (2001), ‘Confirmation Bias in Sequential Information Search after Preliminary Decisions: An Expansion of Dissonance Theoretical Research on Selective Exposure to Information’, Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 80(4), 557–71. You can also find a discussion of this paper, and its implications for decision making, in Church, I. (2016), Intellectual Humility: An Introduction to the Philosophy and Science, Bloomsbury. Kindle Edition (Kindle Locations 5817?20).

  25 Baron, J., Gürçay, B. and Metz, S.E. (2016), ‘Reflection, Intuition, and Actively Open-Minded Thinking’, in Weller, J. and Toplak, M.E. (eds), Individual Differences in Judgment and Decision Making from a Developmental Context, London: Psychology Press.

  26 Adame, B.J. (2016), ‘Training in the Mitigation of Anchoring Bias: A Test of the Consider-the-Opposite Strategy’, Learning and Motivation, 53, 36?48.

  27 Hirt, E.R., Kardes, F.R. and Markman, K.D. (2004), ‘Activating a Mental Simulation Mind-Set Through Generation of Alternatives: Implications for Debiasing in Related and Unrelated Domains’, Journal of Experimental Social Psychology, 40(3), 374?83.

  28 Chandon, P. and Wansink, B. (2007), ‘The Biasing Health Halos of Fast-Food Restaurant Health Claims: Lower Calorie Estimates and Higher Side-Dish Consumption Intentions’, Journal of Consumer Research, 34(3), 301–14.

  29 Miller, A.K., Markman, K.D., Wagner, M.M. and Hunt, A.N. (2013), ‘Mental Simulation and Sexual Prejudice Reduction: The Debiasing Role of Counterfactual Thinking’, Journal of Applied Social Psychology, 43(1), 190–4.

  30 For a thorough examination of the ‘consider the opposite strategy’ and its psychological benefits, see Lambie, J. (2014), How to Be Critically Open-Minded: A Psychological and Historical Analysis, Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, pp. 82?6.

  31 Herzog, S.M. and Hertwig, R. (2009), ‘The Wisdom of Many in One Mind: Improving Individual Judgments with Dialectical Bootstrapping’, Psychological Science, 20(2), 231?7.

  32 See the following paper for a recent examination of this technique: Fisher, M. and Keil, F.C. (2014), ‘The Illusion of Argument Justification’, Journal of Experimental Psychology: General, 143(1), 425?33.

  33 See the following paper for a review of this research: Samuelson, P.L. and Church, I.M. (2015), ‘When Cognition Turns Vicious: Heuristics and Biases in Light of Virtue Epistemology’, Philosophical Psychology, 28(8), 1095?1113. The following paper provides an explanation of the reasons accountability may fail, if we do not feel comfortable enough to share the sources of our reasoning honestly: Mercier, H., Boudry, M., Paglieri, F. and Trouche, E. (2017), ‘Natural-born Arguers: Teaching How to Make the Best of Our Reasoning Abilities’, Educational Psychologist, 52(1), 1?16.

  34 Middlekauf, R. (1996), Benjamin Franklin and His Enemies, Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, p. 57.

  35 Suedfeld, P., Tetlock, P.E. and Ramirez, C. (1977), ‘War, Peace, and Integrative Complexity: UN Speeches on the Middle East Problem, 1947–1976’, Journal of Conflict Resolution, 21(3), 427?42.

  36 The psychologist John Lambie offers a more detailed analysis of these political and military studies in Lambie, How to be Critically Open-minded, pp. 193?7.

  37 See. for example, the following article by Patricia Hogwood, a reader in European Politics at the University of Westminster: Hogwood, P. (21 September 2017), ‘The Angela Merkel Model – or How to Succeed in German Politics’, The Conversation, https://theconversation.com/the-angela-merkel-model-or-how-to-succeed-in-german-politics-84442

  38 Packer, G. (1 December 2014), ‘The Quiet German: The Astonishing Rise of Angela Merkel, the Most Powerful Woman in the World’, New Yorker: https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2014/12/01/quiet-german.

  39 Parker, K.I. (1992), ‘Solomon as Philosopher King? The Nexus of Law and Wisdom in 1 Kings 1?11’, Journal for the Study of the Old Testament, 17(53), 75?91. Additional details drawn from Hirsch, E.G., et al. (1906), ‘Solomon’, Jewish Encyclopedia. Retrieved online at: http://www.jewishencyclopedia.com/articles/13842-solomon.

  40 Grossmann, I. and Kross, E. (2014), ‘Exploring Solomon’s Paradox: Self-Distancing Eliminates the Self?Other Asymmetry in Wise Reasoning about Close Relationships in Younger and Older Adults’, Psychological Science, 25(8), 1571?80.

  41 Kross, E., Ayduk, O. and Mischel, W. (2005), ‘When Asking “Why” Does Not Hurt: Distinguishing Rumination from Reflective Processing of Negative Emotions’, Psychological Science, 16(9), 709–15.

  42 For a wide-ranging review of this research, see Kross, E. and Ayduk, O. (2017), ‘Self-distancing’, Advances in Experimental Social Psychology, 55, 81?136.

  43 Streamer, L., Seery, M.D., Kondrak, C.L., Lamarche V.M. and Saltsman, T.L. (2017), ‘Not I, But She: The Beneficial Effects of Self-Distancing on Challenge/Threat Cardiovascular Responses’, Journal of Experimental Social Psychology, 70, 235?41.

  44 Gros
smann and Kross, ‘Exploring Solomon’s Paradox’.

  45 Finkel, E.J., Slotter, E.B., Luchies, L.B., Walton, G.M. and Gross, J.J. (2013), ‘A Brief Intervention to Promote Conflict Reappraisal Preserves Marital Quality Over Time’, Psychological Science, 24(8), 1595–1601.

  46 Kross, E. and Grossmann, I. (2012), ‘Boosting Wisdom: Distance from the Self Enhances Wise Reasoning, Attitudes, and Behavior’, Journal of Experimental Psychology: General, 141(1), 43?8.

  47 Grossmann, I. (2017), ‘Wisdom and How to Cultivate It: Review of Emerging Evidence for a Constructivist Model of Wise Thinking’, European Psychologist, 22(4), 233–246.

  48 Reyna, V.F., Chick, C.F., Corbin, J.C. and Hsia, A.N. (2013), ‘Developmental Reversals in Risky Decision Making: Intelligence Agents Show Larger Decision Biases than College Students’, Psychological Science, 25(1), 76?84.

  49 See, for example, Maddux, W.W., Bivolaru, E., Hafenbrack, A.C., Tadmor, C.T. and Galinsky, A.D. (2014), ‘Expanding Opportunities by Opening Your Mind: Multicultural Engagement Predicts Job Market Success through Longitudinal Increases in Integrative Complexity’, Social Psychological and Personality Science, 5(5), 608?15.

  50 Tetlock, P. and Gardner, D. (2015), Superforecasting: The Art and Science of Prediction, p. 126. London: Random House.

  51 Grossmann, I., Karasawa, M., Izumi, S., Na, J., Varnum, M.E.W., Kitayama, S. and Nisbett, R. (2012), ‘Aging and Wisdom: Culture Matters’, Psychological Science, 23(10), 1059?66.

  52 Manuelo, E., Kusumi, T., Koyasu, M., Michita, Y. and Tanaka, Y. (2015), in Davies, M. and Barnett, R. (eds), The Palgrave Handbook of Critical Thinking in Higher Education, New York: Palgrave Macmillan, pp. 299?315.

  53 For a review of this evidence, see Nisbett, R.E., Peng, K., Choi, I. and Norenzayan, A. (2001), ‘Culture and Systems of Thought: Holistic Versus Analytic Cognition’, Psychological Review, 108(2), 291?310. Markus, H.R. and Kitayama, S. (1991), ‘Culture and the Self: Implications for Cognition, Emotion, and Motivation’, Psychological Review, 98(2), 224?53. Henrich, J., Heine, S.J. and Norenzayan, A. (2010), ‘Beyond WEIRD: Towards a Broad-based Behavioral Science’, Behavioral and Brain Sciences, 33(2?3), 111?35.