by David Brooks
The ability to do well on these sorts of tests is significantly influenced by heredity. The single strongest predictor of a person’s IQ is the IQ of his or her mother. People with high IQs do better in school and in school-like settings. As Dean Hamer and Peter Copeland note, “In study after study, IQ is the single best predictor of school performance.”
If you want to lead a business, it probably helps to have an IQ over 100. If you want to go into nuclear physics, it probably helps to have an IQ over 120.
But there are a couple of problems with Harrison’s emphasis on IQ. In the first place, it is surprisingly malleable. Environmental factors can play a huge role in shaping IQ. A study of black children in Prince Edward County, Virginia, found that they lost an average of six IQ points for every missed year of school. Parental attention also seems to matter. Firstborns tend to have higher IQs than secondborns, who tend to have higher IQs than thirdborns. This effect disappears, however, when there is more than a three-year gap between children. The theory is that mothers talk to their firstborns more and use more complicated sentences. They have to divide their attention when they have young children born closely together.
The broadest evidence of IQ malleability is the Flynn Effect. Between 1947 and 2002, IQ levels across the developed world rose steadily by about three percentage points per decade. This was found across many countries, across many age groups, and in many different settings, and it’s stark evidence of an environmental component to IQ.
Interestingly, scores did not rise across all sections of the IQ test. People in 2000 were no better at the vocabulary and reading-comprehension portions of the test than people in 1950. But they were much better at the sections designed to measure abstract reasoning. “Today’s children,” James R. Flynn writes, “are far better at solving problems on the spot without a previously learned method for doing so.”
Flynn’s explanation is that different eras call forth different skills. The nineteenth-century society rewarded and required more concrete-thinking skills. Contemporary society rewards and requires more abstract-thinking skills. People who have a genetic capacity to reason abstractly use those skills more and more, and hence get better and better at them. Their inherited skills are multiplied by their social experiences, and the result is much, much higher IQ scores.
However, once you get beyond the school environment, it’s not a very reliable predictor of performance. Controlling for other factors, people with high IQs do not have better relationships and better marriages. They are not better at raising their children. In a chapter of Handbook of Intelligence, Richard K. Wagner of Florida State University surveys the research on IQ and job performance and concludes, “IQ predicts only about 4 percent of variance in job performance.” In another chapter of the handbook, John D. Mayer, Peter Salovey, and David Caruso conclude that at best IQ contributes about 20 percent to life success. There is great uncertainty about these sorts of numbers. As Richard Nisbett puts it, “What nature hath joined together, multiple regression cannot put asunder.” But the general idea is that once you get past some pretty obvious correlations (smart people make better mathematicians), there is a very loose relationship between IQ and life outcomes.
One famous longitudinal study known as the Terman study followed a group of extremely high-IQ students (they all scored 135 or above). The researchers expected these brilliant young people to go on to have illustrious careers. They did fine, becoming lawyers and corporate executives, for the most part. But there were no superstar achievers in the group, no Pulitzer Prize winners or MacArthur Award winners. In a follow-up study by Melita Oden in 1968, the people in the group who seemed to be doing best had only slightly higher IQs. What they had was superior work ethics. They were the ones who had shown more ambition as children.
Once a person crosses the IQ threshold of 120, there is little relationship between more intelligence and better performance. A person with a 150 IQ is in theory much smarter than a person with a 120 IQ, but those additional 30 points produce little measurable benefit when it comes to lifetime success. As Malcolm Gladwell demonstrated in Outliers, the Americans who won Nobel Prizes in Chemistry and Medicine did not mostly go to Harvard and MIT, the schools at the tippy-top of the cognitive ladder. It was simply enough that they went to good schools—Rollins College, Washington State, Grinnell. If you are smart enough to get into a good school, you’re smart enough to excel—even in academic spheres like chemistry and medical research. It’s not important that you are in the top 0.5 percent. A study of 7,403 Americans who participated in the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth, conducted by Jay Zagorsky of Ohio State, found no correlation between accumulating large wealth and high IQ.
Harrison’s mistake was to equate IQ with mental ability. The reality is that intelligence is a piece of mental ability, but it is not the most important piece. People who score well on IQ tests are good at logical, linear, and computational tasks. But to excel in the real world, intelligence has to be nestled in certain character traits and dispositions. To draw a parallel, a soldier may be phenomenally strong. If you gave him a test involving push-ups and pull-ups, he would do very well. But unless he possesses courage, discipline, technique, imagination, and sensitivity, he probably won’t survive amidst the chaos of the battlefield. In the same way, a thinker may be very smart but unless she possesses moral virtues such as honesty, rigor, and fair-mindedness, she probably won’t succeed in real life.
In his book What Intelligence Tests Miss, Keith E. Stanovich lists some of the mental dispositions that contribute to real world performance: “The tendency to collect information before making up one’s mind, the tendency to seek various points of view before coming to a conclusion, the disposition to think extensively about a problem before responding, the tendency to calibrate the degree of strength of one’s opinions to the degree of evidence available, the tendency to think about future consequences before taking action, the tendency to explicitly weight pluses and minuses of a situation before making a decision, and the tendency to seek nuance and avoid absolutism.”
In other words, there is a big difference between mental force and mental character. Mental character is akin to moral character. It is forged by experience and effort, carved into the hinterland of the mind.
Clocks and Clouds
The science writer Jonah Lehrer sometimes reminds his readers of Karl Popper’s distinctions between clocks and clouds. Clocks are neat, orderly systems that can be defined and evaluated using reductive methodologies. You can take apart a clock, measure the pieces, and see how they fit together. Clouds are irregular, dynamic, and idiosyncratic. It’s hard to study a cloud because they change from second to second. They can best be described through narrative, not numbers.
As Lehrer has noted, one of the great temptations of modern research is that it tries to pretend that every phenomenon is a clock, which can be evaluated using mechanical tools and regular techniques. This is surely true of the study of intelligence. Researchers have spent a great deal of time studying IQ, which is relatively stable and quantifiable, and relatively little time studying mental character, which is cloudlike.
Raw intelligence is useful for helping you solve well-defined problems. Mental character helps you figure out what kind of problem you have in front of you and what sort of rules you should use to address it. As Stanovich notes, if you give people the rules they need to follow in order to solve a thinking problem, then people with higher IQs do better than people with low IQs. But if you don’t give them the rules, people with high IQs do no better, because coming up with the rules to solve a problem and honestly evaluating one’s performance afterward are mental activities barely related to IQ.
Mental force and mental character are only lightly correlated. As Stanovich puts it, “Many different studies involving thousands of subjects have indicated that measures of intelligence display only moderate to weak correlations (usually less than .30) with some thinking dispositions (for example, actively open-minded thinking, need fo
r cognition) and near zero correlation with others (such as conscientiousness, curiosity, diligence.)”
Many investors, for example, are quite intelligent, but behave self-destructively because of their excessive faith in their intelligence. Between 1998 and 2001 the Firsthand Technology Value mutual fund produced an annualized total return of 16 percent. The average individual investor in this fund, however, lost 31.6 percent of his or her money over this time. Why? Because the geniuses thought they could get in and out of the market at the right moments. They missed the important up days and caught the devastating down ones. These people, who are quite smart, performed worse than if they had been stolid and stupid.
Other people score well on IQ tests but can’t hold down a job. James J. Heckman of the University of Chicago and others compared the workplace performance of high-school graduates with those who dropped out of high school but took the GED exams. The GED recipients are as smart as high-school grads who do not go on to college, but they earn less than these high-school grads. In fact, they have lower hourly wages than do high-school dropouts, because they possess fewer of the so-called noncognitive traits like motivation and self-discipline. GED recipients are much more likely to switch jobs. Their labor-force participation rates are lower than that of high-school grads.
At the very top of intellectual accomplishment, intelligence is nearly useless in separating outstanding geniuses from everybody else. The greatest thinkers seem to possess mental abilities that go beyond rational thinking narrowly defined. Their abilities are fluid and thoroughly cloudlike. Albert Einstein, for example, would seem to be an exemplar of scientific or mathematical intelligence. But he addressed problems by playing with imaginative, visual, and physical sensations. “The words of the language, as they are written or spoken, do not seem to play any role in my mechanism of thought,” he told Jacques Hadamard. Instead, he said that his intuitions proceed through “certain signs and more or less clear images” that he could manipulate and combine. “The above mentioned elements are, in my case, of visual and some of muscular type,” Einstein observed.
“I can only think in pictures,” the physicist and chemist Peter Debye declared. “It’s all visual.” He said that when working on a problem he saw fuzzy images, which he tried to progressively clarify in his mind and then eventually, after the problem was largely solved, he would clarify the pictures in the form of mathematics. Others proceed acoustically, rehearsing certain sounds associated with certain ideas. Others do so emotionally: “You had to use your feelings,” Debye explained, “What does the carbon atom want to do?”
Wisdom doesn’t consist of knowing specific facts or possessing knowledge of a field. It consists of knowing how to treat knowledge: being confident but not too confident; adventurous but grounded. It is a willingness to confront counterevidence and to have a feel for the vast spaces beyond what’s known. Harrison did not rate highly on any of these character traits.
Time to Go
Erica was in an office filled with people with impressive brains who nonetheless couldn’t find their way out of a paper bag. As the months went by, she became more and more impatient with their shortcomings, and more dumbfounded by their ability to miss opportunities and repeat their mistakes. Here, as so often in her new life, Erica felt like a semi-outsider. Maybe it was because her upbringing was so different, or her skin color was different, or for some other reason, but she seemed more aware of the irrational, darker, and passionate side of life. One day, when she was at her most exasperated, she half-jokingly decided that she had been put on this earth to fulfill a Mission from God: to save the white man from himself.
Because the Almighty is a testing God, he had sent down upon this earth upper–middle class suburban kids who went to white-bread high schools, polo-shirt colleges, and light beer–sipping business schools and then were spit out into the world of bottled-water corporate America and who never got closer to reality than occasional forays into turnpike rest stops. Their worldviews rested upon an assumption of pristine equilibrium. As long as everybody was civil and genial, the way they were, then their way of thinking made sense. As long as everything was neat and orderly, they could retreat and live inside the formulas they’d learned in school.
But, much of the time, because the world is not neat and gentle, they were the babes of the universe. They fell for Bernie Madoff schemes, subprime mortgages, and derivatives they didn’t understand. They were suckers for every moronic management fad, every bubble mania. They wandered about in the mist, blown about by deeper forces they could not understand.
Fortunately, God, in his infinite and redeeming mercy, had also sent down a tight-abbed, small-boned Chinese-Chicana woman to rescue the innocents. This hard-assed, chip-on-her-shoulder, hyper-organized human Filofax would liberate the overprotected masses from the six-delta PowerPoint bullet points and introduce them to the underworld of reality. God had raised his servant in chaos and squalor so that she might be armed with enough knowledge, drive and vinegar in her bloodstream to jostle the White Man from the comfort of his categories and help him see hidden forces that actually drive the mind. God had armed Erica with the strength and the bad attitude she would need so she would take up the yellowish-brown woman’s burden and pave the way for the salvation of the Earth.
As the months went by, she grew increasingly bored, and frustrated by the groupthink. She took long walks at night, fantasizing about what she would do if she ran her own department or her own firm, and as she strode she would furiously type her ideas into the memo section of her iPhone. During these walks she felt almost euphoric, like she was destined to do some great thing. She realized that her imagination had raced beyond her current job. She was restless. There was no going back.
Erica began to think about creating her own consulting firm. She decided to coolly weigh the pros and cons of such a venture, but with her emotions racing ahead, she rigged the exercise from the start. She exaggerated the pros, minimized the cons, and vastly overestimated how easy it would be.
Erica told Harrison she was leaving. She set up the world corporate headquarters of her new firm on her dining-room table, and she worked with a sort of mania that was a wonder to behold. She called every old mentor, client, and contact. She barely slept. She was flooded with ideas about things she could do with the firm. She would sit down and remind herself that she needed to find one narrow niche, but she couldn’t help herself—the flood of scattershot ideas just kept coming. She felt liberated not having to follow the guardrails of some other person’s thinking. She was going to create a consulting firm that would be unlike any other. It would be humanist in the deepest sense. It would treat people not as data points, but as the fully formed idiosyncratic creatures they are. She was utterly convinced she would succeed.
CHAPTER 11
CHOICE ARCHITECTURE
SOMETIME BACK IN THE PHARAOHS’ DAY, A SHOPKEEPER DISCOVERED he could manipulate the unconscious thoughts of his customers simply by manipulating the environment in his store. Merchandisers have been following his lead ever since. For example, shoppers in grocery stores usually confront the fruit-and-vegetable section first. Grocers know that shoppers who buy the healthy stuff first will feel so uplifted they will buy more junk food later in their trip.
Grocers know that the smell of baked goods stimulates shopping, so many bake their own bread from frozen dough on the premises each morning and then pump the bread smell into the store throughout the day. They also know that music sells goods. Researchers in Britain found that when French music was pumped into a store, sales of French wines skyrocketed. When German music was played, German wine sales grew.
At the shopping mall, low-volume stores are generally near the exits. People haven’t yet made the transition from the outside world to the inner shopping world so they barely notice those first few establishments. In department stores, the women’s shoe section is generally next to the women’s cosmetics section (while the clerk is going back to find the right size shoe
, bored customers are likely to wander over and find some makeup they might want to try later).
Consumers frequently believe products placed on the right side of a display are of higher quality than those on the left. Timothy Wilson and Richard Nisbett put four identical pairs of panty hose on a table and asked consumers to rate them. The farther to the right a pair was on the table, the higher the rating the women gave it. The rightward-most pair was rated highest by 40 percent of the customers, the next one by 31 percent, the next by 17 percent, and the leftward-most by 12 percent. All of the customers but one (a psychology student) denied that location made any difference in their selection, and none noticed that the products were exactly the same.
At restaurants, people eat more depending on how many people they are dining with. People eating alone eat least. People eating with one other person eat 35 percent more than they do at home. People dining in a party of four eat 75 percent more, and people dining with seven or more eat 96 percent more.
Marketing people also realize that people have two sets of tastes, one for stuff they want to use now and one for stuff they want to use later. For example, when researchers asked customers what movies they would like to rent to watch later, they generally pick art films such as The Piano. When they are asked what movie they want to watch tonight, they pick blockbusters such as Avatar.
Even people shopping for major purchases often don’t know what they want. Realtors have a phrase, “Buyers lie,” because the house many people describe at the beginning of their search is nothing like the one they actually prefer and buy. Builders know that many home decisions are made in the first seconds upon walking in the door. A California builder, Capital Pacific Homes, structured its high-end spec houses so that upon entering the customer would see the Pacific Ocean through the windows on the main floor, and then the pool through an open stairway leading to the lower level. The instant view of water on both levels helped sell these $10 million homes. Later cogitation was much less important.
