The Intelligence Trap

by David Robson

  Perhaps the thorniest issue concerns how the public will be represented in Congress. Would the representatives be chosen by a popular vote, or selected by local governments? Should larger states have more seats? Or should each state be given equal representation – regardless of its size? Smaller states such as Delaware fear they could be dominated by larger states such as Virginia.2

  With tempers as hot as the sweltering weather, the closed State House proves to be the perfect pressure cooker, and by the end of the summer the Convention looks set to self-combust. It falls to Benjamin Franklin – Philadelphia’s own delegate – to relieve the tension.

  At eighty-one, Franklin is the oldest man at the Convention, and the once robust and hearty man is now so frail that he is sometimes carried into the proceedings on a sedan chair. Having personally signed the Declaration of Independence, he fears that America’s reputation in the eyes of the world hinges on their success. ‘If it does not do good it will do harm, as it will show that we have not the wisdom enough among us to govern ourselves’, he had previously written to Thomas Jefferson, who was abroad at the time.3

  Franklin plays the role of the pragmatic host: after the day’s debating is over, he invites the delegates to eat and drink in his garden, just a few hundred feet from the Convention, where he may encourage calmer discussion under the cooling shade of his mulberry tree. He sometimes brings out his scientific collection, including a prized two-headed snake – which he uses as a metaphor for indecision and disagreement.

  In the State House itself, Franklin is often silent, and largely influences the discussions through pre-written speeches. But when he does intervene, he pleads for compromise. ‘When a broad table is to be made, and the edges of planks do not fit, the artist takes a little from both, and makes a good joint,’ he argues during one heated debate in June.4

  This pragmatic ‘carpentry’ eventually presents a solution for the issue of states’ representation – a problem that was fast threatening to destroy the Convention. The idea came from Roger Sherman and Oliver Ellsworth, two delegates from Connecticut, who proposed that Congress could be divided into two houses, each voted for with a different system. In the Lower House, representatives would be apportioned according to population size (pleasing the larger states) while the Senate would have an equal number of delegates per state, regardless of size (pleasing the smaller states).

  The ‘Great Compromise’ is at first rejected by the delegates – until Franklin becomes its champion. He refines the proposal ? arguing that the House would be in charge of taxation and spending; the Senate would deal with matters of state sovereignty and executive orders – and it is finally approved in a round of voting.

  On 17 September, it is time for the delegates to decide whether to put their names to the finished document. Even now, success is not inevitable until Franklin closes the proceedings with a rousing speech.

  ‘I confess that there are several parts of this constitution which I do not at present approve, but I am not sure I shall never approve them,’ he declares.5 ‘For having lived long, I have experienced many instances of being obliged by better information, or fuller consideration, to change opinions even on important subjects, which I once thought right, but found to be otherwise. It is therefore that the older I grow, the more apt I am to doubt my own judgment, and to pay more respect to the judgment of others.’

  It is only right, he says, that a group of such intelligent and diverse men should come along with their own prejudices and passions – but he ends by asking them to consider that their judgements might be wrong. ‘I cannot help expressing a wish that every member of the Convention who may still have objections to it, would with me, on this occasion, doubt a little of his own infallibility, and to make manifest our unanimity, put his name to this instrument.’

  The delegates take his advice and, one by one, the majority sign the document. Relieved, Franklin looks to George Washington’s chair, with its engraving of the sun on the horizon. He has long pondered the direction of its movement. ‘But now at length I have the happiness to know that it is a rising and not a setting sun.’

  Franklin’s calm, stately reasoning is a stark contrast to the biased, myopic thinking that so often comes with great intelligence and expertise. He was, according to his biographer Walter Isaacson, ‘allergic to anything smacking of dogma’. He combined this open-minded attitude with practical good sense, incisive social skills and astute emotional regulation – ‘an empirical temperament that was generally averse to sweeping passions’.6

  He wasn’t always enlightened on every issue. His early views on slavery, for instance, are indefensible, although he later came to be the president of the Pennsylvania Abolition Society. But in general – and particularly in later life – he managed to navigate extraordinarily complex dilemmas with astonishing wisdom.

  This same mindset had already allowed him to negotiate an alliance with France, and a peace treaty with Britain, during the War of Independence, leading him to be considered, according to one scholar, ‘the most essential and successful American diplomat of all time’.7 And at the signing of the Constitution, it allowed him to guide the delegates to the solution of an infinitely complex and seemingly intractable political disagreement.

  Fortunately, psychologists are now beginning to study this kind of mindset in the new science of ‘evidence-based wisdom’. Providing a direct contrast to our previously narrow understanding of human reasoning, this research gives us a unifying theory that explains many of the difficulties we have explored so far, while also providing practical techniques to cultivate wiser thinking and escape the intelligence trap.

  As we shall see, the same principles can help us think more clearly about everything from our most personal decisions to important world events; the same strategies may even lie behind the astonishing predictions of the world’s ‘super-forecasters’.

  First, some definitions. In place of esoteric or spiritual concepts of wisdom, this scientific research has focused on secular definitions, drawn from philosophy, including Aristotle’s view of practical wisdom – ‘the set of skills, dispositions and policies that help us understand and deliberate about what’s good in life and helps us to choose the best means for pursuing those things over the course of the life’, according to the philosopher Valerie Tiberius. (This was, incidentally, much the same definition that Franklin used.8) Inevitably, those skills and characteristics could include elements of the ‘tacit knowledge’ we explored in Chapter 1, and various social and emotional skills, as well as encompassing the new research on rationality. ‘Now if you want to be wise it’s important to know we have biases like that and it’s important to know what policies you could enact to get past those biases,’ Tiberius said.9

  Even so, it is only relatively recently that scientists have devoted themselves to the study of wisdom as its own construct.10 The first steps towards a more empirical framework came in the 1970s, with ethnographic research exploring how people experience wisdom in their everyday lives, and questionnaires examining how elements of thinking associated with wisdom – such as our ability to balance different interests – change over a lifetime. Sure enough, wise reasoning did seem to increase with age.

  Robert Sternberg (who had also built the scientific definitions of practical and creative intelligence that we explored in Chapter 1) was a prominent champion of this early work and helped to cement its credibility; the work has even inspired some of the questions in his university admission tests.11

  An interest in a scientifically well-defined measure of wisdom would only grow following the 2008 financial crash. ‘There was a kind of social disapprobation for “cleverness” at the expense of society,’ explains Howard Nusbaum, a neuroscientist at the University of Chicago – leading more and more people to consider how our concepts of reasoning could be extended beyond the traditional definitions of intelligence. Thanks to this wave of attention, we have seen the foundation of new institutions designed to tackle the subject he
ad on, such as Chicago’s Center for Practical Wisdom, which opened in 2016 with Nusbaum as its head. The study of wisdom now seems to have reached a kind of tipping point, with a series of exciting recent results.

  Igor Grossmann, a Ukrainian-born psychologist at the University of Waterloo, Canada, has been at the cutting edge of this new movement. His aim, he says, is to provide the same level of experimental scrutiny – including randomised controlled trials – that we have come to expect from other areas of science, like medicine. ‘You’re going to need that baseline work before you can go and convince people that “if you do this it will solve all your problems’’,’ he told me during an interview at his Toronto apartment. For this reason, he calls the discipline ‘evidence-based wisdom’ – in the same way that we now discuss ‘evidence-based medicine’.

  Grossmann’s first task was to establish a test of wise reasoning, and to demonstrate that it has real-world consequences that are independent of general intelligence, education and professional expertise. He began by examining various philosophical definitions of wisdom, which he broke down into six specific principles of thinking. ‘I guess you would call them metacognitive components – various aspects of knowledge and cognitive processes that can guide you towards a more enriched complex understanding of a situation,’ he said.

  As you would hope, this included some of the elements of reasoning that we have already examined, including the ability to ‘consider the perspectives of the people involved in the conflict’, which takes into consideration your ability to seek and absorb information that contradicts your initial view; and ‘recognising the ways in which the conflict might unfold’, which involves the counter-factual thinking that Sternberg had studied in his measures of creative intelligence, as you try to imagine the different possible scenarios.

  But his measure also involved some elements of reasoning that we haven’t yet explored, including an ability to ‘recognise the likelihood of change’, ‘search for a compromise’ and ‘predict conflict resolution’.

  Last, but not least, Grossmann considered intellectual humility – an awareness of the limits of our knowledge, and inherent uncertainty in our judgement; essentially, seeing inside your bias blind spot. It’s the philosophy that had guided Socrates more than two millennia ago, and which also lay at the heart of Franklin’s speech at the signing of the US Constitution.

  Having identified these characteristics, Grossmann asked his participants to think out loud about various dilemmas – from newspaper articles concerning international conflicts to a syndicated ‘Dear Abby’ agony aunt column about a family disagreement, while a team of colleagues scored them on the various traits.

  To get a flavour of the test, consider the following dilemma:

  Dear Abby,

  My husband, ‘Ralph’, has one sister, ‘Dawn’, and one brother, ‘Curt’. Their parents died six years ago, within months of each other. Ever since, Dawn has once a year mentioned buying a headstone for their parents. I’m all for it, but Dawn is determined to spend a bundle on it, and she expects her brothers to help foot the bill. She recently told me she had put $2,000 aside to pay for it. Recently Dawn called to announce that she had gone ahead, selected the design, written the epitaph and ordered the headstone. Now she expects Curt and Ralph to pay ‘their share’ back to her. She said she went ahead and ordered it on her own because she has been feeling guilty all these years that her parents didn’t have one. I feel that since Dawn did this all by herself, her brothers shouldn’t have to pay her anything. I know that if Curt and Ralph don’t pay her back, they’ll never hear the end of it, and neither will I.

  The response of a participant scoring low on humility looked something like this:

  I think the guys probably end up putting their share in . . . or she will never hear the end of it. I am sure they have hard feelings about it, but I am sure at the end they will break down and help pay for it.12

  The following response, which acknowledges some crucial but missing information, earned a higher score for humility:

  Dawn apparently is impatient to get this done, and the others have been dragging it out for 6 years or at least nothing’s been done for 6 years. It doesn’t say how much she finally decided would be the price . . . I don’t know that that’s how it happened, just that that seems the reasonable way for them to go about it. It really depends on the personalities of the people involved, which I don’t know.

  Similarly, for perspective taking, a less sophisticated response would examine just one point of view:

  I can imagine that it was a sour relationship afterward because let’s just say that Kurt and Ralph decided not to go ahead and pay for the headstone. Then it is going to create a gap of communication between her sister and her brothers.

  A wiser response instead begins to look more deeply into the potential range of motives:

  Somebody might believe that we need to honour parents like this. Another person might think there isn’t anything that needs to be done. Or another person might not have the financial means to do anything. Or it could also mean that it might not be important to the brothers. It often happens that people have different perspectives on situations important to them.

  The high scorer could also see more possibilities for the way the conflict might be resolved:

  I would think there would probably be some compromise reached, that Kurt and Ralph realize that it’s important to have some kind of headstone, and although Dawn went ahead and ordered it without them confirming that they’d pitch in, they would probably pitch in somehow, even if not what she wanted ideally. But hopefully, there was some kind of contribution.

  As you can see, the responses are very conversational – they don’t demand advanced knowledge of philosophical principles, say – but the wiser participants are simply more willing to think their way around the nuances of the problem.

  After the researchers had rated the participants’ thinking, Grossmann compared these scores to different measures of wellbeing. The first results, published in 2013 in the Journal of Experimental Psychology, found that people with higher scores for wise reasoning fared better in almost every aspect of life: they were more content and less likely to suffer depression, and they were generally happier with their close relationships.

  Strikingly, they were also slightly less likely to die during a five-year follow-up period, perhaps because their wiser reasoning meant they were better able to judge the health risks of different activities, or perhaps because they were better able to cope with stress. (Grossmann emphasises that further work is needed to replicate this particular finding, however.)

  Crucially, the participants’ intelligence was largely unrelated to their wise reasoning scores, and had little bearing on any of these measures of health and happiness.13 The idea that ‘I am wise because I know that I know nothing’ may have become something of a cliché, but it is still rather remarkable that qualities such as your intellectual humility and capacity to understand other people’s points of view may predict your wellbeing better than your actual intelligence.

  This discovery complements other recent research exploring intelligence, rational decision making, and life outcomes. You may recall, for instance, that Wändi Bruine de Bruin found very similar results, showing that her measure of ‘decision making competence’ was vastly more successful than IQ at predicting stresses like bankruptcy and divorce.14 ‘We find again and again that intelligence is a little bit related to wise reasoning – it explains perhaps 5% of the variance, probably less, and definitely not more than that,’ said Grossmann.

  Strikingly, Grossmann’s findings also converge with Keith Stanovich’s research on rationality. One of Stanovich’s sub-tests, for instance, measured a trait called ‘actively open-minded thinking’, which overlaps with the concept of intellectual humility, and which also includes the ability to think about alternative perspectives. How strongly would you agree with the statement that ‘Beliefs should always be revised in response to new in
formation or evidence’, for instance? Or ‘I like to gather many different types of evidence before I decide what to do’? He found that participants’ responses to these questions often proved to be a far better predictor of their overall rationality than their general intelligence – which is reassuring, considering that unbiased decision making should be a key component of wisdom.15

  Grossmann agrees that a modest level of intelligence will be necessary for some of the complex thinking involved in these tasks. ‘Someone with severe learning difficulties won’t be able to apply these wisdom principles.’ But beyond a certain threshold, the other characteristics – such as intellectual humility and open-minded thinking – become more crucial for the decisions that truly matter in life.

  Since Grossmann published those results, his theories have received widespread acclaim from other psychologists, including a Rising Star Award from the American Psychological Association.16 His later research has built on those earlier findings with similarly exciting results. With Henri Carlos Santos, for instance, he examined longitudinal data from previous health and wellbeing surveys that had, by good fortune, included questions on some of the qualities that are important to his definition of wisdom, including intellectual humility and open-mindedness. Sure enough, he found that people who scored more highly on these characteristics at the start of the survey tended to report greater happiness later on.17

  He has also developed methods that allow him to test a greater number of people. One study asked participants to complete an online diary for nine days, with details about the problems they faced and questionnaires examining their thinking in each case. Although some people consistently scored higher than others, their behaviour was still highly dependent on the situation at hand. In other words, even the wisest person may act foolishly in the wrong circumstances.18