The Intelligence Trap

by David Robson

  Ray had never been to a burger joint like it; it was somewhere he would have happily taken his wife and children. And he saw that the operation could easily be upscaled. His excitement was visceral; he was ‘wound up like a pitcher with a no-hitter going’. He knew he had to buy the rights to franchise the operation and spread it across America.1

  Within the next few years, Ray would risk all his savings to buy out the two brothers who owned it. He would keep the emblem of its golden arches, though, and despite the acrimonious split, the brothers’ name – McDonald – would still be emblazoned on every restaurant.

  His lawyers apparently thought he was mad; his wife’s reaction was so negative that they got divorced. But Ray was never in any doubt. ‘I felt in my funny bone that it was a sure thing.’2

  History may have proven Ray Kroc’s instincts correct; McDonald’s serves nearly 70 million customers every day. In light of the science of dysrationalia, however, it’s natural to feel more than a little sceptical of a man who gambled everything on the whims of his funny bone.

  Surely instinctual reasoning like this is the antithesis of Franklin’s slow-and-careful moral algebra and Igor Grossmann’s study of evidence-based wisdom? We’ve seen so many examples of people who have followed their hunches to their detriment; Kroc would seem to be the exception who proves the rule. If we want to apply our intelligence more rationally, we should always try to avoid letting our emotions and gut feelings rule our actions in this way.

  This would be a grave misunderstanding of the research, however. Although our gut reactions are undoubtedly unreliable, and over-confidence in those feelings will lead to dysrationalia, our emotions and intuitions can also be valuable sources of information, directing our thinking in impossibly complex decisions and alerting us to details that have been accidentally overlooked through conscious deliberation.

  The problem is that most people – including those with high general intelligence, education and professional expertise – lack the adequate self-reflection to interpret the valuable signals correctly and identify the cues that are going to lead them astray. According to the research, bias doesn’t come from intuitions and emotions per se, but from an inability to recognise those feelings for what they really are and override them when necessary; we then use our intelligence and knowledge to justify erroneous judgements made on the basis of them.

  Cutting-edge experiments have now identified exactly what skills are needed to analyse our intuitions more effectively, suggesting yet more abilities that are not currently recognised in our traditional definitions of intelligence, but which are essential for wise decision making. And it turns out that Kroc’s descriptions of his physical ‘funny-bone feelings’ perfectly illustrate this new understanding of the human mind.

  The good news is that these reflective skills can be learnt, and when we combine them with other principles of evidence-based wisdom, the results are powerful. These strategies can improve the accuracy of your memories, boost your social sensitivity so that you become a more effective negotiator, and light the spark of your creativity.

  By allowing us to de-bias our intuitions, these insights resolve many forms of the intelligence trap, including the curse of expertise that we explored in Chapter 3. And some professions are already taking notice. In medicine, for instance, these strategies are being applied by doctors who hope to reduce diagnostic errors – techniques that could potentially save tens of thousands of lives every year.

  Like much of our knowledge about the brain’s inner workings, this new understanding of emotion comes from the extreme experiences of people who have sustained neurological injury to a specific part of the brain.

  In this case, the area of interest is the ventromedial area of the prefrontal cortex, located just above the nasal cavity – which may be damaged through surgery, stroke, infection, or a congenital defect.

  Superficially, people with damage to this area appear to emerge from these injuries with their cognition relatively unscathed: they still score well on intelligence tests, and their factual knowledge is preserved. And yet their behaviour is nevertheless extremely bizarre, veering between incessant indecision and rash impulsiveness.

  They may spend hours deliberating over the exact way to file an office document, for instance, only to then invest all of their savings in a poor business venture or to marry a stranger on a whim. It’s as if they simply can’t calibrate their thinking to the importance of the decision at hand. Worse still, they appear immune to feedback, ignoring criticism when it comes their way, so they are stuck making the same errors again and again.

  ‘Normal and intelligent individuals of comparable education make mistakes and poor decisions, but not with such systematically dire consequences,’ the neurologist Antonio Damasio wrote of one of the first known patients, Elliot, in the early 1990s.3

  Damasio was initially at a loss to explain why damage to the frontal lobe would cause this strange behaviour. It was only after months of observation with Elliot that Damasio uncovered another previously undiscovered symptom that would eventually hold the key to the puzzle: despite the fact that his whole life was unravelling in front of him, Elliot’s mood never once faltered from an eerie calmness. What Damasio had originally taken to be a stiff upper lip seemed like an almost complete lack of emotion. ‘He was not inhibiting the expression of internal emotional resonance or hushing inner turmoil’, Damasio later wrote. ‘He simply did not have any turmoil to hush.’

  Those observations would ultimately lead Damasio to propose the ‘somatic marker hypothesis’ of emotion and decision making. According to this theory, any experience is immediately processed non-consciously, and this triggers a series of changes within our body – such as fluctuations in heart rate, a knot in the stomach, or build-up of sweat on the skin. The brain then senses these ‘somatic markers’ and interprets them according to the context of the situation and its knowledge of emotional states. Only then do we become conscious of how we are feeling.

  This process makes evolutionary sense. By continually monitoring and modifying blood pressure, muscle tension and energy consumption, the brain can prepare the body for action, should we need to respond physically, and maintains its homeostasis. In this way, the somatic marker hypothesis offers one of the best, biologically grounded, theories of emotion. When you feel the rush of excitement flowing to the tips of your fingers, or the unbearable pressure of grief weighing on your chest, it is due to this neurological feedback loop.

  Of even greater importance for our purposes, however, the somatic marker hypothesis can also explain the role of intuition during decision making. According to Damasio, somatic markers are the product of rapid non-conscious processing which creates characteristic bodily changes before our conscious reasoning has caught up. The resulting physical sensations are the intuitive feelings we call gut instinct, giving us a sense of the correct choice before we can explain the reasons why.

  The ventromedial prefrontal cortex, Damasio proposed, is one of the central hubs that is responsible for creating bodily signals based on our previous experiences, explaining why patients like Elliot failed to feel emotions, and why they would often make bad decisions; their brain damage had cut off their access to the non-conscious information that might be guiding their choices.

  Sure enough, Damasio found that people like Elliot failed to show the accompanying physiological responses – such as sweating – when viewing disturbing images (such as a photo of a horrific homicide). To further test his theory, Damasio’s team designed an elegant experiment called the Iowa Gambling Task, in which participants are presented with four decks of cards. Each card can come with a small monetary reward, or a penalty, but two of the decks are subtly stacked against the player, with slightly bigger rewards but much bigger penalties. The participants don’t initially know this, though: they just have to take a gamble.

  For most healthy participants, the body starts showing characteristic changes in response to a particular choice – such
as signs of stress when the participant is set to choose the disadvantageous deck – before the player is consciously aware that some decks are stacked for or against them. And the more sensitive someone is to their bodily feelings – a sense called interoception – the quicker they learn how to make the winning choices.

  As Damasio expected, brain injury survivors such as Elliot were especially bad at the Iowa Gambling Task, making the wrong choices again and again long after others have started homing in on the right card decks. This was caused by their lack of the characteristic somatic changes before they made their choices. Unlike other players, they did not experience a reliable visceral response to the different decks that would normally warn people from risking huge losses.4

  You don’t need to have endured a brain injury to have lost touch with your feelings, though. Even among the healthy population, there is enormous variation in the sensitivity of people’s interoception, a fact that can explain why some people are better at making intuitive decisions than others.

  You can easily measure this yourself. Simply sit with your hands by your sides and ask a friend to take your pulse. At the same time, try to feel your own heart in your chest (without actually touching it) and count the number of times it beats; then, after one minute, compare the two numbers.

  How did you do? Most people’s estimates are out by at least 30 per cent,5 but some reach nearly 100 per cent accuracy – and your place on this scale will indicate how you make intuitive decisions in exercises like the Iowa Gambling Task, with the higher scorers naturally gravitating to the most advantageous options.6

  Your score on the heartbeat counting test can translate to real-world financial success, with one study showing that it can predict the profits made by traders in an English hedge fund, and how long they survived within the financial markets.7 Contrary to what we might have assumed, it is the people who are most sensitive to their visceral ‘gut’ feelings – those with the most accurate interoception – who made the best possible deals.

  Its importance doesn’t end there. Your interoceptive accuracy will also determine your social skills: our physiology often mirrors the signals we see in others – a very basic form of empathy – and the more sensitive you are to those somatic markers, the more sensitive you will be of others’ feelings too.8

  Tuning into those signals can also help you to read your memories. It is now well known that human recall is highly fallible, but somatic markers signal the confidence of what you think you know9 – whether you are certain or simply guessing. And a study from Keio University in Tokyo found they can also act as reminders when you need to remember to do something in the future – a phenomenon known as prospective memory.10

  Imagine, for instance, that you are planning to call your mum in the evening to wish her a happy birthday. If you have more attuned interoception, you might feel a knot of unease in your stomach during the day, or a tingling in your limbs, that tells you there’s something you need to remember, causing you to rack your brain until you recall what it is. Someone who was less aware of those body signals would not notice those physiological reminders and would simply forget all about them.

  Or consider a TV quiz show like Who Wants to Be a Millionaire. Your success will undoubtedly depend on your intelligence and general knowledge, but your sensitivity to somatic markers will also determine whether you are willing to gamble it all on an answer you don’t really know, or whether you can correctly gauge your uncertainty and decide to use a lifeline.

  In each case, our non-conscious mind is communicating, through the body, something that the conscious mind is still struggling to articulate. We talk about ‘following the heart’ when we are making important life choices – particularly in love – but Damasio’s somatic marker hypothesis shows that there is a literal scientific truth to this romantic metaphor. Our bodily signals are an inescapable element of almost every decision we make, and as the experiences of people like Elliot show, we ignore them at our peril.

  When Kroc described the uncanny feeling in his funny bone and the sense of being ‘wound up like a pitcher’, he was almost certainly tapping into somatic markers generated by his non-conscious mind, based on a lifetime’s sales experience.

  Those feelings determined who he recruited, and who he fired. It was the cause of his decision to first buy into the McDonald’s franchise and after their relationship had turned sour, it led him to buy out the brothers. Even his choice to keep the burger bar’s original name – when he could have saved millions by starting his own brand – was put down to his gut instincts. ‘I had a strong intuitive sense that the name McDonald’s was exactly right.’11

  Kroc’s descriptions offer some of the most vivid examples of this process, but he is far from alone in this. In creative industries, in particular, it’s difficult to imagine how you could judge a new idea purely analytically, without some instinctual response.

  Consider Coco Chanel’s descriptions of her nose for new designs. ‘Fashion is in the air, born upon the wind. One intuits it. It is in the sky and on the road.’ Or Bob Lutz, who oversaw the construction of Chrysler’s iconic Dodge Viper that helped save the company from ruin in the 1990s. Despite having no market research to back up his choice, he knew that the sports car – way beyond the price range of Chrysler’s usual offerings – would transform the company’s somewhat dour image. ‘It was this subconscious visceral feeling . . . it just felt right,’ he says of his decision to pursue the radical new design.12

  Damasio’s theory, and the broader work on interoception, gives us a strong scientific foundation to understand where those visceral feelings come from and the reasons that some people appear to have more finely tuned intuitions than others.

  This cannot be the whole story, however. Everyday experience would tell us that for every Kroc, Chanel or Lutz, you will find someone whose intuitions have backfired badly, and to make better decisions we still need to learn how to recognise and override those deceptive signals. To do so, we need two additional elements to our emotional compass.

  Lisa Feldman Barrett, a psychologist and neuroscientist at Northeastern University in Boston, has led much of this work, exploring both the ways our moods and emotions can lead us astray and potential ways to escape those errors. As one example, she recalls a day at graduate school when a colleague asked her out on a date. She didn’t really feel attracted to him, but she’d been working hard and felt like a break, so she agreed to go to the local coffee shop, and as they chatted, she felt flushed and her stomach fluttered – the kinds of somatic markers that you might expect to come with physical attraction. Perhaps it really was love?

  By the time she’d left the coffee shop, she had already arranged to go on another date, and it was only when she walked into her apartment and vomited that she realised the true origins of those bodily sensations: she had caught the flu.13

  The unfortunate fact is that our somatic markers are messy things, and we may accidentally incorporate irrelevant feelings into our interpretations of the events at hand – particularly if they represent ‘background feelings’ that are only on the fringes of our awareness, but which may nevertheless determine our actions.

  If you have a job interview, for instance, you’d better hope it’s not raining – studies show that recruiters are less likely to accept a candidate if the weather is bad when they first meet them.14 When researchers spray the smell of a fart, meanwhile, they can trigger feelings of disgust that sway people’s judgements of moral issues.15 And the joy that comes from a World Cup win can even influence a country’s stock market – despite the fact that it has nothing to do with the economy’s viability.16

  In each case, the brain was interpreting those background feelings and responding as if they were relevant to the decision at hand. ‘Feeling,’ says Feldman Barrett, ‘is believing’ – a phenomenon called ‘affective realism’.17

  This would seem to pour cold water on any attempts to use our intuition. But Feldman Barrett has also found that som
e people are consistently better able to disentangle those influences than others – and it all depends on the words they use to describe their feelings.

  Perhaps the best illustration comes from a month-long investigation of investors taking part in an online stock market. Contrary to the popular belief that a ‘cooler head always prevails’ – and in agreement with the study of the traders at the London hedge fund – Feldman Barrett found that the best performers reported the most intense feelings during their investments.

  Crucially, however, the biggest winners also used more precise vocabularies to describe those sensations. While some people might use the words ‘happy’ and ‘excited’ interchangeably, for example, these words represented a very specific feeling for some people – a skill that Feldman Barrett calls ‘emotion differentiation’.18

  It wasn’t that the poorer performers lacked the words; they simply weren’t as careful to apply them precisely to describe the exact sensations they were feeling; ‘content’ and ‘joyful’ both just meant something pleasant; ‘angry’ or ‘nervous’ described their negative feelings. They seemed not to be noting any clear distinctions in their feelings – and that ultimately impaired their investment decisions.

  This makes sense given some of the previous research on affective realism, which had found that the influence of irrelevant feelings due to the weather or a bad smell, say, only lasts as long as they linger below conscious awareness, and their power over our decisions evaporates as soon as the extraneous factors are brought to conscious attention. As a consequence, the people who find it easier to describe their emotions may be more aware of background feelings, and they are therefore more likely to discount them. By pinning a concept on a feeling, it is easier to analyse it more critically and to disregard if it is irrelevant.19