The Intelligence Trap

by David Robson

  Even some well-meaning attempts at educational reform fall into these traps. Teachers have been encouraged to identify a child’s learning style – whether they are a visual, verbal, or kinaesthetic learner. The idea sounds progressive, but it only reinforces the idea that people have fixed preferences for the ways they learn, and that we should make learning as easy as possible, rather than encouraging them to wrestle with problems that aren’t immediately straightforward.

  It’s little wonder that students in countries such as the USA and UK do not tend to score well on Igor Grossmann’s tests of evidence-based wisdom, or the measures of critical thinking that predict our susceptibility to misinformation.

  Now compare those attitudes to the Japanese education system, where even students in elementary school are encouraged to wrestle with complexity every day; they are taught to discover new ways of solving problems for themselves and, when they have found one answer, to consider the other alternative solutions. If you don’t immediately understand something, the answer is not to ignore it and reinforce your own beliefs, but to look further and to explore its nuances. And the extra thinking that involves is not a sign of weakness or stupidity; it means that you are capable of ‘eating bitterness’ to come to a deeper understanding. If you initially fail, it’s fine to admit your mistakes, because you know you can improve later.

  The students are simply better prepared for the more complex, nuanced, and ill-defined problems the real world will set against them during adulthood. And this seems to be reflected in their higher scores on measures of open-minded, flexible reasoning.13 Various studies, for instance, have found that when asked about controversial environmental or political issues, people in Japan (and other East Asian cultures) tend to take longer to consider the questions without offering knee-jerk reactions, and are more likely to explore contradictory attitudes and to think about the long-term consequences of any policies.14

  If we return to that idea of the mind as a car, the British and American education systems are designed to offer as smooth a track as possible, so that each person can drive as fast as their engine can possibly let them. The Japanese education system, in contrast, is more of an assault course than a race course; it requires you to consider alternative routes to steer your way around obstacles and persevere even when you face rough terrain. It trains you to navigate effectively rather than simply revving the engine.

  Let’s be clear: we are talking about averages here, and there is a huge amount of variation within any culture. But these results all suggest that the intelligence trap is partly a cultural phenomenon born in our schools. And once you recognise these facts, it becomes clear that even small interventions can begin to encourage the thinking styles we have explored in the rest of this book, while also improving the factual, academic learning that schools already try to cultivate.

  Even a simple strategic pause can be a powerful thing.

  Having asked the class a question, the average American teacher typically waits less than a second before picking a child to provide an answer – sending out a strong message that speed is valued over complex thinking. But a study from the University of Florida has found that something magical happens when the teacher takes a little more time – just three seconds – to wait to pick a child, and then for the child to think about the response.

  The most immediate benefit was seen in the length of the children’s answers. The small amount of thinking time meant that the children spent between three and seven times as long elaborating their thoughts, including more evidence for their viewpoint and a greater consideration of alternative theories. The increased waiting time also encouraged the children to listen to each other’s opinions and develop their ideas. Encouragingly, their more sophisticated thinking also translated to their writing, which became more nuanced and complex. That’s an astonishing improvement from the simple act of exercising teacherly patience.15 As the researcher, Mary Budd Rowe, put it in her original paper: ‘slowing down may be a way of speeding up’.

  The psychologist Ellen Langer at Harvard University, meanwhile, has examined the way that complex material is currently over-simplified to avoid any ambiguity, and the consequences of that for our thinking. In physics or mathematics, for instance, there may be many different ways to solve a problem – but we are told just one method and discouraged from looking beyond that. The assumption had been that even a hint of complexity would only lead to confusion – which was thought to harm learning. Why let the child potentially mix up the different methods if just one would do?

  In reality, Langer has found that subtly changing the phrasing of a lesson to introduce those ambiguities encourages deeper learning. In one high-school physics lesson, the children were presented with a thirty-minute video demonstrating some basic principles and asked to answer some questions using the information. In addition to the basic instructions, some of the participants were told that ‘The video presents only one of several outlooks on physics, which may or may not be helpful to you. Please feel free to use any additional methods you want to assist you in solving problems.’ This simple prompt encouraged them to think more freely about the topic at hand, and to apply the material more creatively to novel questions.16

  In another experiment, students were offered a strategy to solve a specific kind of mathematical problem. Thanks to a change in a single word, children told that this was just ‘one way to solve this equation’ performed better than those told it was ‘the way to solve this equation’ – they were about 50 per cent more likely to get the correct answer. They also showed a deeper understanding of the underlying concept and were better able to determine when the strategy would and wouldn’t work.17 The same applies for the humanities and social sciences. Geography students told that ‘this may be the cause of the evolution of city neighbourhoods’ showed a greater understanding in a subsequent test than those who had been taught the material as absolute, undeniable facts.

  The subtle suggestion of ambiguity, far from creating confusion, invites them to consider the other alternative explanations and explore new avenues that would have otherwise been neglected. The result is a more reflective and actively open-minded style of thinking, of the kind that we explored in Chapter 4. Framing questions using conditional terms can also improve students’ performance on creative thinking tasks.

  You may remember that Benjamin Franklin deliberately avoided the use of ‘dogmatic’ terms that demonstrated complete certainty, and that this acceptance of uncertainty also improved the super-forecasters’ decision making. Langer’s work offers further evidence that this kind of nuanced thinking can be encouraged from a young age.18 Presenting uncertainty might create a little bit of confusion – but that only improves engagement and ultimately increases the child’s learning.

  In addition to these subtle primes, students might be actively encouraged to try to imagine a historical article from various viewpoints and the arguments they might raise, for instance. Or in science, they might be given two case studies representing apparently contradictory arguments on the topic they are studying, and then asked to evaluate the strength of the evidence and reconcile the different views. Again, the prediction might have been that these exercises would be counter-productive, a distraction that reduces students’ overall learning of the syllabus. In reality, they add another desirable difficulty that means children actually remember more of the factual material than those who are specifically told to memorise the text.19

  If you combine these methods with the measures we have explored previously, such as the training in emotion differentiation that we examined in Chapter 5, and the critical thinking skills we discussed in Chapter 6, it becomes clear that schools could offer comprehensive training in all of the thinking skills and dispositions that are essential for wiser reasoning.20 In each case, evidence shows that these interventions will improve academic achievement for people of lower cognitive ability,21 while also discouraging the dogmatic, closed-minded and lazy thinking that often plagu
es people of high intelligence and expertise.

  These benefits have been documented throughout the education system – from elementary schoolchildren to university undergraduates. But we can only cultivate wiser thinking if we allow students – even those just starting school – to face occasional moments of confusion and frustration rather than spoon-feeding them easy-to-digest information.

  You don’t need to be a teacher or a child to benefit from these findings. For work or for pleasure, most of us continue to learn into adulthood, and being able to regulate our own studying is essential if we are to make the most of our learning opportunities. The research shows that most people – even those of great intelligence – use poor learning techniques; the strategic use of desirable difficulties can improve your memory while also training your brain to be better equipped to deal with confusion and uncertainty in any context.22

  You can:

  Space out your studies, using shorter chunks distributed over days and weeks. Like the postmen in Baddeley’s initial experiment, your progress may feel slow compared with the initial head-start offered by more intensive study. But by forcing yourself to recall the material after the delay between each session, you will strengthen the memory trace and long-term recall.

  Beware of fluent material. As discussed previously, superficially simple textbooks can lead you to believe that you are learning well, while, in fact, they are reducing your long-term recall. So try to study more nuanced material that will require deeper thinking, even if it is initially confusing.

  Give yourself a pre-test. As soon as you begin exploring a topic, force yourself to explain as much as you already know. Even if your initial understanding is abysmally wrong, experiments show that this prepares the mind for deeper learning and better memory overall, as you correct for your errors in your subsequent studies.

  Vary your environment. If you tend to study in the same place for too long, cues from that environment become associated with the material, meaning that they can act as non-conscious prompts. By ensuring that you alter the places of learning, you avoid becoming too reliant on those cues – and like other desirable difficulties, this reduces your immediate performance but boosts your long-term memory. In one experiment, simply switching rooms during studying resulted in 21 per cent better recall on a subsequent test.

  Learn by teaching. After studying – and without looking at your notes – imagine that you are explaining all that you have covered to another person. Abundant evidence shows that we learn best when we have to teach what we have just learnt, because the act of explanation forces us to process the material more deeply.

  Test yourself regularly. So-called ‘retrieval practice’ is by far the most powerful way of boosting your memory. But make sure you don’t give in and look at the answers too quickly. The temptation is to look up the answer if it doesn’t immediately come to mind, but you need to give yourself a bit of time to really struggle to recall, otherwise you won’t be exercising your memory enough to improve long-term recall.

  Mix it up. When testing yourself, you should make sure you combine questions from different topics rather than only focusing on one subject. Varying the topic forces your memory to work harder to recall the apparently unrelated facts, and it can also help you to see underlying patterns in what you are learning.

  Step outside your comfort zone and try to perform tasks that will be too difficult for your current level of expertise. And try to look for multiple solutions to a problem rather than a single answer. Even if none of your solutions is perfect, these productive failures will also increase your conceptual understanding.

  When you are wrong, try to explain the source of the confusion. Where did the misconception come from – and what was the source of the error? Not only does this prevent you from making the same specific error again; it also strengthens your memory of the topic as a whole.

  Beware the foresight bias. As Robert and Elizabeth Bjork have shown, we are bad at judging the level of our learning, based on our current performance – with some studies showing that the more confident we are in our memory of a fact, the less likely we are to remember it later. This, again, is down to fluency. We are more confident of things that initially come to mind easily – but we often haven’t processed those fluent facts very deeply. So be sure to test yourself regularly on the material that you think you know well, in addition to the material that may feel less familiar.

  Besides aiding factual learning, desirable difficulties can also help you to master motor skills, like playing a musical instrument. The current dogma is that music practice should be a disciplined but highly repetitive affair, where you spend lengthy sessions practising the same few bars again and again until you play them to near perfection.

  Instead, the Bjorks’ research suggests that you would do far better to alternate a few different excerpts of music, spending a few minutes on each one. This will cause you to refresh your memory each time you come back to the exercise or excerpt.23

  You can also try to inject some variability into the performance of the music itself. As part of her research on ‘conditional learning’, Ellen Langer told a group of piano students to ‘change your style every few minutes and not to lock into one particular pattern. While you practise, attend to the context, which may include subtle variations or any feelings, sensations or thoughts you are having.’ Independent judges considered their playing to be more proficient on a subsequent test than that of students who had instead practised in a more traditional manner, aimed at rote memorisation.

  Langer has since replicated this experiment in a large symphony orchestra – where endless repetitive practice often leads to burnout. When asked to look for the subtle nuances in their performance, the players’ enjoyment increased, and their performance was also judged to be more enjoyable by an independent group of musicians.24

  The orchestra may seem to be a very different environment from the school classroom, but the philosophy of deliberately embracing nuance and complexity in learning can be applied to any context.

  After having met the Bjorks at UCLA, I visited a nearby school in Long Beach, California, that may be the most comprehensive attempt yet to apply all the principles of evidence-based wisdom in a single institution.

  The school is called the Intellectual Virtues Academy and it is the brainchild of Jason Baehr, a professor of philosophy at Loyola Marymount University in Los Angeles. Baehr’s work focuses on ‘virtue epistemology’ – examining the philosophical importance of character traits like intellectual humility, curiosity and open-mindedness for good reasoning – and he has recently collaborated with some of the psychologists studying intellectual humility.

  At the time of the IVA’s founding, Baehr’s interest had been purely theoretical, but that changed with a phone call from his friend and fellow philosopher Steve Porter, who heard a radio news programme about the Obamas’ choice of school for their daughters. The piece happened to mention the availability of so-called ‘charter’ schools – state-funded schools that are managed privately according to their own educational vision and curriculum.

  The two philosophers both had young children of their own, so why not attempt to set up their own charter school, Porter suggested. They began to meet up regularly in coffee shops to discuss how they might apply a model of teaching that deliberately cultivates intellectual virtues like curiosity – ‘not as an add-on, extra-curricular program, but rather where everything is oriented around the question of how we can help our students to grow in some of these qualities,’ Baehr told me.

  This vision is clear from the moment I step into the building. Written on the walls of every classroom are the nine ‘master virtues’ that the IVA considers to be crucial for good thinking and learning, with accompanying slogans. They are divided into three categories:

  Getting started

  Curiosity: a disposition to wonder, ponder, and ask why. A thirst for understanding and a desire to explore.

  Intellectual humility: a wil
lingness to own up to one’s intellectual limitations and mistakes, unconcerned with intellectual status or prestige.

  Intellectual autonomy: a capacity for active, self-directed thinking. An ability to think and reason for oneself.

  Executing well

  Attentiveness: a readiness to be ‘personally present’ in the learning process. Keeps distractions at bay. Strives to be mindful and engaged.

  Intellectual carefulness: a disposition to notice and avoid intellectual pitfalls and mistakes. Strives for accuracy.

  Intellectual thoroughness: a disposition to seek and provide explanations. Unsatisfied with mere appearances or easy answers. Probes for deeper meaning and understanding.

  Handling challenges

  Open-mindedness: an ability to think outside the box. Gives a fair and honest hearing to competing perspectives.

  Intellectual courage: a readiness to persist in thinking or communicating in the face of fear, including fear of embarrassment or failure.

  Intellectual tenacity: a willingness to embrace intellectual challenge and struggle. Keeps its ‘eyes on the prize’ and doesn’t give up.

  As you can see, some of these virtues, including intellectual humility, open-mindedness, curiosity, are exactly the same elements of good thinking that Igor Grossmann had included in his initial studies of wise reasoning about everyday events, while others – such as ‘intellectual carefulness’ and ‘intellectual thoroughness’ – are more closely linked to the cultivation of scepticism that we explored in Chapter 6; ‘intellectual courage’, ‘intellectual tenacity’ and ‘intellectual autonomy’, meanwhile, enforce the idea of struggle and confusion that Stigler and the Bjorks have studied so extensively.