By David Robson
Why intelligence often backfires
Subject
Themes
Kary Mullis invented the polymerase chain reaction, one of the most important tools in modern biology, and won a Nobel Prize for it. He also believes in astrology, claims to have been abducted by a glowing raccoon-shaped alien, and denies that HIV causes AIDS. His case opens a troubling investigation into why high intelligence so often coexists with profoundly irrational thinking.
Kary Mullis invented the polymerase chain reaction, one of the most important tools in modern biology, and won a Nobel Prize for it. He also believes in astrology, claims to have been abducted by a glowing raccoon-shaped alien, and denies that HIV causes AIDS. His case opens a troubling…
Published in 2019, The Intelligence Trap arrived at a moment when the limitations of conventional intelligence had become painfully visible in public life. Political polarisation, the spread of misinformation through social media, and a series of institutional failures (from the 2008 financial…
Traditional measures of intelligence capture only a fraction of what the human mind can do, and that fraction can become actively dangerous when it operates without adequate checks. IQ tests, developed from Alfred Binet's original tool for identifying struggling schoolchildren, were never designed…
The concept of wisdom has historically been treated as a philosophical ideal rather than a measurable psychological trait. Igor Grossmann at the University of Waterloo changed that by developing scientific measures of wise reasoning. His framework identifies four key components: intellectual…
Western education systems are built on a deeply flawed assumption: that learning should be as smooth and comfortable as possible. Material is simplified, broken into neat categories, and presented in the most fluent format available. Students who grasp concepts quickly are praised, while those who…
Individual cognitive biases can be devastating, but when they propagate through teams and organisations, the consequences can be catastrophic. The intelligence trap does not merely affect single minds; it scales up through group dynamics and corporate cultures to produce disasters that no individual…
If there is a single quality that runs through every strand of the research on wiser thinking, it is intellectual humility: the willingness to recognise the limits of what you know and to remain open to the possibility that you are wrong. Socrates identified this quality at his trial in 399 BC,…
In the 1920s, psychologist Lewis Terman embarked on one of the most ambitious studies of intelligence ever attempted. Selecting over 1,500 Californian children with IQs above 135, he planned to track them throughout their lives, expecting to prove that high intelligence guaranteed success. He called…
Arthur Conan Doyle, the creator of the hyper-rational detective Sherlock Holmes, was a passionate believer in spiritualism who attended five or six seances a week. In 1922, he invited his friend Harry Houdini to an impromptu seance in Atlantic City, where Conan Doyle's wife Jean claimed to channel…
In April 2004, lawyer Brandon Mayfield received three loud thumps on his office door. Two FBI agents arrested him in connection with the Madrid train bombings, which had killed 192 people. The FBI claimed to have matched his fingerprint to one found on a bag of detonators in Madrid, declaring it a…
During the sweltering summer of 1787, delegates at the Constitutional Convention in Philadelphia argued fiercely over how to structure the new American government. Eighty-one-year-old Benjamin Franklin, so frail he was sometimes carried in on a sedan chair, helped defuse the tension. His approach…
Ray Kroc was a fifty-two-year-old milkshake mixer salesman when he walked into a small hamburger restaurant in San Bernardino, California, and felt an overwhelming visceral certainty. The restaurant was clean, efficient, and served food that tasted extraordinary. Kroc described a feeling in his…
In late 1999, a chain email swept across the internet warning that bananas imported from Central America could infect people with "necrotising fasciitis," a flesh-eating disease. The email claimed the FDA had secretly admitted that 15,000 Americans would be affected. By January 2000, public concern…
Richard Feynman, known as "Ritty" in childhood, tinkered endlessly in a home laboratory made from an old wooden packing box, equipped with shelves, a heater, and an electric circuit of light bulbs. He built a homemade burglar alarm and performed chemistry shows for neighbourhood children. At school,…
James Stigler, a graduate student from the University of Michigan, sat in a fourth-grade classroom in Sendai, Japan, watching a teacher single out the worst-performing boy in the class. The boy was ordered to draw three-dimensional cubes on the blackboard in front of everyone. Each time he failed,…
According to most pundits, Iceland had no place at the Euro 2016 football tournament. Just four years earlier, they had ranked 131st in the world. With a population of 330,000, smaller than many London boroughs, and one coach who still worked part-time as a dentist, they were given no chance against…
In the twenty years before the Deepwater Horizon disaster, there had been literally dozens of minor blowouts in the Gulf of Mexico. Each time, lucky circumstances, such as the direction and speed of the wind, prevented full catastrophe. Transocean, the company responsible for cementing the Deepwater…
By David Robson
Subject
Themes
Kary Mullis invented the polymerase chain reaction, one of the most important tools in modern biology, and won a Nobel Prize for it. He also believes in astrology, claims to have been abducted by a glowing raccoon-shaped alien, and denies that HIV causes AIDS. His case opens a troubling investigation into why high intelligence so often coexists with profoundly irrational thinking.