A five-step guide to not being stupid

[Desecrated]

By David Robson

23 April 2015

If you ever doubt the idea that the very clever can also be very silly, just remember the time the smartest man in America tried to electrocute a turkey. Benjamin Franklin had been attempting to capture “electrical fire” in glass jars as a primitive battery. Having succeeded, he thought it’d be impressive to use the discharge to kill and roast his dinner. Soon it became a regular party trick, as he wowed guests with his magical ability to command this strange force.

During one of these demonstrations, however, Franklin became distracted, and made an elementary mistake – he touched one of the live jars while holding a metal chain in the other hand. “The company present… say that the flash was very great and the crack as loud as a pistol,” he later wrote. “I then felt what I know not how well to describe; a universal blow thro'out my whole body from head to foot which seem'd within as well as without; after which the first thing I took notice of was a violent quick shaking of my body.”


1. Your education sucks

The problem, says Robert Sternberg at Cornell University, is that our education system is not designed to teach us to think in a way that is useful for the rest of life. “The tests we use – the SATs or A-levels in England – are very modest predictors of anything besides school grades,” he says. “You see people who get very good grades, and then they suck at leadership. They are good technicians with no common sense, and no ethics. They get to be the president or vice-president of corporations and societies and they are massively incompetent.”

What can be done? Sternberg and others are now campaigning for a new kind of education that teaches people how to think more effectively, alongside more traditional academic tasks. Their insights could help all of us – whatever our intelligence – to be a little less stupid:

2. Recognise your blind spots

Like Hanna-Barbera’s Yogi, do you secretly think “you’re smarter than the average bear”? Don’t we all. It’s something called “illusory superiority”, and, as Yogi shows, it’s particularly inflated among the least able. In your defense, you might claim that you know you’re smart because of your report cards, or that impressive performance at a pub quiz. If so, you might be suffering from “confirmation bias” – the tendency to only pick evidence to support your viewpoint. Still unconvinced? Then psychologists would claim that you are suffering from the “bias blind-spot” – a tendency to deny flaws in your own thinking.


3. Argue with yourself – and don’t pull the punches

If self-deprecation isn’t your strong suit, there is a simple strategy to deflate those biases: pick the exact opposite standpoint, and start arguing against your convictions. That internal argument can puncture many of the most resilient biases – such as overconfidence, and “anchoring” – the tendency to be convinced by the first piece of evidence that floats your way. A similar, but distinct, tactic might involve putting yourself in someone else’s shoes and imagining their viewpoint. That could be particularly useful when dealing with personal problems; like King Solomon in the Bible, we are often much wiser when advising others than when dealing with issues closer to home.

4. Imagine “what if…”

One of Sternberg’s biggest issues with the education system is that we are not taught to use our smarts to be practical, or creative. Even if we aren’t schooled through rote memorization any more, many teachers still don’t necessarily train the kind of flexibility needed in most of real life. One way to develop those skills could be to re-imagine key events. History students could write an essay exploring “What would the world be like if Germany had won World War Two?” or “What would have happened if Britain had permanently abolished the monarchy in the 17th Century?”. If history isn’t your thing, writing a story imagining “The day the president quit” or “The day my wife disappeared” could be a starting point.

It may sound fanciful, but the point is that it forces you to consider the different eventualities and form hypotheses. Young children help hone that kind of “counterfactual thinking” when they play pretend, which helps them to learn everything from the laws of physics to social skills. We don’t tend to practise it deliberately as an adult – but you might find that it helps broaden your mindset when grappling with the unexpected.

5. Don’t underestimate a checklist

As Benjamin Franklin’s mishap demonstrates, distraction and absent-mindedness can be the downfall of the best of us. When wrestling with complex situations, it is easy to forget the basics – which is why Gawande is a passionate advocate of checklists as a gentle reminder. At the Johns Hopkins Hospital, for instance, a list of five bullet points reminding doctors of basic hygiene reduced 10-day infection rates from 11% to 0%. A similar checklist for pilots, reminding them of the basic procedures for take-off and landing, seemed to halve American pilot deaths during World War Two.

As Gawande points out, these were professionals with the greatest skill and cutting-edge technology – yet a simple piece of paper ended up saving so many lives. Whatever your profession, those facts are worth considering before you assume that you know it all already.