About the stupidity of smart people

For the seed - a simple mathematical riddle. A baseball and bat together cost 1 dollar and 10 cents. At the same time, a bit costs 1 dollar more than a ball. How much is the ball?



The vast majority of people respond that the ball costs 10 cents. The answer is obvious, but incorrect (the ball costs 5 cents, and a bit, respectively, 1 dollar 5 cents). That's because people are in a hurry and most often use the most obvious ways to solve problems.

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For more than fifty years, Nobel Prize winner in economics, Professor of Psychology, Daniel Kahneman asked the subjects questions like this and analyzed their answers. As a result, his experiments significantly changed the idea of ​​human thinking. Ancient philosophers and modern economists with sociologists often assert that man is a rational being. But Kahneman's research (in collaboration with the late Amos Tversky) shows that we are not as rational as we would like.



When people are faced with a situation that requires a solution, they almost never begin to evaluate information, look for relevant statistics, and so on. Instead, decisions are made thanks to a long list of thought patterns and behavioral labels. Therefore, sometimes stupid decisions are made instead of the necessary ones.



So with this problem about the ball and the bat - the majority misses even such a simple step as basic mathematical calculations, and people quickly give an answer that simply seems to be true.



Kahneman, despite the fact that now his work is known and he is considered one of the most influential psychologists of the 20th century, remained in the shadow for a long time, his studies were of little interest to anyone. He said that he somehow expounded his point of view on the irrationality of thinking to one eminent American philosopher, and he frowned and said: "I am not interested in the psychology of stupidity."



A new study in the Journal of Personal and Group Psychology, led by Richard West, James Madison and Keith Stanovich, proves that smart people are more prone to such errors.



West and his colleagues developed a system of questions and tested 482 students. Another problem for an example:



In the lake there is a plot overgrown with water lilies. Every day this area increases in size by 2 times. It is known that water lilies will cover the entire surface of the lake in 48 days.



For how many days will the water lilies cover exactly half of the lake's surface?



The majority of such a first reaction to this question - they divide 48 in half and get 24.



But this is not true. Half of the lake is covered with water lilies on the 47th day.



West and colleagues set the goal of research not only to confirm the existence of stereotypical thinking, but also to identify the relationship between human intelligence and prejudice.



The results were quite alarming. It turned out that self-awareness is not very helpful. That is, if a person himself knows that he sometimes thinks with stereotypes, and when solving a problem he makes an amendment to this, it still does not save him from making the wrong decision.



One of the dangerous consequences of such thinking is the so-called “blind spot of bias”, in Russian - “Not to notice logs in your own eye.” This is based on the property of people to clearly note systematic mistakes in the thinking of other people, clearly realizing that this is a mistake, and at the same time making the same mistakes themselves, without noticing it.



The West group developed questions of 4 levels of complexity, and at all these levels the percentage of bad decisions and “blind spots” was quite noticeable. The level of education and academic performance was not a panacea - more than 50% of students at Harvard, Princeton and MIT incorrectly answered the question about the bat and the ball.



Is there any way to explain the occurrence of these "blind spots"? There are suggestions that they appear due to the inconsistency between how we evaluate others and how we evaluate ourselves. When considering the irrational act of another person, we are forced to rely on behavioral information, so we can clearly see from the side all the thinking errors of this subject. But when evaluating our own decisions, we tend to bump into a dense introspection, somehow explain or justify our motivation, whine on our mistakes, sometimes even blame others for our mistakes.



The main reasons for our irrationality remain impenetrable for introspection, because analysis is also a rational way of solving a problem. Excessive self-examination can even aggravate the problem.



In general, you can finish with a simple truth - “The more we try to know ourselves, the less we understand.”