Is There a Difference Between Intelligence and Personality?

2min Snip

00:00

Play full episode

Summary

Transcript

Episode notes

I think of it as like an asmto curve that's coming up a were ic matters down here, where the curves is going up dramatically. But once you get up to a certain plateau, a certain level, it's going to plateau off. And so what happens after that isn't going to i c Is not going to make any difference. It's going to be need of achievement or drive, or creativity, or thinking out of the box, or something like that. Ah. A good point. Let's talk about other influences and and how lives turn out. This is ant subject of interest to me. So youare asking me, assess the relative importance of each of these

In this wide-ranging conversation Shermer and Nisbett discuss Nisbett’s research showing how people reason, how people should reason, why errors in reasoning occur, how much you can improve reasoning, what kinds of problems are best solved by the conscious mind and what kinds by the unconscious mind, and how we should think about intelligence, along with the controversies over group differences and genetic influences on I.Q. scores and why Charles Murray (The Bell Curve) is wrong in inferring genetic causes for group differences in I.Q.. Nisbett also shows that self-knowledge can be dramatically off-kilter and points to ways to improve it, and demonstrates how different cultures have radically different ways of reasoning and feeling, and how this led to his most famous research showing the difference between Northerners and Southerners in rates of violence, the culture of honor, and a hair-trigger for slights and insults. The two also discuss the #metoo, BLM, antiracism, and woke movements today in context of his psychological research.