Episode 16: Beware the Intelligence Trap! (with David Robson)

Do highly intelligent people actually take better decisions in their daily lives than everyone else? And if not, what’s missing from our picture of what it means to be ‘smart’? Can you be highly intelligent, yet flunk a rationality test? And rather than noise to be ignored, might our emotions help us make decisions that are actually more rational? David Robson joins Igor and Charles to discuss intelligence traps, Terman’s Termites, the Monte Carlo fallacy, Damasio’s Somatic Marker hypothesis, the competitive humility of the start-up culture, and the ‘brutal pessimism’ baked in to the dark history of the Intelligence test. Igor wrangles with the challenge of convincing leaders of the merits of intellectual humility in a culture obsessed with certainty, David advocates for widespread cognitive inoculations, and Charles learns that butterflies in the stomach after a date may mean love, but also may mean gastric flu. Welcome to Episode 16.

Special Guest: David Robson.

Links:

• David Robson – Exploring the human brain, body and behaviour.
• The Intelligence Trap – David Robson
• Intelligence — Robert J. Sternberg
• Alfred Binet and the History of IQ Testing
• The Vexing Legacy of Lewis Terman | STANFORD magazine
• Five Minutes with Keith E. Stanovich, Richard F. West, and Maggie E. Toplak | The MIT Press
• Rational and Irrational Thought: The Thinking That IQ Tests Miss - Scientific American
• The Somatic Marker Hypothesis and the Possible Functions of the Prefrontal Cortex: Damasio, Everitt and Bishop (1996)
• Emotional intelligence and how emotions are 'made' | WIRED UK
• Can We Improve Predictions? Q&A with Philip "Superforecasting" Tetlock - Scientific American Blog Network
• The Debunking Handbook: now freely available for download
• The Fine Art of Baloney Detection: Carl Sagan
• Exploring Solomon’s Paradox: Self-Distancing Eliminates the Self-Other Asymmetry in Wise Reasoning About Close Relationships in Younger and Older Adults - Igor Grossmann, Ethan Kross, 2014