Beyond IQ, follow rationality, and become truly smart.
Editor’s note: This article comes from the WeChat public account “open wisdom school” (ID: openmindclub), the author Xia Zi, reproduced with permission.
Smart people also do stupid things. The root cause is that “clever” and “rational” are actually two things. Smart is just the performance of intelligence tests, but the ability to make rational decisions is unmeasured.
Since Sun Li ’s opening drama “Anjia” has been aired, it has immediately become a topic-making machine, driving successive waves of searches. The first to bear the brilliance of the apartment, which has not been sold in ten years “Runway Room” was bought by Kobe customer Gong Beibei played by Hai Qing.
Gong Beibei and her husband both graduated with a doctorate, but they did n’t have a glorious life, but they lived in a house with more than 60 square meters. Born soon, they urgently need to improve living conditions.
Sun Li, the real estate agency regional manager Fang Shijin, designed and renovated the “runway room”, turning the long aisle into a children’s gallery, turning the room without windows on the other side of the aisle and opening the skylight The attic is connected, where Gong Beibei can look up at the starry sky and has “poetry and distance”.
In this situation, the critical and demanding Gong Beibei finally made up her mind: “Okay, I will buy it.”
But what seems to be wrong?
Is this runway room really needed by Gong Beibei? Is this signing behavior a rational choice for Gong Beibei?
We can clearly see the clues outside the screen. This “runway room” that is not transparent between the north and the south, has no windows in the room, and is common to the aisle is not practical at all. Why didn’t she with high IQ know it?
Smart people also do stupid things
Let ’s take a look at what cognitive scientists say first?
Stanovic, former research chairman of Canadian Applied Cognitive Science, believes in “Beyond IQ” that smart people also do stupid things. The root cause is that “smart” and “rational” are actually two things. The performance on the intelligence test, but the ability to make rational decisions is not measurable.
In life, many smart people with very high intelligence levels have a lot of deficiencies in rational thinking. For example, economists have lost money in stock trading, and university professors have also fallen into Ponzi schemes.
“We only have one brain, but there are two kinds of minds-quick thinking and slow thinking”, American psychologist Daniel Kahneman wrote in his famous best-selling book “Thinking, Fast and Slow Say.
Kahneman was the recipient of the 2002 Nobel Prize in Economics and the first psychologist to receive this award. He was inspired by Stanovich’s ideas when he wrote this book.
picture source selfie
Quick thinking is like a fierce Zhang Fei, relying on intuition to judge, with fewer cognitive resources to call, and quick response, but it is easy to be fooled, thinking that what you see is what you get, and drawing wrong conclusions.
Slow thinking is like Zhuge Liang, who is good at logic analysis, has many cognitive resources to call, thinks twice, is not easy to be fooled, and draws rigorous and reliable conclusions.
The brain loves to be lazy. The default way to decide is to think fast.
When humans think about problems, their brains are extremely stingy when using cognitive resources, and they are always looking for obvious superficial information, and they are not willing to infer the existing information. This is what we usually call “cognitive stingy ghosts.” Among them, the availability heuristic is one of the tricks commonly used by cognitive miser.
Kahneman defines availability heuristics as the process of judging probability through “the ease with which instances are presented in the brain”, that is, things that can be easily and smoothly remembered in memory, we think of this kind of thing The probability of occurrence is greater.
The human brain is naturally sensitive to the vividness and freshness of information.
Speaking back to “An Jia”, the children’s gallery, the loft starry sky, poems and distance … These lively messages meet the psychological needs of Gong Beibei’s parents and children, and cause her brain to think quickly.
Therefore, even a wise person like hers will inevitably fall into the misunderstanding of availability-inspired thinking, just like a spell, a ghost makes a irrational choice.
Everyone is a cognitive miser
In real life, everyone is a cognitive miser, and decision bias caused by the availability of inspiration is everywhere.
1. Recent events.
What happened recently is easier to remember than what happened before, and the probability of occurrence is also overestimated.
Xiao Zheng saw a car rear-end accident on the way to work, thinking about how many recent traffic accidents.
Xiao Li has read several spy novels in the past two weeks, so she feels conspiracy in everything she reads.
2. Personal experience.
A person who has personally experienced an event often overestimates the possibility of the event.
A person who has experienced the Wenchuan earthquake will overestimate the probability of an earthquake and will be more willing to buy earthquake insurance than others.
Married young people often quarrel about housework and always think they are better than the otherMuch more, because the young couple always remember what they have done very well, so the self-evaluation will be higher.
3. Media reports.
The media likes to pursue the breaking point of news, which is easier to extract from people’s memories.
After the plane crash was reported over and over again, it left a very deep impression in people’s minds and believed that it was unsafe to fly. In fact, a large number of statistical data show that the aircraft mortality rate is the lowest among all vehicles.
4. Vivid effect.
There is no doubt that the vividness of a picture or photo is much higher than the statistics.
Everyone should have seen this promotional image of the project? A bunch of statistics of out-of-school children are far less impressive than a visually striking picture.
picture source network
5. Knowledge limitation.
The limitations of cognition and vision allow people to make judgments based only on information they know.
If you have a cold during the new crown epidemic, it is often unreliable for ordinary people to handle it based on their previous experience, and doctors can judge and provide better medical solutions based on medical expertise.
6. Imagination.
Imagination is an important role in probability assessment. It is easy to imagine events that seem to have a greater chance of happening.
When assessing the probability of accidents during a forest expedition, if you can imagine many tragic accidents, this expedition will be considered very dangerous, although this may not necessarily be the case. On the contrary, if you fail to think of some possible dangers, the risks will be underestimated.
Reason can be learned
In real life, high IQ alone is not enough to ensure that we make good decisions. When your IQ is doubled, but if you do n’t have rational thinking, you will only double your stupidity and do more harm to humans.
Heidegger defending Hitler is a world-renowned philosopher; among the Nazi war criminals of the Nuremberg Trial after World War II, the Minister of Economy of Nazi Germany, Yamal Schacht, had an IQ of 143 points.
Improving reason is extremely important not only for individuals, but also for society.
How to avoid smart people doing stupid things, StanThe solutions given by Norwich and Kahneman are: having high IQ is not enough, but also having high reason.
Although “rational barriers” are widespread among us. But fortunately, reason is not immutable. Reason can be learned, even easier than intelligence.
How can we avoid decision biases caused by availability in daily life?
1. Stay skeptical.
It is not about the information that is known or easy to think about, multi-dimensional thinking, cross-validation, comprehensive judgment, and reasonable decision.
2. Stay alert.
We must be vigilant enough for those vivid and infectious stories, not to be dominated by our emotions.
3. Be objective.
Do n’t simply believe in intuition, but use statistical data that truly reflects the objective situation as the basis for judgment.
The availability heuristic is a double-edged sword
The availability heuristic is a double-edged sword.
Cognitive miser can save us a lot of cognitive resources and must use other tasks. At the same time, when a situation requires precise responses, heuristic processing is too general.
The real-time computing and storage capabilities of the human brain are very limited.
99% of the countless decisions we have made in our lives are not very valuable “washing and ironing decisions”. These decisions are very effective using the availability heuristic processing, which is very effective for the brain It is both economical and affordable, and the resulting deviations are harmless and correctable.
For example, if you are walking on a typhoon day and suddenly find that an advertising board is crumbling in front of you, you remember that the glass curtain wall fell and hurt the passers-by just two days ago, and you immediately detoured.
Even if the probability of being hit is not high, this prediction deviation is acceptable compared to the serious consequences of being injured if not hit.
The remaining 1% of things, such as getting married, having children, going to school, and buying a house, are the key events that control our lives. When we look back at life decades later, it may be these few simple questions that determine all of our lives.
If these things are also made with “fast but inferior” processing decisions, it is likely to lead our lives astray, just like the house in the “home” in the middle of the house. .
In modern society, more and more artificially designed traps deliberately lure cognitive miser into the trap. To this end, we must recognize the deviations in the availability of our brains, reasonably think slowly, respond to future uncertainties with a more cautious attitude, and avoid decision traps to the greatest extent.
Beyond IQ, follow rationality and become a truly smart person. ■