But dumbness alone is rarely the driving threat: at the head of almost every dumb movement, you will find the stupid in charge. We can now explain why stupidity is so domain-specific, why someone can be so smart in one area, and such an idiot in another: the relevant concepts are often domain-specific. In this kind of case, agents possess the necessary intellectual tools but unwittingly lock them away.
So stupidity is tough to fix. This is exacerbated by the way it dovetails with other vices: stubbornness stops me from revisiting my concepts even as they fail me. To view political opponents as primarily cynical transforms them into Machiavellian monsters, leaving no space for anything but a zero-sum battle for domination. Both moves also offer a certain false reassurance: with a bit of reflection, we can be fairly sure that we are not cynical and, with the right credentials, we can prove that we are not dumb.
But we might well, nevertheless, be caught in the net of stupidity. Ethical living. Sikh ethics sees self-centredness as the source of human evil. Ageing and death. Older people are battling despair, but Erikson offers us hope. Thinking and intelligence. Why some of the smartest people can be so very stupid. Dumbness alone is rarely the driving threat: at the head of almost every dumb movement, you will find the stupid in charge Second, stupidity begets more stupidity due to a profound ambiguity in its nature.
Email Tweet Share. Despite their astonishing skill, surgeons can cause the needless loss of life through sheer carelessness — something as simple as forgetting to wash their hands or apply a clean dressing. In business, short-sighted thinking might involve cutting corners that eventually lead to the downfall of a company. 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.
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:. Credit: Thinkstock. Still unconvinced? The fact is that we all suffer from some subconscious biases, clouding everything from the decision to buy a house to your views on the conflict in Crimea.
Fortunately, psychologists are finding that people can be trained to spot them. There are about a to consider, so start swotting up with this comprehensive list.
Among other things, it measures how easily you deal with uncertainty, and how quickly and willingly you will change your mind based on new evidence. For example, Philip Tetlock at the University of Pennsylvania is currently asking ordinary people to predict the course of complex political events in a four-year contest.
He has found that the best forecasters depended just as much on open-mindedness as a high IQ. It might be more helpful to tell someone they're being overconfident than that they're being stupid, for example. The researchers now plan to concentrate on the cognitive mechanisms people use to monitor others' behaviors. One mystery, Aczel said, is why people find stupidity so amusing, a fact that drives any number of Hollywood comedies and even widespread kudos think the Darwin Awards.
Original article on Live Science. Stephanie Pappas is a contributing writer for Live Science covering topics from geoscience to archaeology to the human brain and behavior.
A freelancer based in Denver, Colorado, she also regularly contributes to Scientific American and The Monitor, the monthly magazine of the American Psychological Association. Stephanie received a bachelor's degree in psychology from the University of South Carolina and a graduate certificate in science communication from the University of California, Santa Cruz. Live Science. Stephanie Pappas.
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