How important is intelligence in getting ahead, in conquering goals, and generally making a success out of one’s life? Is intelligence the gold standard for who succeeds and who doesn’t?
Intelligence tends to be ‘measured’ by the intelligence quotient, or IQ, an assessment of brain processing speed. Smart people can quickly commit to mind facts, digits, and vocabulary, and can retrieve such information from their memory at rapid speed. Ask a high IQ person to remember a six-digit number, and then to repeat it backwards, or to rotate a 3D object in their mind, and they won’t have too much of a problem doing it. Lower IQ people will labour somewhat, like an old engine that takes some time to warm up.
But why is it that those sporting high IQs often make disastrous errors in judgement? We read about politicians, judges, surgeons, and esteemed scientists who’ve lost money on investment scams or small fortunes on speculative stocks that the ordinary punter would stay well clear of. How is it that the ultra-smart can make a mess of their relationships, personal life, and health? If you’re ultra-clever – with an innate ability to recognise patterns in chaos – wouldn’t that translate into exceptional decision-making skills across all areas of life?
In his book, What Intelligence Tests Miss, Canadian psychologist Keith E. Stanovich writes: “Many people display the systematic inability to think and behave rationally despite the fact that they have more than adequate IQs.”
Stanovich coined the term “dysrationalia” to explain why smart people often do dumb things. Dysrationalia is a thinking disorder, a lack of good judgement and sound decision-making, and people with high IQs are just as likely to be “dysrational” as anyone else.
“Being rational,” writes Stanovich, “means acting to achieve one’s own life goals using the best means possible.” Being able to think rationally helps us to steer our lives in the direction we desire. But IQ does not measure rationality. IQ tests do not assess how efficiently and effectively we can make clever decisions – decisions at work, at home, with our investments, and critical decisions relating to our health – and it’s these decisions, not whether we can spot a repeating pattern or turn a 3D object 180 degrees, that will determine the course of our lives.
“One of the reasons that many of us are dysrationalic to some extent is that, for a variety of reasons, we have come to overvalue the kinds of thinking skills that IQ tests measure and undervalue other critically important cognitive skills, such as the ability to think rationally,” he concludes.
