Which is better: 100 rubles now or 300 rubles in a year? A baseball bat with a ball costs 1 ruble 10 kopecks, a bat is 1 ruble more expensive than a ball, how much does a ball cost? These are simple logical questions that people often give "intuitive" wrong answers. The reason is in cognitive distortions, which are subject to everyone, without exception. Sadly, smart people are more prone to some cognitive biases than dumb people.
For experienced fraudsters, such research findings will not be kept secret. They know very well that it is easier to fool an intelligent person than an “impenetrable” stubborn fool.
Over the centuries, many philosophers, economists and sociologists have built their theories based on the basic premise that man is a rational being and acts rationally and logically. It turns out that this is not the case. Dozens of scientific studies carried out in the 20th century force us to reconsider this basic premise.
Cognitive distortions in a situation of uncertainty
When people are faced with a situation of uncertainty, they do not begin the process of conservatively evaluating the information by calculating the statistical probability of each possible outcome. As it turned out, decisions are made by unscientific methods - with the help of certain strong mental attitudes, which often lead to a stupid result. These mental attitudes do not at all help to calculate mathematical probabilities in the mind faster. They are designed specifically to avoid mathematical evaluation altogether. When asked about a baseball bat and a ball, the brain tries to completely shut off math and forgets everything that happened in school. How are decisions made in this case and why does the brain create such "clues"?
One of the famous scientists who studies the logic of the irrational is Nobel laureate Daniel Kahneman, the founder of psychological economics and behavioral finance, which combine economics and cognitive science to explain the irrationality of a person's attitude to risk in decision-making and in managing their behavior. He is famous for his work with Amos Tversky on establishing the cognitive basis for common human delusions (Decision Making Under Uncertainty: Rules and Prejudices).
In his book, Kahneman talks about various cognitive biases, including the anchoring effect - a feature of a person's assessment of numerical values, due to which the estimate is biased towards the initial approximation. A typical manifestation of the anchoring effect, for example, when the product of numbers 1 × 2 × 3 × 4 × 5 × 6 × 7 × 8 × 9 is rated lower by a person than the product of numbers 9 × 8 × 7 × 6 × 5 × 4 × 3 × 2 × 1. Of course, this is far from the only cognitive bias that manifests itself almost daily.
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How smart people are prone to cognitive biases
The authors of a scientific paper published in 2012 in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology conducted a special study to test the propensity for cognitive distortion in smart and stupid people (based on the results of the universal SAT test).
For the survey, they selected 482 students of various levels of intellectual development. They each received a seven-question questionnaire from a standard set of cognitive biases, such as this:
Several water lilies are floating on the surface of the lake. Their number doubles every day. It takes 48 days for water lilies to cover the entire surface of the lake. How long does it take for them to cover half of the lake?
Obviously the correct answer is 47 days. However, many people get it wrong.
The study also tested students for susceptibility to the anchoring effect that Kahneman and Tversky talked about. In this case, the students were first thrown a numerical anchor X (the question "Do you think the world's tallest sequoia is higher or lower than X meters?"), And then the ratio of Y and X was checked after the question "What is the height (Y) of the highest in the world of sequoia?"
So, the study confirmed that the number of correct answers and the strength of cognitive distortions correlate weakly with the SAT score and with the NFC scale (Need for Cognition Scale, an assessment of how much a person likes to think - how much he enjoys this process). Previous research has shown that smarter people who tend to think are less prone to cognitive biases. First, this is not true for all cognitive biases. Secondly, there is one caveat.
Scientists have found that higher SAT, NFC and CRT (Cognitive Reflection Test) scores do not eliminate the blind spot effect in a person - a characteristic cognitive distortion when a person is not able to adequately assess the impact of cognitive distortions on himself (although he notices how they affect thinking of other people).
The specific cognitive bias "blind spot" (BBS) is even more common in smart people than in dumb people. We are talking about a negative correlation with intelligence. That is, smart people more often than stupid people inadequately overestimate their ability to think strictly logically and rationally.
According to experts, this is due to the fact that more intellectually developed people are aware of their higher intellectual status - and therefore assume that they will avoid cognitive biases better than other people. This is why smart people are the most susceptible to cognitive blind spot distortions. At the same time, a number of classic distortions like the anchoring effect are equally manifested in people with high intelligence and people with low intelligence.
It turns out that in some situations it is easier for a smart person to deceive and drag him into a fraudulent scam - simply because he considers himself more cunning than others. But in basic distortions (at the everyday level) this is not at all the case. Not only a developed intelligence, but also an excellent education also does not save from cognitive distortions. As Kahneman discovered many years ago, more than 50% of students at Harvard, Princeton and MIT give the wrong answer to the question about the baseball bat and ball.
The study showed some more worrying results. For example, there is no evidence that being aware of one's own cognitive biases somehow helps people avoid them. Moreover, self-examination can, on the contrary, damage sober thinking. The more we delve into ourselves and try to understand our own thinking and the reasons for actions, the more cognitive distortions manifest themselves.