“On the planet Earth, man had always assumed that he was more intelligent than dolphins because he had achieved so much—the wheel, New York, wars and so on—whilst all the dolphins had ever done was muck about in the water having a good time. But conversely, the dolphins had always believed that they were far more intelligent than man—for precisely the same reasons.”
– Douglas Adams
Here’s a spoiler for you: you’re not as smart as you think. And even if you’re very, very smart, that doesn’t mean you make decisions logically or rationally. One last thing: that’s all good news.
I just finished a book called The Knowledge Illusion, by Steven Sloman of Brown University and Philip Fernbach of the University of Colorado’s Leeds School of Business. Sloman and Fernbach have an interesting theory about human cognition: we are, at our best, a hive mind.
In other words, human minds don’t function as computers do. We can only retain a limited amount of ready information and we can’t truly understand everything that’s needed to function. Here’s their test: on a scale of 1 to 7, rate how well you understand the way a toilet works. My guess is most of us have a basic understanding and give ourselves a 5 or 6. Now, explain on paper exactly how a toilet functions, start to finish.
Turns out, after people are asked to explain things that they think they understand, they struggle to do so and their initial rating of 5 to 6 often drops several points.
As Sloman and Fernbach say, the point of these tests isn’t to prove that humans aren’t smart or don’t know things. “It’s that people are more ignorant than they think they are,” the two write, “We all suffer, to a greater or lesser extent, from an illusion of understanding, an illusion that we understand how things work when in fact our understanding is meager.”
I believe most people don’t have much trouble admitting that they don’t understand plumbing. We don’t hesitate to rely on the expertise of brain surgeons or auto mechanics or veterinarians. But what about political issues like immigration and abortion and tax policy? What about management issues in our workplace? Do we admit our ignorance and defer to experts or do we, for some reason, insist that our opinions are as valuable as that of someone who’s studied the issue for years?
The fact is, human beings are the only species (to our knowledge) that suffers from confirmation bias, the tendency to discount facts that run counter to our beliefs. It’s not a very useful aspect of our personalities and doesn’t help us survive or evolve. “A mouse bent on confirming its belief that there are no cats around and a rat focusing its attention on breadcrumbs and ignoring other foods to confirm its belief that breadcrumbs are the best food,” Sloman and Fernbach says, “Would not pass on their genes to many descendants.”
The reason humans have thrived, despite our logical weaknesses, is our ability to communicate and collaborate. We are designed to communicate well, to listen for subtle differences in tone of voice and watch for minute changes in facial expression and body movement. We’re so good at it that we do it subconsciously and are very accurate at understanding another person when we’re speaking face-to-face, even when they’re discussing complicated or nuanced issues.
Sadly, Google has convinced us that we are all experts in everything. But access to information is not the same as mastery of that information, as any AI specialist will tell you. Reading a couple paragraphs on merit pay doesn’t make you an expert on teacher salaries.
It’s quite dangerous for us to stop relying on experts. Working collectively has enabled us to persist on this planet, despite our physical fragility. We can’t outrun a cheetah or outfight a gorilla and we even lose out to the lowly mosquito in many cases. But we can recruit an entomologist to fight the mosquito (or an infectious disease specialist to treat yellow fever) and an engineer to design a vehicle capable of escaping the cheetah and a chemist to create a tranquilizer for the gorilla. We are smart collectively.
But that means we should stop isolating ourselves into our little social media/digital worlds and start talking to experts. It means we should be honest about the subjects we know well and those we don’t. In order to collaborate, we must communicate and we must trust each other. That requires honest conversation and active listening.
Oh, and one more thing: if you’re in charge of recruiting, maybe the best candidate for the job isn’t the smartest guy or gal. Maybe it’s the one that collaborates productively. Maybe the best recruit is a person who can admit what they don’t know and track down expert opinions. Maybe, just maybe, our emphasis on IQ should give way to a focus on EQ.