Michelle: A Nobel Prize winner who believed in alien abductions. The creator of Sherlock Holmes duped by teenage girls with paper fairies. Mark: Whoa, hold on. Michelle: These aren't punchlines. They're evidence of what science writer David Robson calls 'The Intelligence Trap,' and today we're learning how to escape it. Mark: Okay, so you're telling me the smartest people are the easiest to fool? My uncle who believes every internet conspiracy is going to absolutely love this episode. He's going to feel so validated. Michelle: He might! But it's more complicated than that. We're diving into the book The Intelligence Trap: Why Smart People Make Stupid Mistakes – and How to Make Wiser Decisions by David Robson. Mark: The Intelligence Trap. I like that name. It sounds like a mental escape room you don't even know you're in. Michelle: That’s a perfect way to put it. And Robson is the ideal guide for this. He's not just a journalist; he has a mathematics degree from Cambridge University. He's spent his career as a science writer looking at the extremes of the human brain, but with a very sharp, analytical eye. Mark: So he’s got the intellectual horsepower to understand intelligence, but also the skepticism to question it. Michelle: Exactly. The book was widely acclaimed when it came out because it tackles a question that haunts all of us: why do people who are demonstrably brilliant in one area suddenly seem to lose all common sense in another? It challenges this deep-seated cultural belief we have that a high IQ is a golden ticket to success and rationality. Mark: Right, that being "smart" is a kind of shield against being "stupid." But these stories you mentioned suggest the shield might be full of holes. Michelle: Or that the shield can be turned into a weapon against yourself. The book argues that high intelligence can actually make certain mistakes more likely, not less. Mark: Okay, I'm hooked. Where do we start? With the alien-believing Nobel laureate or the fairy-hunting detective writer?

Michelle: Let's start with the master of logic himself, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle. We all know him as the creator of Sherlock Holmes, the most rational, evidence-based character in literary history. Holmes would famously say, "When you have eliminated the impossible, whatever remains, however improbable, must be the truth." Mark: A motto for skeptics everywhere. Michelle: And yet, Conan Doyle himself was one of the world's most passionate and public believers in spiritualism and the paranormal. He spent a fortune and a huge amount of his reputation defending mediums who were, to almost everyone else, obvious frauds. Mark: That’s a wild contradiction. It’s like finding out the head of the Federal Reserve is secretly a compulsive gambler. Michelle: It gets better. The most famous example is the case of the Cottingley Fairies. In 1917, two young cousins in Cottingley, England, produced five photographs of themselves playing with what appeared to be tiny, winged fairies in their garden. Mark: Let me guess. They were real? Michelle: They were cardboard cut-outs from a children's book, held up with hatpins. And it was pretty obvious. The fairies were two-dimensional, they had the exact art style of the popular children's books of the day, and they didn't move between photos. Mark: Okay, so a cute prank by a couple of kids. Michelle: A prank that Arthur Conan Doyle, the creator of Sherlock Holmes, championed as definitive proof of the existence of a new dimension of life. He wrote a bestselling book about it. He used his formidable intellect to come up with elaborate explanations for all the inconsistencies. Experts pointed out the hatpins, and Doyle argued they were the fairies' belly buttons. Mark: He argued they were fairy belly buttons? Come on! How could the man who invented the science of deduction fall for that? Michelle: That's the core of the intelligence trap. His intelligence didn't help him see the truth; it helped him build a more elaborate, more convincing justification for what he wanted to be true. He was grieving the loss of his son, and spiritualism offered him comfort. His intelligence became a servant to his emotions, not a master of them. Mark: Wow. So his brainpower was used to construct a really impressive-sounding delusion. Michelle: Precisely. And he's not alone. The book opens with Kary Mullis, a biochemist who won the Nobel Prize for inventing PCR, a technique that revolutionized medicine and biology. A certified genius. Mark: I'm almost afraid to ask what he believed in. Michelle: Well, for starters, he was a fierce proponent of astrology. He also denied that HIV caused AIDS. And most colorfully, he claimed he was once abducted by aliens near his cabin in California. He described them as glowing, raccoon-like creatures who spoke to him. Mark: A glowing raccoon... from space. And this guy won a Nobel Prize. Michelle: Yes. And he wasn't joking. He was completely serious. Again, his intelligence didn't prevent these beliefs; it may have given him the confidence to hold them against all scientific consensus. He could out-argue anyone who challenged him, not because he was right, but because he was smarter. Mark: This is fascinating and also slightly terrifying. It's not just about being wrong. It's about being brilliantly and confidently wrong. So there's clearly a pattern here. What is going on inside these incredible minds that leads them so far astray?

Michelle: That's the million-dollar question, and Robson gives it a name that I think is incredibly useful: 'dysrationalia'. Mark: Dysrationalia. Sounds like a condition. Am I going to see a pharmaceutical ad for it during the evening news? Michelle: (laughs) Maybe one day. But it's a term coined by psychologist Keith Stanovich to describe the failure to think and behave rationally despite having adequate intelligence. It's the gap between your IQ and your RQ—your Rationality Quotient. Mark: Okay, so IQ is like the raw processing power of a computer, the CPU speed. What's RQ? Michelle: RQ is the software. It's the operating system that runs on that hardware. It's your ability to avoid cognitive biases, to think critically, and to make sound judgments. You can have a supercomputer of a brain, but if it's running buggy, virus-ridden software, you're going to get crashes. Conan Doyle and Kary Mullis had Ferraris for brains, but the steering was broken. Mark: And what's the main bug in the software? Michelle: The biggest one is called 'motivated reasoning'. This is the idea we touched on with Conan Doyle. Our brains don't operate like impartial scientists seeking truth. They operate like lawyers hired to defend a client. And the client is our pre-existing beliefs, our identity, our emotions. Mark: I can see that. When you're in an argument, you're not usually trying to find the objective truth. You're trying to win. Michelle: Exactly. And here's the trap: the smarter you are, the better lawyer your brain is. A person with an average IQ might just say, "Well, I just believe it." A person with a high IQ can construct a complex, multi-layered, citation-filled argument to defend that same belief, even if it's completely wrong. They build a fortress of logic around a core of irrationality. Mark: That explains so much about the internet. You see these incredibly elaborate conspiracy theories, and they're not built by fools. They're built by people who are clearly intelligent, but they've aimed that intelligence in the wrong direction. Michelle: And it's not just about conspiracies. It applies to experts, too. Robson talks about the 'curse of knowledge,' which is another part of the trap. This is where expertise in one area makes you overconfident and creates blind spots. Mark: How does that work? Michelle: Think about the FBI fingerprint examiners in the 2004 Madrid bombing case. They found a partial print on a bag of detonators and ran it through their database. It came back with a potential match: an American lawyer named Brandon Mayfield. Mark: Okay, sounds like good police work. Michelle: Except it wasn't his print. The Spanish police insisted it was a match for an Algerian man. But the FBI's top examiners, some of the best in the world, were so convinced they were right that they saw what they wanted to see. They explained away the differences. Their expertise created an expectation, a bias, that blinded them to the actual evidence. They were 100% confident in a 100% wrong match. Mayfield was arrested and held for two weeks before the FBI finally admitted their mistake. Mark: Wow. So their expertise actually made them worse at their job in that moment. Michelle: It made them more vulnerable to a specific kind of error. They became too reliant on their intuition and their past successes, and they stopped looking at the details with a fresh, humble eye. Mark: This is all a bit depressing. It feels like we're all walking around with these flawed mental tools, and the smarter we are, the more damage we can do with them. Are we all just doomed to be brilliant idiots? What's the escape hatch? How do we get out of this intelligence trap?

Michelle: Thankfully, the book doesn't just leave us in despair. The entire second half is dedicated to the escape hatch, which Robson calls 'evidence-based wisdom'. It's a toolkit of mental habits and strategies to cultivate that 'Rationality Quotient' we talked about. Mark: Okay, give me the tools. I need to upgrade my brain's operating system. Michelle: The first and most fundamental tool is intellectual humility. It's the simple, yet incredibly difficult, practice of recognizing the limits of your own knowledge and being willing to be wrong. Mark: That sounds like the exact opposite of what gets you ahead in the world. We're taught to be confident, to have all the answers. Michelle: And that's the trap! The book highlights Benjamin Franklin as a master of this. During the drafting of the US Constitution, the convention was on the verge of collapse because of bitter arguments. Franklin, the oldest and most respected delegate, stood up and said something amazing. He said, "I confess that there are several parts of this constitution which I do not at present approve, but I am not sure I shall never approve them... The older I grow, the more apt I am to doubt my own judgment, and to pay more respect to the judgment of others." Mark: That's a powerful statement. He's basically saying, "I'm smart enough to know I might be wrong." Michelle: Exactly! And that humility is what allowed for compromise and, ultimately, the creation of the Constitution. He even had a practical technique for this, which he called 'moral algebra'. When facing a tough decision, he wouldn't just go with his gut. He'd take a sheet of paper, draw a line down the middle, and list all the pros on one side and all the cons on the other. He'd then weigh them over several days, crossing off arguments of equal weight, until the correct path became clear. Mark: So it's a system to force yourself to be objective. To stop your inner lawyer from only presenting one side of the case. I like that. It's a checklist for your brain. Michelle: It is. And there's another powerful technique for overriding our biased gut feelings. It's called 'self-distancing', and it's a solution to what psychologists call 'Solomon's Paradox'. Mark: King Solomon from the Bible? The guy who was famously wise? Michelle: The very same. He was brilliant at solving other people's complex problems, like the famous case of the two women claiming the same baby. But his personal life was a complete disaster. He was ruled by his passions and made terrible decisions that led his kingdom to ruin. Mark: Oh, I know that feeling. I give my friends amazing, insightful advice, and then I go home and make the same dumb mistakes over and over again. Michelle: We all do! That's Solomon's Paradox. We are wiser when reasoning about other people's problems than our own. The solution—self-distancing—is to trick your brain by thinking about your own problem as if it were happening to a friend. Instead of asking "What should I do?", you ask, "What would I tell my friend Mark to do in this situation?" Mark: Huh. That immediately takes the emotional heat out of it. You become an objective advisor instead of the panicked person in the middle of the storm. Michelle: Precisely. It shifts you from 'hot', emotional, self-centered cognition to 'cool', rational, and wise reasoning. Even just using the third person—"Why is Mark feeling so anxious about this?"—can create enough psychological distance to see the situation more clearly. It's a simple but profound mental hack.

Michelle: So when you put it all together, the book's core message isn't that intelligence is bad. It's that intelligence is incomplete. It's a powerful tool, but like any tool, its usefulness depends entirely on the skill and mindset of the person wielding it. Mark: Right. A chainsaw is a fantastic tool for a lumberjack, but a terrible one for a surgeon. It's about using the right tool for the job, and raw IQ isn't the right tool for navigating life's complexities. Michelle: Exactly. Without that layer of evidence-based wisdom—that intellectual humility, that self-awareness, that willingness to doubt your own brilliance—our intelligence can become a trap. It builds these beautiful, logical-sounding cages for our minds, reinforcing our biases and blinding us to the truth. Mark: It really makes you stop and think. What belief am I holding onto right now, not because it's true, but just because my brain is really, really good at defending it? Michelle: That's a fantastic question for all of us to reflect on. True wisdom might not be about having the right answers, but about being brave enough to question the answers we're most sure of. Mark: And maybe being brave enough to admit that a glowing space raccoon is probably not a reliable source of information, no matter how smart you are. Michelle: (laughs) Especially then. We'd love to hear from our listeners on this. What's one 'intelligence trap' you've seen in your own life, or in the world around you? Let us know on our social channels. We're always curious to hear your insights. Michelle: This is Aibrary, signing off.