Cognitive Gymnastics: Why The Stupid Never Ends

2009 September 7

By Matt

Last week, or whenever that last T-Mag debacle was going on, I mentioned something called the Dunning-Kruger effect a few times. I had originally planned to write up a short research review on this beforehand, but the debacle was just to timely to ignore it.

In any case, this phenomenon is an interesting example of a cognitive bias – that is, a thought process which blinds us or distracts us from objective reality. The Dunning-Kruger effect is what you see when someone incompetent or unqualified judges his/her ability as being far higher than it actually is. In comparison, people that are competent tend to much more conservative and underestimate their own ability.

It really is just a formalization of all the old adages about being smart enough to realize how little you know; people really are too stupid to know they’re stupid. I think a lot of readers thought I was just making it up, but Dunning and Kruger have actually had several papers published on the subject. This is a very real thing, and it has some very interesting implications.

What is Intelligence?

Pointing out “stupidity” is a common theme. On the Internet especially, hardly a day goes by where we don’t run into somebody “stupid”, “ignorant”, or whatever you choice of colloquialism may be. When that happens, we’re generally talking about people that “don’t get it” or “say unintelligent things”. In some cases it may just be that the person says something rude or tactless.

“Stupid” in the common speech is a catch-all term that really just means “this person doesn’t agree with my viewpoint, and how could s/he not?” What this means is generally understood in social settings, but I think we can define it more concretely. Any time “everybody knows” something, you’ve never got a real definition.

In order to know what stupid is, we have to know what it isn’t. If we’re considering stupid to mean the opposite of intelligent or lacking intelligence, we have to define intelligence.

First and foremost, while there are different definitions, intelligence is always dealing with a common collection of traits, namely: the ability to reason, to plan ahead, to learn from experience, to solve problems, to think abstractly, and to comprehend complex ideas.

For most folks, “intelligence” is synonymous with “being smart”, “knowing stuff”, and “being a nerd”, but it’s more than this. It’s not the ability to memorize and recite facts. It’s not just being good at taking tests.

Intelligence represents a deeper level of understanding and a more abstract level of information processing.

How many times have you heard the old cliche that some person isn’t “book smart” but is “street smart”? This can represent an intelligent person that simply has little or no interest in academic subjects – or someone that has never been exposed to them. Or maybe even somebody that simply applies his/her intelligence in a different way.

This is key: intelligence is not what someone knows. Intelligence is how good that person is at learning, understanding, and applying information.

What is Stupid?

So you’re surfing around the Internet and you see something that just pisses you off. You can’t resist it – this person is clearly an idiot and you’ve got to set them straight. You launch into a well-written tirade, certain your brilliance will get through.

But what’s this? You check back only to find that the target of your diatribe has not only rejected your monologue, but doesn’t even seem to have understood it in the first place – or maybe he didn’t even read it.

So you call him stupid. What do you mean, really? We fire off “stupid” and “idiot” and “moron” without a second thought – but what are we getting at? Besides frustration, that is.

We know what intelligence is, so it’s only reasonable to mean that a stupid person would lack that ability, or some aspect of it.

When you call somebody stupid, it’s for a range of reasons. Someone can be completely obtuse, refusing to accept basic facts. A person might be using bad logic or poor reasoning ability, which leads to wrong conclusions.

It always boils down to a breakdown in the reasoning process somewhere along the chain. In some cases this is just due to ego getting in the way; people tend to equate their opinion or viewpoint with themselves, and thus defend it as if they were the ones being attacked (which is in fact another kind of cognitive bias).

In other cases, it’s because the person in question simply doesn’t have the knowledge or experience to back up what he’s saying.

We’re getting closer to a definition of “stupid” now. “Stupid” people, in everyday terms, tend to lack intelligence in the sense that they aren’t able to grasp complex or abstract concepts; they simply lack that level of awareness. This is made worse by the Dunning-Kruger effect, in that this very same lack of awareness means they aren’t able to understand their own level of “stupid”.

So a “stupid” person isn’t just unintelligent; he or she is actually unaware of how unintelligent he or she is – because of the lack of intelligence. It’s a vicious cycle.

There’s a trait called metacognition – which literally means “thinking about your own thoughts” – that describes this. In effect, most people simply aren’t aware of their own thought processes. This may sound like a dog chasing its tail, but consider this.

The human brain is very good at reacting to other humans. It evolved in a setting where reading other humans was critical – we had to know whether we could trust another person as a potential ally, or whether we were being deceived.

In order to do this, humans developed the ability to model the minds of other humans. Most of us can look at how another human is acting and figure out what he or she is thinking – not in specific terms, but in a general sense. I can’t know that you’re thinking about a ham sandwich with cheese and mustard, but I can probably get the vague impression that you’re sick of listening to me drone on for hours in some stupid meeting.

We don’t read thoughts, but we can pick up on mood and attitude and general things like that. A lot of this is mediated by unconscious signals so that we don’t even realize we’re doing it. You can see this in the so-called uncanny valley, where something looks almost human but is just not quite right in some way or another – it’s missing those unconscious signals that our brains expect.

This ability to model human thoughts extends to ourselves as the process of self-reflection or introspection. We can examine our own thoughts just as easily as we can understand the thoughts of others. There’s one key difference: the model of your thoughts is your thoughts.

Think about that one for a minute.

Intelligence is largely about awareness – and even if you’re not terribly “intelligent” in the sense of “knowing things and being very smart”, you can still be aware of your own state of being. Being aware that you’re not very smart is a humbling thing (trust me), but it’s also a sign that you’re paying attention and that you have an understanding of your own mental state.

That ability to be aware of yourself and your surroundings is key. When I talk about someone being “smart” or “stupid”, I’m very rarely considering what that person knows. Your PC can store more raw data than any human being alive, but as yet our computer technology isn’t intelligent. Storing and recalling facts is not intelligence.

And make no mistake, this general intelligence is not universal across all areas in all people. Some people will be very intelligent in math and analytical subjects but couldn’t write a coherent sentence to save their lives. Some will be excellent in social or emotional intelligence but unable to balance a checkbook. Human brains do tend to have aptitudes in some specific areas, which is why we classify different “kinds” of intelligence.

I’m completely horrible in math, for example. It just doesn’t “click” with me the way I see in some people. In school I was supposedly “good” at it by test scores but in relation to my ability in English language and science reasoning it always lagged. Even today I still struggle with the whole topic.

In comparison, I’m very good with word association and with analytical reasoning. Those areas of the brain are good at what they do; the areas tasked with number-crunching obviously are not.

No, in my outlook “smart” and “stupid” have more to do with how you look at information and how you process it. You can be “not very smart” in the sense of being relatively uneducated, but still very intelligent because of how you look at the world.

In my experience the “stupid” people are those that think irrationally, that rely on fallacious arguments, and are both unwilling and unable to comprehend complex information. It’s not just that they don’t know things, it’s that they seem completely unable to consider information beyond their own pre-formed conclusions.

When you argue with a person like this, they tend to shut down mentally and just repeat themselves over and over. For them it isn’t a matter about having a debate to learn, it’s about shouting until you agree with them. There is no consideration or deliberation of opposing information.

This, too, has been studied in research by Westen et al (PDF file) and detailed further in Westen’s The Political Brain, and the research of Fowler and Schreiber. They’ve pretty clearly demonstrated that humans act like this and that there is a neurological basis for it.

The so-called confirmation bias means that the average human is very likely to dismiss, ignore, and distort information if it disagrees with them, in order to make reality conform to an existing belief. We don’t tend to reason deductively, using facts to shape our view of the world. Instead, we form an opinion and then expect the facts to twist to it.

Most people don’t realize that they do this. And now you see why metacognition and awareness in general is so important when discussing intelligence. Intelligent people on average will tend to avoid this kind of behavior simply by virtue of having that self-awareness.

Of course I can’t leave out the general undercurrent of anti-intellectualism, either, and I’ll argue that the attitude of the unintelligent is at least as complicit as the stupid itself.

It’s fine to not know things and hell it’s even fine to be “stupid”. What’s not fine is the trend towards the uninformed wanting to be involved in things like national politics, as one glaring example.

If you’re not informed and you make it clear that you have no desire (or ability) to become informed, why should anyone care what you think?

Yet that’s exactly the case that a good chunk of the population tries to make. “I don’t know what I’m talking about, but I’m right and you should listen to me” is not a compelling argument.

What this has to do with anything

No, I’m not going off the deep end, not entirely. I mean don’t get me wrong, sometimes I do think about writing up posts just to see what I can get away with, but I’m not there just yet.

I know a lot of my recent updates have been kinda out there, but that’s what happens when I start reading a lot of artificial intelligence and cognitive science research, and when I frankly run out of exercise-related topics. If you want me to talk training, send me some questions or something.

I do think this stuff is interesting in a personal sense, because it does explain a lot of what you see in the fitness industry, whether it’s online or down at your gym.

You can see this in effect with any zealot, really, not just in politics. Look at all the people that become fanboys of some particular training method or diet. They’ve got a hammer and every problem has become a nail. Try to tell them otherwise and you might as well have just slapped their mama.

These behavioral quirks are of course exploited to make money – it’s called “marketing”. Confirmation bias combined with a lack of analytical ability means that when you tell people what they want to hear, they give you money.

It turns out that about 99% of the fitness industry builds its business model around this concept. People are sold fat burners, diets, ab-thingies, new workouts promising 27 lbs of muscle in six weeks, and so on. Despite hard evidence to the contrary, people still spend billions of dollars every year.

This explains why. This also explains why people making obviously false claims, or even outright con artists, can stay in business and even thrive. It really make me wonder sometimes why I bother trying to be ethical, because somebody could clean up with all the gullible folks out there.

It’s even worse because half the time I just get told off for my troubles; very ironic when you’re trying to educate people and prevent them from wasting time and money on pipe-dreams. That’s the power of marketing. Not only are you appealing to people’s emotions, which are how most people make decisions, but you’ve created a nice little zombie that will mindlessly defend you.

That’s what happens why you try to stop a force of nature, though, and stupid most definitely qualifies.