Why do Intelligent people do Stupid Things?

What Does It Mean to Have an IQ?

Let me ask you a question. A bat and a ball together cost $1.10. The bat costs $1 more than the ball. How much does the ball cost? If your answer is $0.10, then I’m afraid you’re absolutely wrong

Don’t worry, you’re in good company. When students at Harvard University were asked the same question, 50% gave the same incorrect answer. At other less selective universities, the failure rate is even higher a whopping 80%. What is the correct answer? I hear you ask. The ball, of course, costs five cents. If you got this right, congratulations.

The General Population vs You

You’re also likely to be more indecisive, non religious and politically incorrect than the general population. If you are one of the general population and you’re still scratching your head, let me break this one down for you. If we take the commonly espoused but incorrect answer of the ball costing $0.10, that would infer that the bat costs $1.10, We said, $1 more than the ball. Then that would bring the total cost to $1.20. This is why your teacher always told you to show your workings.

You’re not stupid. You’re just a cognitive miser, a term coined by professors Susan Fisk and Shelley Taylor, meaning that your brain really hates doing that thing called thinking and tries to find solutions to problems using the least amount of energy possible. Instead of reading the bat costs $1 more than the ball, your lazy brain probably just read it as the bat costs $1, inferring that the ball would cost ten cents, of course, but that isn’t what it said. The world is an immensely complex place, and our brains are doing their best to sort through 400 billion bits of information every second, consuming and not so insignificant 20% of the body’s total energy. It’s no wonder, then, that sometimes our brains like to take shortcuts.

Usually, this isn’t an issue. See something that looks sharp? Don’t touch it. Does the floor look wet? You might slip. This is all fine until you’re walking through what you think is an open door one day and bam, you walk nose first into a pane of glass. A stupid thing to do, right? not necessarily. You see, being a cognitive miser has no bearing on someone’s intelligence…