What Makes Intelligent People Prone To Bias?

When a person is faced with a complicated problem, there tends to be a range of potential ways of tackling and solving it. In the best-case scenario, the individual will apply critical thinking to the situation, weighing up their options in a balanced manner and, ultimately, establishing the best course of action.

This tendency — which has been termed the “myside” bias — can be observed in the way people act in real-life situations all the time. On top of that, researchers have noted it over and over again in a range of different studies.

Let’s consider a real-life situation. The death rate associated with COVID-19 is substantially higher than that of regular flu. That’s an established fact, backed up by reams of research. The specifics are difficult to establish, given the changeable nature of the COVID-19 situation, but the scientific community has shown that COVID-related deaths are, as Johns Hopkins Medicine puts it, “substantially higher (possibly ten times or more) than that of most strains of the flu.”

Research has indicated smarter people are especially likely to interpret situations in a biased way. In her book THINKING 101, Yale University psychology professor Woo-kyoung Ahn, suggests why, noting it’s “because they know more ways to explain away the facts that contradict their beliefs.”

For the study, a group of undergrads were selected on the basis of their outlook on capital punishment. Some of them supported it, because they thought it served to act as a deterrent against committing crimes, while others opposed it.

Half of the made-up studies demonstrated that the death penalty did discourage crime. One of them read, “Kroner and Phillips (1977) compared murder rates for the year before and the year after adoption of capital punishment in 14 states. In 11 of the 14 states, murder rates were lower after adoption of the death penalty. This research supports the deterrent effect of the death penalty.”

So, each time the subjects had read through one of these made-up death penalty studies, they were told to record whether or not their outlook on capital punishment had changed. Had their view of the issue been influenced by the research they’d just analyzed?

It turned out that both sides of the group were influenced by the materials they’d read. When they read the studies that claimed the deterrent effect was real, both the proponents and the opponents of the death penalty came to take a more favorable view of it. On the other hand, when they read the studies arguing against the deterrent effect, both sides tended to become less convinced by it.

Things get even more interesting when we look at a second part of this study. For the first part, the subjects read fairly short summaries of the findings of each made-up study. In this second part, they were provided with much more information. The methods of the made-up studies were described in greater detail, for example.

Let’s take a look at an example of one of the subject’s responses to a particular study, having received the additional information. Having read that the study had been conducted “only one year before and one year after capital punishment was reinstated” in a particular state, they’d decided that the methodology was flawed.

This is a pretty detailed critique, indicative of someone fairly intelligent. But the thing is, those who were found to formulate these apparently sophisticated arguments were also shown to be particularly biased. They’d come up with arguments like that one, and they’d use them against the studies that opposed their original stance on capital punishment. And on top of that, the studies that contradicted their original stance would actually reinforce their initial belief.

Dr. Ahn elaborated on the implications of these findings. She pointed out, “Coming up with excuses to dismiss evidence requires a good amount of analytic thinking skills and background knowledge, like how to collect and analyze data… When the participants could not apply such sophisticated skills because the study descriptions were so brief, biased assimilation did not occur.”

The findings of the capital-punishment study were fascinating, but the research had its limitations. For one thing, the reasoning skills of each subject weren’t assessed on an individual basis. The researchers, therefore, couldn’t compare how people of varying cognitive abilities fared against one another.

On the easier side, this question was included. “Imagine,” it began, “we are throwing a five-sided die 50 times. On average, out of these 50 throws, how many times would this five-sided die show an odd number?” Can you get the correct answer?

If you want an example of one of the more complicated questions, here’s the set-up, “In a forest, 20 percent of mushrooms are red, 50 percent brown, and 30 percent white. A red mushroom is poisonous with a probability of 20 percent. A mushroom that is not red is poisonous with a probability of 5 percent.”

Subjects in this study were also shown a data table, which laid out the apparent effects of a skin cream on different people’s rashes. According to the data, about 75 percent of those who applied the cream claimed it helped to clear their rash up. The remaining 25 percent of people who applied the cream to their rash said it made it worse.

In this section of the study, in which participants were asked to consider the data about the rash cream, Dr. Ahn wrote, “Assessing these results correctly is a fairly challenging task, so it makes sense that the higher the participants’ scores were in the numeracy assessment, the more likely they were to get the right answers. And in fact that’s what happened.”

In this other section, the exact same numbers that were used in the rash cream data were applied to a much more politically divisive scenario. That is, the data this time was about whether or not gun control had an effect on the rate of crime.

This is where things got really interesting. Those participants who’d scored comparatively poorly on the numeracy tests tended to have trouble getting the right answers to the questions about the rash cream and gun control. That’s not terribly surprising, of course. And it also didn’t matter whether they voted Democrat or Republican.

That wasn’t at all the case when it came to the participants who exhibited greater numeracy skills. “Republicans with higher numeracy were more likely to get it right when the correct answer was that gun control increased crime,” Dr. Ahn explained.

Dr. Ahn was adamant that she wasn’t trying to claim that people with lower cognitive abilities don’t also exhibit their own biases. “I am not trying to say those lacking high levels of quantitative or analytic reasoning skills don’t make biased interpretations,” she wrote. “Of course they do.”

And other experts have been willing to make the still-stronger claim that smarter people really do tend to exhibit biases more than others. The late Daniel Kahneman, a Princeton University psychologist and Nobel Prize winner who passed away on March 27, 2024, was one such person.

An example of the sort of question Kahneman would ask of people was laid out in an article in The New Yorker. “A bat and ball cost $1.10,” the problem begins. “The bat costs $1 more than the ball. How much does the ball cost?”

For hundreds of years, countless social scientists, philosophers, and economists have worked off the assumption that humans are rational creatures. One hears the argument all the time, but, frankly, the evidence would appear to suggest that quite the opposite is really the case.

The argument that people are actually prone to irrationality says that, when faced with a complicated, uncertain scenario, individuals tend not to think through the information available to them very carefully. Nor, for that matter, do they seek out more information or statistics that might actually shed light on the situation.

Dr. Kahneman’s insight on this subject has been profoundly influential, so much so that The New Yorker claimed he “is now widely recognized as one of the most influential psychologists of the 20th century.” Still, that wasn’t always so. During the earlier stages of his career, his ideas were rejected.

The irony, of course, is that this unnamed snobby philosopher is the one who now looks stupid. A lot of research now backs up the thinking of Dr. Kahneman, including one study that has appeared in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology.

There were 482 undergraduates taking part in Dr. West and Dr. Stanovich’s study, each of whom was asked a series of questions. These consisted of what The New Yorker termed as “classic bias problems.” Let’s look at one to get an idea of what sort of problems were put to the respondents.  

Do you know the answer? A lot of people are prone to taking a mental shortcut when faced with this problem, which means they divide 48 by 2 to get 24. They therefore posit that the answer is that it takes 24 days for the pond to become half-covered. They’re wrong.

DR. West also included a problem to test for “anchoring bias,” which is a concept that Dr. Kahneman and Dr. Tversky described in the ’70s. The New Yorker piece laid out the problem, noting, “Subjects were first asked if the tallest redwood tree in the world was more than X feet, with X ranging from 85 to 1,000 feet. Then the students were asked to estimate the height of the tallest redwood tree in the world.

All of this is very interesting, but Dr. West, dr. Stanovich, and other people they worked with wanted to learn more than this. It was all well and good to analyze the various biases that people were prone to, but that work had already been done many times before. They wanted to specifically work out how a person’s intelligence influenced those biases.

The researchers observed that “people who were aware of their own biases were not better able to overcome them.” To the layman, that might seem like a really surprising finding: surely self-awareness would help counter cognitive bias? Well, apparently not.  

One of the more troublesome biases to which people are prone, according to Dr. West, is what he called the “bias blind spot,” which is when we automatically assume other people are more prone to making thinking errors than we are. The New Yorker piece explains, “This ‘meta-bias’ is rooted in our ability to spot systematic mistakes in the decisions of others — we excel at noticing the flaws of friends — and inability to spot those same mistakes in ourselves.”

And, it seems, intelligence makes people more prone to succumbing to the bias blind spot. According to Dr. West’s research, intelligent individuals — intelligent in so much as they score highly in the SAT — are a little more likely than others to fall into flawed, biased ways of thinking.

The New Yorker piece offered some theories as to why this might be. “One provocative hypothesis,” it suggested, “is that the bias blind spot arises because of a mismatch between how we evaluate others and how we evaluate ourselves. When considering the irrational choices of a stranger, for instance, we are forced to rely on behavioral information; we see their biases from the outside, which allows us to glimpse their systematic thinking errors.”

There’s a major problem with this introspective manner of analysis, from the perspective of this theory. Our biases, which are the main drivers of irrational thinking, tend to be unconscious. When we attempt to reflect upon our own thoughts, feelings, and behaviors, then, we tend to miss these unconscious biases.

All of this research stands in opposition to assumptions that lots of people hold about the nature of intelligence and how it affects those who possess it. Smart people, it’s presumed, are able to recognise their biases and rise above them. We think they’re best able to assess information from a neutral position and to consequently work out the best solution to a problem.

People we might traditionally think of as intelligent — say, doctors, academics, and scientists — can often exhibit a predisposition for conformity. To be sure, that can be a great thing in certain instances. After all, would you want a doctor who didn’t play by the rules to treat you?

Everyone has their biases, regardless of the ostensible level of their intelligence. Human beings just tend to understand the world in ways that align with the beliefs that they already hold. It’s universal, but it really does seem like the situation is even more pronounced in the cases of smart people.