The Intelligence Trap, Review

The Intelligence Trap by David Robson is available in hardback from Hodder & Stoughton for £20.

The Intelligence Trap poses three key questions and provides excellent answers to each:

• Why do smart people act stupidly?
• What skills and dispositions are smart people missing that would explain their mistakes?
• How can we cultivate those positive qualities to protect us from errors?

So why do smart people make silly mistakes? The Intelligence Trap takes a thorough look at what the science tells about intelligence, and mostly importantly, when and how intelligence can lead people astray. It takes chapter after thoroughly interesting chapter to unpack the stories and research about intelligence, then teaches the reader how to avoid the mistakes other intelligent people have made. Robson explains everything from why experts often overestimate their own judgement, to how groups can get caught up in folly.

The Intelligence Trap distills over 100 years of scientific research about intelligence and explains it in a series of stories and practical examples. This approach makes it clear to see how the mistakes explained in the book will occur in everyday life. In most of the chapters, you will see how common it is for smart people to show poor judgement. Throughout the book you will see stories that mirror your own mistakes, or situations you can easily imagine yourself in. Then, Robson explains how to avoid these mistakes.

Most importantly, the style and structure of this book offers very clear and practical advice to readers. Every reader knows what it’s like to look at someone’s silly behaviour and think to themselves what are they thinking? Each of the chapters helps to answer that question.

After outlining the reasons smart people make stupid mistakes in the first section, the second section of The Intelligence Trap provides “A toolkit for reasoning and decision making”. This will be the most interesting section for many readers. Robson sets out the toolkit in a straightforward and practical way using fascinating stories which illustrate his points.

One of the important points that Robson explains is how to reflect on your own decision-making process. Considering alternative courses of action with an open mind is one way to avoid mistakes. Many silly mistakes and catastrophic blunders emerge from overconfidence, failure to consider alternatives and lack of awareness of one’s own decision-making process. Taking a deeper look at these processes helps people to avoid making mistakes. There is, of course, a bit more to it which Robson explains so well in this book.

This book is an excellent read for anyone with any level of knowledge on the topic. Experts and novices alike will greatly benefit from the information and lessons in The Intelligence Trap. Experts would do well to read the reminders about how the smartest people with the most extensive experience can so easily make mistakes. The book illustrates the science with helpful case studies which will make it a thoroughly enjoyable read for people already familiar with the topic.

Those with less background knowledge on the topic will find it equally interesting and enjoyable to read. The book dispenses with jargon and technical language to get straight to the heart of each major question. The tools and tips presented by Robson are available to everyone who is interested.

The Intelligence Trap is a much-needed inoculation to prevent decision-making that leads to blunders. This book should be required reading for any student of leadership, business or psychology. It should also be required reading for any intelligent person in a leadership position.

Most of the advice offered by Robson appears to be common sense. This is more tribute to Robson’s writing style. He takes an extraordinary amount of information and distills it into clear lessons that are relevant to all readers. After you read this book the first time, you’ll be picking it up again and again to understand why people around you (and you!) make silly mistakes.

David Robson is a science journalist specialising in the extremes of the human brain, body and behaviour. As a feature writer for the BBC, he has interviewed everyone from real-life vampires to the hyper-polyglots who have mastered more than 30 languages, and the scientists hunting for the elixir of life – in whale blubber.

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