How to act less stupid, according to psychologists
“The stupidest thing someone can do is overestimate themselves,” he said. “What that tells us is that you don’t have to have a low IQ, in people’s eyes, to act stupidly. You just have to misperceive your abilities.”
In other words poseurs, who overestimate their abilities, come across as the most stupid, which is not surprising. This ties into earlier posts about millennials, the culture of authenticity, and how HBD-based science and post-2008 economic reality is making liberalism obsolete. In the workforce throughout the 90’s and 2000’s, all these ‘poseurs’ were getting by on social skills and connections, and then 2008 came along and then these overpaid, semi-competent employees that were just ‘coasting by’ lost their jobs. And those jobs, especially clerical jobs in the finance sector, will never come back.
Take the work of Daniel Kahneman, a Nobel Laureate and professor of psychology at Princeton University who, using arithmetic questions, has found that intelligence can make simple answers harder to find.
He hasn’t figured out why, but hypothesizes that intelligent people might be less capable of evaluating themselves, making them more vulnerable. When given a math problem, for instance, an intelligent person might assume they aren’t capable of the same thinking errors that their peers are, which, in turn, makes them more prone to commit them.
Just another example of how the left uses bogus behavioral ‘science’ to try to turn high-IQ into a handicap. Let’s see…if I were going to wager on who con solve a complicated math problem, my money would be on the high-IQ math PHD, not a less intelligent person with ‘street smarts’. Daniel Kahneman and the rest of his social pseudoscience ilk are promoting ‘leveling’ – the idea that smart people are not much better than anyone else, as part of the liberal war on individual cognitive exceptionalism. Smart people solve problems and create technologies, and if smart people sometimes act stupid, how do stupid people act? Part of the problem is confirmation bias – our awareness of mistakes made by smart people is heightened, but we ignore the fact that less intelligent people tend to make more mistakes overall. Many people, understandably so, are uncomfortable with the reality that some are individuals are intrinsically better than others, so we look for any excuse however small to knock these exceptional people down to size.
Diederik Alexander Stapel, a former professor of social psychology at Tilburg University, was suspended in 2011 for fabricating data to give politically correct results.
Over half of psychology studies fail reproducibility tests, which should tell you how useless this field is.
Kahneman, Taleb, Dan Ariely, and Gladwell rose to preeminence, along with the empty suit Obama, before and after the financial crisis as millions of people who felt ‘wronged’ by the financial and cognitive elite took comfort in the leftist message that ‘smart people are no better than everyone else’, which is pretty much the synopsis of every book written by the aforementioned authors. Gladwell, the embodiment of the pseudo-intellectual hipster, is possibly the worst of all of pop-psychology charlatans, the 10,000 hour rule he helped popularize in 2008 thoroughly debunked.
Even though I’m on the ‘right’, there is a serious epidemic of parents who think their otherwise dull kids are special. Due to inflated expectations and easily hurt feelings, the learning process is hindered because of the mismanagement of resources – both time and money – in trying to bring slow kids up to speed and neglecting the needs of exceptional children.
Related:
Nature Beats Nurture
How Liberalism Distorts Perception of IQ
Liberal Denial of Individual Congenital Cognitive Exceptionalism
The Uselessness of Pop Social Psychology