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Your mental abilities are not in doubt, neither you nor those around you. You are a former honor student and the intellectual center of any team. And yet sometimes, at the most unexpected moment, you make such ridiculous mistakes and make such absurd decisions that it’s time to grab your head. Why?
It is pleasant and profitable to have high intelligence: according to statistics, smart people earn more and even live longer. However, the expression «woe from wit» is also not devoid of scientific grounds.
Shane Frederick, a professor at the Yale School of Management, has conducted a study that explains why rational thinking and intelligence do not always go hand in hand. He invited the participants to solve some simple logic problems.
For example, try this problem: “A baseball bat and a ball together cost a dollar and a dime. The bat costs a dollar more than the ball. How much is the ball worth? (The correct answer is at the end of the article.)
People with high IQs are more likely to blurt out the wrong answer without too much thought: «10 cents.»
If you make a mistake too, don’t be discouraged. More than half of the students at Harvard, Princeton, and MIT who took part in the study gave the same answer. It turns out that academically successful people do make more mistakes when solving mental problems.
The main reason for misses is excessive confidence in one’s own abilities.
Although we don’t often spend time solving logic puzzles like the one mentioned above, the mental functions involved in this process are similar to those we use every day in everyday life. So people with high IQs often make embarrassing mistakes in the workplace.
But why? Emotional intelligence bestselling author Travis Bradbury lists four reasons.
Smart people are overconfident
We are used to quickly giving the right answers and sometimes we don’t even realize that we are answering without thinking.
“The most dangerous thing about the mistakes of intellectually developed people is that they do not even suspect that they can be wrong. The stupider the mistake, the harder it is for a person to admit that he made it, says Travis Bradbury. — However, people with any level of intelligence suffer from «blind spots» in their own logical constructions. This means that we easily notice other people’s mistakes, but do not see our own.
Smart people find it harder to develop perseverance
When everything is easy for you, difficulties are perceived as something negative. As a sign that you are not up to the task. When a smart person realizes that he has a lot of hard work to do, he often feels lost.
As a result, he prefers to do something else in order to confirm his sense of self-worth. Whereas perseverance and work, perhaps after some time, would have brought him success in those areas that were not initially given.
Smart people like to multitask at the same time.
They think quickly and therefore are impatient, like to do several things at the same time, feeling that they are unusually efficient. However, it is not. Not only does multitasking make us less productive, people who are constantly “scattering” actually lose out to those who prefer to dedicate themselves entirely to one activity in a certain period of time.
Smart people don’t take feedback well.
Smart people don’t trust the opinions of others. It is hard for them to believe that there are professionals who can give them an adequate assessment. Not only does this not contribute to high performance, but it can also lead to toxic relationships at work and in your personal life. Therefore, they should develop emotional intelligence.
The correct answer is 5 cents.