Sometimes, highly intelligent people fall into what psychologists call the intelligence trap–a tendency of experts to overreach the limits of their expertise. One of the most dramatic examples of this occurred in 1998 with the failure of the investment firm Long Term Capital Management (LTCM) generally attributed to the prevailing hubris among its senior partners who seemed to believe in their public persona as “financial geniuses.” Buoyed by their successes, they continued to increase leverage while failing to test the assumptions underpinning their mathematical model. Since these highly intelligent people were used to being right much more often than being wrong, they may have been especially susceptible to this cognitive trap. Since the natural sciences, by contrast, are typically dedicated to the search for disconfirming evidence of current theories, we might expect the Hi-Q researchers in the natural sciences, to be immune. However, it seems that confirmation bias is ubiquitous; few, if any, escape its lure.
Quite frequently, Nobel laureates or winners of other prestigious awards, make scientifically unjustified assertions within or outside their field of expertise. This phenomenon, often described as “Nobel disease,” is a common result of confirmation bias. Indian astrophysicist Subrahmanyan Chandrasekhar, who won the Nobel Prize in 1983 describes how a scientist may fall into this cognitive trap:
These people [winners of prestigious awards] imagine afterward that the fact that they succeeded so triumphantly in one area means they have a special way of looking at science that must be right. But science doesn’t permit that. Nature has shown over and over again that the kinds of truth which underlie nature transcend the most powerful minds.
Though Albert Einstein possessed one of the most powerful scientific minds of all time, his inability to contribute new ideas to physics in his middle age has been attributed to confirmation bias, manifest in his reluctance to challenge his assumption that the universe is deterministic. Meanwhile, the younger quantum physicists working in the field that Einstein had helped to pioneer, were coming to believe that an electron does not have a definite position at a particular time until it is observed–a phenomenon known as quantum weirdness. In the face of accumulating new evidence supporting indeterminacy, Einstein stubbornly refused to abandon his assumption of determinacy, stating:
Quantum mechanics is certainly imposing. But an inner voice tells me that it is not yet the real thing. The theory says a lot, but does not really bring us any closer to the secret of the “Old One.” I, at any rate, am convinced that He [God] does not play dice.
Niels Bohr, as one of the fathers of quantum physics, became weary of Einstein’s frequent insistence that “God does not play dice with the universe,” and once responded, “Einstein, stop telling God what to do!” Bohr had abandoned the assumption of determinacy, and most of the quantum physicists were moving forward with a new paradigm.
In his book, Einstein’s Mistakes: The Human Failings of Genius, physicist Hans Ohanion documents Einstein’s attempts to construct thought (gedanken) experiments that would refute indeterminacy and support his assumption. He wrote, “Einstein’s entire program [his search for a unified field theory] was an exercise in futility. … It was obsolete from the start.” His younger colleague Robert Oppenheimer, who had led the Manhattan Project in the development of the atomic bomb, opined, “He simply turned his back on experiments [to] rid himself of the facts.” The young radical, who had irrevocably changed the foundations of physics by challenging its long-held false assumptions, succumbed in older age to confirmation bias–ignoring the new experimental evidence that would disconfirm the validity of a unified field theory.
In another realm, the quintessential inventor Thomas Edison had been unrelenting in his belief that direct current (DC) is the best way to transport electricity throughout America. In spite of substantial evidence provided by his employee Nikola Tesla, showing the advantages of alternating current (AC) over DC, Edison continued to insist that alternating current was too dangerous and refused to pay Tesla for his research on AC. Unable to convince his boss, Tesla sold his findings to George Westinghouse who patented the technology that remains the basis of today’s power grid.
Examples of highly intelligent people who have fallen into the intelligence trap are legion. (More examples can be found in Intelligence, IQ & Perception.) As the escapist Harry Houdini once observed, “As a rule, I have found that the greater brain a man has, and the better he is educated, the easier it has been to mystify him.”
