Full paper (West, Meserve, & Stanovich, 2012).
The New Yorker article ("Why smart people are stupid") by Lehrer misrepresents the main point of West et al.'s paper, which is that – as the original paper title asserts – "cognitive sophistication does not attenuate the bias blind spot", instead of the article's claim that smart people are more susceptible to cognitive biases.
Three negligent misrepresentations by Lehrer:
First, contrary to the general message of the article, West et al. state twice that most cognitive biases are negatively correlated with cognitive ability (emphasis mine):
The finding that the bias blind spot is more apparent among the more cognitively sophisticated individuals is contrary to much of the rest of the heuristics and biases literature where most biases are negatively correlated (or at least independent) with cognitive abilities (Bruine de Bruin et al., 2007; Chiesi et al., 2011; Del Missier et al., 2010, 2011; Finucane & Gullion, 2010; Kokis, Macpherson, Toplak, West, & Stanovich, 2002; Stanovich & West, 1998, 2000; Toplak et al., 2011; Weller, Levin, & Denburg, 2011; West et al., 2008).
Most cognitive biases in the heuristics and biases literature are negatively correlated with cognitive sophistication, whether the latter is indexed by development, by cognitive ability, or by thinking dispositions (Bruine de Bruin et al., 2007; Chiesi et al., 2011; Finucane & Gullion, 2010; Kokis et al., 2002; Toplak & Stanovich, 2002; Toplak et al., 2011; Weller et al., 2011; West et al., 2008).
Second, West et al. refer to the bias blind spot as a metabias because it is a pattern of inaccurate judgment in reasoning about cognitive biases. In this context, the distinction between bias and metabias (which the article neglects to maintain) is vital because the whole point of West et al.'s paper is that this particular metabias does not exhibit the same negative correlation with cognitive ability that many cognitive biases exhibit. They do not contest or assert to have a counterexample to the claim that most cognitive biases are negatively correlated with cognitive ability.
There is an important metabias that remains unexamined in all of the previous work on individual differences, however. It is the so-called bias blind spot—explored in an important article by Pronin, Lin, and Ross (2002). They found that people thought that various cognitive and motivational biases were much more prevalent in others than in themselves. Bias turns out to be relatively easy to recognize in the decisions of others, but often difficult to detect in one’s own judgments.
Third, West et al. are rather cautious (in contrast with the article) in stating the correlation strengths of bias blind spots with cognitive ability. For instance, they have as their paper title "Cognitive sophistication does not attenuate the bias blind spot", rather than a stronger "Cognitive sophistication augments the bias blind spot". However, they do find a slight positive correlation (two-tailed p < 0.05):
We found that none of these bias blind spot effects displayed a negative correlation with measures of cognitive ability (SAT total, CRT) or with measures of thinking dispositions (need for cognition, actively open-minded thinking). If anything, the correlations went in the other direction.
Whatever explains the slightly positive correlation, a conservative way to characterize the findings here is to say that cognitive ability provides no inoculation at all from the bias blind spot—the tendency to believe that biased thinking is more prevalent in others than in ourselves. In our data, cognitive ability did not attenuate the tendency toward a blind spot at all. Thus, the bias blind spot joins a small group of other effects such as myside bias and noncausal base-rate neglect (Stanovich & West, 2008b; Toplak & Stanovich, 2003) in being unmitigated by increases in intelligence.
Social news posts about the New Yorker article:
ETA: OB post
The article is pretty annoying, but after thinking about this for a day the positive blind-spot/IQ association doesn't seem implausible at all. Smart people tend to know they're smart (and tend to overestimate how far above the mean they are). And lots of people associate cognitive biases with low intelligence (in part because they are associated for many biases). So it shouldn't be that surprising that smart people think they're less likely to suffer from a cognitive bias after one is described to them given that they're unlikely to be familiar with past ...
A New Yorker article on cognitive biases was on the reddit front page in the last day. It seems like a good opportunity to discuss what the article got right, what it didn't, how reddit reacted, and how one might better publicize the topic in the future.
reddit comments(this link doesn't work any more, see VincentYu's comment for links)
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