Why Smart People Make Bad Decisions

Have you ever wondered why smart people do stupid things?

Fine, let's not say stupid. Let's say absurd. :)

You surely know someone whose intelligence you trust. A friend, a manager, a colleague, the person you have a crush on. And to your amazement, despite all your talks, despite all that intelligence, they walk straight into a mistake they can see coming. They fool themselves, and you are left standing there.

Why, do you think?

A Turkish trainer in a Swiss room

Some time ago I was abroad. I had been invited to Switzerland to run a workshop, and in Germany I tried to help quite a few people through career coaching.

It was one of those rare moments I felt proud of, and later, alone, quietly moved by. For years I had watched foreign trainers in my own country, admired them, sat in their trainings. This time I was the one invited to a foreign country as the trainer.

A woman, an entrepreneur, a trainer and a Turk, all in one person. That combination was not something the room was used to. There were 16 of us, and curious faces were looking at me. We had a good time. We learned, we laughed, we made decisions, we were surprised. The smiling faces at the end and the new friendships were a real joy.

So why am I telling you this?

Because the struggles, the worries, the fears and the excuses people told themselves there were so similar to the ones I hear at home. I found that fascinating.

Of course they may not feel the security problems we feel. At that time, there were bombings in Turkey, you are right. But apart from that, believe me, our human anxieties look very much alike.

Do you know one of the biggest reliefs I felt while I was there?

Strange, but it was this. When the pedestrian light turned green, I did not feel the need to look left and right again. If you live in Istanbul, the green light tells you that you are safe, yet I still look both ways to make sure the cars have actually stopped. Even that creates a contradiction in the mind.

Surprising? A little.

Why do we want to believe?

The truth is, we all want to believe. We want to be convinced. Believing is natural. Disbelief, skepticism, science, those are not natural. They are much harder.

Not believing in anything, trust me, is deeply uncomfortable. You cannot live life doubting everything like Sherlock Holmes.

But here is the reality. We are all pattern-seeking primates. We have a tendency to find a meaningful model among meaningful and meaningless data. We want to connect the dots, and we build connections out of the patterns we find. To understand, to protect ourselves, to trust, to survive.

In our lives, our work and our relationships, we look for patterns. When we meet someone new and decide whether to trust them. In job interviews, about the candidates or about the interviewer.

And however much we trust ourselves, we become more likely to fall into these errors:

• Type 1 error (false positive): believing in a pattern that is not real.

• Type 2 error (false negative): not believing in a pattern that is real.

False positives, false negatives and the rustle in the grass

Let me put it this way.

Say you are an early human walking across the plains of Africa 3.5 million years ago.

You hear a sound in the bushes, a rustle…

Is it a dangerous predator, or just the wind?

The decision you make in the next second may be the most important decision of your life.

If the bushes are rustling only because of the wind and not a predator as you thought, you made a perception error. A Type 1 error, a false positive.

But no harm done. It only made you move away. You are a bit more careful, a bit more alert.

If, however, you decide the grass is rustling because of the wind and there actually is a predator in there, you have become dinner. Congratulations, you have been erased from the gene pool. You have earned a Darwin Award.

Looking through the lens of evolutionary psychology, our default setting for survival may well be "believe that all patterns are real."

In other words, "Every rustle in the bushes belongs to a predator, not the wind."

The tendencies of the belief mechanism in our minds were shaped by natural selection. It is always working to find meaningful patterns and to link them to outside forces that want to hunt us, that are out to get us.

What does dopamine have to do with it?

So what are these patterns connected to? Partly to the level of dopamine in our brain. In experiments, subjects whose dopamine was increased saw far more patterns than subjects with normal dopamine levels.

Paranoia, delusions and hallucinations are all pattern-finding disorders. They are false patterns. Type 1 errors. False positives. And when you give these people medication (a dopamine antagonist), the patterns disappear. The more you reduce the dopamine, the less likely they are to see patterns.

If the amount of dopamine released in your brain is very high, you might start seeing patterns everywhere. Every time people look at you, you think they are watching you. You think people are talking about you.

Perhaps this is the difference between two Nobel Prize winning scientists, Richard Feynman and John Nash. One sees enough patterns to win a Nobel Prize. The other perhaps has too many patterns (to the point of schizophrenia).

"You never know how strong you are until it is the only choice you have."

Being too skeptical is not a good thing either, believe me, you would not want it. If you are too skeptical, you can miss some interesting, good ideas. You can miss life.

It has to be in balance. Open enough to be creative, sharp enough not to fall for nonsense. (Sometimes you need a good BS detector. :))

Why does everyone suddenly know best?

Every so often I come across curious pieces on blogs and especially on LinkedIn. People who have never been leaders lecturing about leadership. A race to take shots at white-collar workers by people who have never been one. People who have never worked in a corporation trashing corporate life. Bashing HR is among the most popular. Or pieces praising, idolizing or criticizing entrepreneurship, written without ever being an entrepreneur or knowing its hardships.

It is as if everyone is dictating their own truth. I cannot understand it. Not everyone can do everything, yes, but some people may simply be choosing to do certain things. And there are those who make themselves feel good by putting others down, saying I did the right thing, they did it wrong.

"Knowledge is knowing that a tomato is a fruit; wisdom is not putting it in a fruit salad." - Miles Kington

I have met with at least 3,000 people, and I can tell you this. Not everyone can do everything. But everyone does some things very well. They can try, they can fail, and afterwards leave much deeper marks on their lives. Look around you…Be happy all the time, network, do this, do that…

Can a smart person be wrong about everything else?

Being smart is not much like being strong. Physical strength stays strength in most places. But a person who shines with intelligence in one area can talk complete nonsense in another.

I know this from myself. :)

We console ourselves as if we had no right to be angry or sad. And it goes on, and on, and on. Until the day we say, enough, I am going to change.

I don't know if you have ever thought about it. Do our behaviors shape our thoughts, or do our thoughts shape our behaviors? People do not only act the way they think. After a while, their actions start to shape their thinking too. That is why we need to build the inner structure that protects us from the toxic people and thoughts around us.

If we cannot do this physically, doing it mentally is far healthier, and it can open the door to the life we actually want.

I wish all of us a life that fits our values.

With love,

Gizem

This essay was first published in Turkish on gizemsahan.com.

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