Unfortunately, the subject of intelligence, IQ, and its related metrics are only somewhat briefly covered in these pages. There's lots of rehashing on Dunning-Kruger effect implications (I happen to love this stuff, since it's everywhere). The dumbest among us, as a rule, is the one whose outlook reflects the greatest divergence from the average of studied effects. In The Psychology of Stupidity, some of the world's leading psychologists and thinkers - including a Nobel Prize winner - will show you . I don’t want to predict how things will go, but with the passing of the older generations it feels like it’ll be a mixture of higher empathy… merged alongside selfies and the need for Likes.

The Psychology of Stupidity | Penguin Random House Secondary The Psychology of Stupidity | Penguin Random House Secondary

But that's a matter of personal taste, and what didn't work for me might work well for a different reader. One is that the stakes are higher: “The novelty of the contemporary era is that it would take only one idiot with a red button to eradicate all stupidity, and the whole world with it. Assholes generally have to fight for the title of “asshole in chief” or “baron” of assholes, but few can match Trump’s prowess at piling assholery upon assholery (Kim Jong-un, in North Korea, being a notable exception). The more you know the more you realize how much more there is to know and how truly little you know. Among the wealth of insights, one of the salient takeaways is the importance of humility and self-skepticism, acutely stated by social psychologist Ewa Drozda-Senkowska: “Ignorance is a strong engine of knowledge, provided that you know you’re ignorant, and that you know what you don’t know.But we are unaware of most of the biases that affect our reception of information, and of the propensities that sway our reasoning. Morons will condemn you instantly, with no appeal possible and no extenuating circumstances admitted, on the sole basis of the appearances they glimpse through their narrow blinkers. Everything that could be proven in the lab is experienced every day in offices, where collective efforts in meetings produce so many stupid ideas … (c) YESS! You can actually see this in action across British society, as the gutter press here exploit (to the point of lunacy) any moral loophole to deny all accountability for society’s issues.

The Psychology of Stupidity - Penguin Random House

A summary of my review is that I hate it, because it’s a terrible book that addresses important topics that deserve more serious attention, and because many people might love it – which is part of the problem, in that they will do so because it gives them license to be smug. experience follows the detection of the correct rule underlying all the individual problems, consistent responding leads to a very high score; if, however, the aha!Stupidity is all around us, from the colleagues who won't stop hitting 'reply all' to the former school friends posting conspiracy theories on Facebook. Second, the correlation between estimated and true percentiles over participants was positive, but imperfect.