excerpts: chapter 2
Chapter 2: Fools Rush In
Blind Spot #1: Not Stopping To Think
A computer expert who offered technical support over the telephone described how she was guiding a virgin computer-user, step by step, through the process of installing a program. The expert had gotten to the point where the new user needed to open the door on his disk drive in order to insert a disk. After she gave the instruction: “Now open the door,” there was a brief silence. Then she could hear her student shuffle across the room and open his office door.”How,” she demanded, “could that person possibly think that it mattered whether or not his office door was open or closed? You don’t have to be a rocket scientist to realize that this doesn’t make sense—you just have to have a brain!”
Why did that person act so illogically? That’s an intriguing question if we ask it in a different tone of voice. If we don’t assume that the person is stupid, then that question takes us back to the main theme in this book: how is it that intelligent adults do dumb things?
“Not Thinking” as a Blind Spot: Missing “Opportunities” to Think
Harvard psychologist David Perkins 1 believes that recognizing “now would be a good time to stop and think”—”recognizing what he calls “thinking opportunities” is not as easy as it sounds. In one of Perkins’s studies, law students wrote essays about controversial issues. 2 The students needed to carefully consider both sides of the issue in order to write an effective analysis. Many failed to do so. Despite the education they were undergoing that emphasized the need to always consider both sides of a case in a legal defense, the students didn’t consider both sides in writing their essays.
The fascinating sidebar to Perkins’s study was the relationship between the law students’ IQ scores and the likelihood that they would consider both sides of the issue. The correlation was zero. This means that the most intelligent students were no more likely than the least intelligent to address both sides of the controversy. Perkins concludes that noticing thinking opportunities is critical to intelligent behavior—yet it is independent of our IQ scores and our reasoning abilities.