Smart People Love New Ideas, Even When They're Bad

A link between high intelligence and luxury beliefs?

Human beings are not impressive animals at first glance. We are not especially strong. We are not particularly fast. We do not have claws, thick hides or sharp teeth. Our great advantage is that we can learn from one another.

One person finds a better way to hunt, cook, build, speak, trade or travel. Others copy it. Then someone improves it. Others copy that too. Over time, these small acts of copying become culture.

Copying is not always wise, though. Sometimes a new method of doing something is better. Sometimes it’s worse. The challenge is knowing when to switch to a new approach and when not to.

A new paper in Personality and Individual Differences asks who is better at making that choice. The authors study how intelligence and personality shape social learning, or the practice of learning from others.

The researchers focus on two mental habits:

The first is “content bias.” This is the tendency to adopt a novel solution when it is better than the old one.

The second is “maintenance bias.” This is the tendency to stick with a solution because it is familiar.

Both habits are useful. Without content bias, people would fail to implement real improvements. Without maintenance bias, they would chase every fad.

Human progress requires both. You need enough openness to notice a better idea. You also need enough caution not to discard what already works.

The researchers created two simple tasks. In one, participants learned a code to open a padlock. In the other, they learned a route through a maze.

After practicing the initial solution, study participants were shown a new one. Sometimes the new solution was better. Sometimes it was about the same. Sometimes it was worse.

Then came the key choice: stay or switch.

The basic result is reassuring. People were generally more likely to switch when the new solution was better. They were less likely to switch when it was worse. In other words, people showed content bias. They could typically tell when the new way was actually an improvement and then implemented it.

But there were also signs of maintenance bias. When the old and new solutions were equal in quality, most people stuck with the one they already knew. This is probably because all else equal, a familiar solution is less risky. A new method may look equal on paper. But you still have to pay the cost of learning it. And the new method might have unpredictable outcomes or side effects.

Importantly, the researchers also measured intelligence and personality.

Intelligence was measured with several tests, including vocabulary, pattern reasoning, working memory and processing speed.

Higher intelligence predicted a greater willingness to switch to new solutions, especially when those solutions were better. Smarter participants were more likely to adopt real improvements.

This makes sense. Intelligence helps people solve novel problems. Smart people are better at noticing when a new approach is superior.

More interestingly, though, smarter people were also more likely to switch even when the new solution was similar or inferior to the original approach.

The authors suggest that the reason for this is that more intelligent people face lower costs when they experiment with new ideas. Trying out a hard or awkward new solution carries fewer penalties for intelligent people. They also enjoy the challenge.

Intelligence helps people not only by making them choose better, but also by making potentially bad choices less costly.

A smart person can try a novel solution. If things go wrong, they are better equipped to recover. For a less intelligent individual, the same mistake is more costly.

Personality played a role too. The researchers looked at the Big Five personality trait openness to experience. Open people tend to be curious, imaginative and more willing to try new things.

So you might expect people high in openness to be better at finding better solutions.

That isn’t what the study found, though.

Openness did not predict switching to superior solutions. Instead, open people were more likely to switch to solutions that were similar or worse. Open people were not especially better at identifying improvement. Rather, they were drawn to novelty itself.

This finding captures both the upside and the risk of high trait openness.

Open people challenge routines and resist conventions. A healthy society needs these creative types. Still, novelty isn’t the same as progress. Sometimes the new thing is worse.

Sometimes the old solution has been around a long time because it works.

Intelligence and openness, two traits linked with higher levels of education, are also associated with interest in novelty. Even if the novel approach is not better. And even if it’s worse. But if you’re a smart person with all of the accompanying benefits your intelligence can supply, you can more quickly recover from your mistakes. Most others can’t.

You might see a connection between this finding and luxury beliefs.

If you are a bright individual, you will have some difficulty imagining what mental life and everyday existence can be like for someone whose IQ is more than 10 or 15 points away from your own.

This is especially true if you have only ever spent time around similar individuals to yourself. Ironically, highly intelligent people are one of the groups most susceptible to this blind spot in their thinking. I grew up around many people with average or below average intelligence. Sure, they had some difficulty with getting through Algebra II or explaining the motifs of the assigned reading. Overall, though, they were just as capable of everyday problem solving, responsibility, and good moral character as anyone else. Still, people who are not in the top half of intelligence often find it helpful to have some guardrails and healthy heuristics, or rules of thumb, for wise decision-making. And frequent and regular reminders of what good decisions look like and how to avoid bad ones.

Human beings have been shaped to imitate. But not all imitation is equally valuable.

A healthy culture needs smart people who can spot new and improved solutions. It needs curious people willing to test new paths. And it needs enough respect for the familiar to remember that not every novelty will necessarily lead to progress.