Intelligence is how well you can work a problem once it is in front of you. Wisdom is knowing which problem you are actually in, and how far your answer can be trusted. The two are easy to confuse, because clever people talk well about everything. They fail in different ways, and the difference matters most when you are deciding whose advice to take.
What intelligence measures
An intelligence test gives you problems with one right answer and measures how quickly and accurately you find it. That ability is real and it predicts a lot: school results, job performance in complex work, the speed at which people learn.
It predicts less about the quality of everyday judgment than most people assume. The psychologist Keith Stanovich spent years comparing intelligence scores with performance on tests of rational thinking: weighing evidence, reasoning about probability, avoiding the standard traps of bias. He found that the two are surprisingly independent. In What Intelligence Tests Miss he gave the gap a name, dysrationalia: thinking poorly despite adequate intelligence.
One reason is that intelligence works for whatever conclusion you have already reached. A clever person who has decided something for a bad reason will build a better case for it than anyone else in the room. The intelligence goes into the argument, not into the decision that came before it. That makes clever people persuasive when they are wrong, which is exactly when you would most like them to be unpersuasive.
What wisdom adds
Researchers who study wise reasoning tend to look for the same few habits. Wise reasoners recognize the limits of what they know. They consider how the situation looks to the other people in it. They expect circumstances to change. They look for a resolution both sides can live with rather than a victory. None of these is the same as raw mental power, and none of them shows up on an intelligence test.
The psychologists Igor Grossmann and Ethan Kross found a revealing pattern in 2014. They asked people to reason about a relationship problem, a partner's infidelity, either as their own problem or as a close friend's. People reasoned more wisely about the friend's problem than about their own, on exactly those habits listed above. The researchers called this Solomon's paradox, after the biblical king famous for wise judgments about other people and poor ones about his own life. When people were asked to think about their own problem in the third person, using their own name, the gap disappeared.
That result says something useful about wisdom. Much of it is distance: the ability to see your own situation as you would see someone else's. Intelligence does not supply distance. If anything, the cleverer you are, the better your private case for doing what you already wanted.
Why clever people give bad advice
Three patterns account for most of it.
They advise outside their field. Being expert in one area teaches you how to be right in that area. It does not tell you where the area ends. A brilliant surgeon's views on investing, or a successful investor's views on raising children, carry the confidence of the first field and none of its evidence.
They hold one big theory. The political scientist Philip Tetlock spent about twenty years collecting forecasts from experts on politics and economics, and checked them against what happened. In Expert Political Judgment he reported that the experts did little better than simple statistical rules, and often worse. The ones who did best were those he called foxes, after an old line about the fox who knows many things and the hedgehog who knows one big thing. Foxes drew on many ideas and adjusted their views as events changed. Hedgehogs fitted everything to one theory, and they were the ones most often wrong. They were also the most confident, and the most quoted.
They treat uncertainty as risk. Gerd Gigerenzer separates known risk, where the rules are fixed and the odds can be calculated, from uncertainty, where neither is true. Intelligence is superb at known risk. Most of life, from careers to markets to relationships, is uncertainty. A clever answer built for a calculable world can be precisely wrong in a world that is not calculable.
How to tell which one is talking
You cannot test an adviser's intelligence over coffee, and you do not need to. These questions sort wise advice from merely clever advice:
- Do they say where their advice stops working? Wise advice comes with conditions. Clever advice often sounds complete.
- Do they mention cases that went wrong? Someone who can tell you about the failures, including their own, has seen enough of the territory to know its edges.
- Have they changed their mind about this, and why? Tetlock's foxes did. A view that has never moved has rarely been tested.
- Are they as careful about their own life as about yours? Solomon's paradox works in both directions. A person who gives balanced advice to others and makes reckless decisions for themselves is showing you how far their judgment travels.
- Do they know how often it works? "It worked for me" is a story. "It works for about one person in ten who tries it" is information.
The answers will not tell you whether someone is smart. They will tell you whether they know what they do not know, which is the part of wisdom you can check from the outside.
For a fuller set of checks with a worked example, see How to Evaluate Advice Before You Follow It, and for why confident but poor advice spreads so well, The Psychology of Misleading Advice. The End of Wisdom is the long version of this argument: why most advice fails, and what a more careful rule for action looks like.
Sources
- Keith E. Stanovich, What Intelligence Tests Miss: The Psychology of Rational Thought, Yale University Press, 2009.
- Igor Grossmann and Ethan Kross, "Exploring Solomon's Paradox: Self-Distancing Eliminates the Self-Other Asymmetry in Wise Reasoning About Close Relationships in Younger and Older Adults", Psychological Science, 2014.
- Philip E. Tetlock, Expert Political Judgment: How Good Is It? How Can We Know?, Princeton University Press, 2005.
- Gerd Gigerenzer, Risk Savvy: How to Make Good Decisions, 2014.