Cognitive biases don’t prove we’re bad at thinking
Instead of illustrating how stupid people are, cognitive biases actually show how much work our brain is doing to make us good at thinking. Visual illusions can fool the eye with clever tricks, and cognitive illusions can do the same, helping us understand how the mind works and how the mind breaks.
We should treat cognitive illusions like psychology’s other great export: visual illusions. These circles look like they’re different sizes, but they’re not! These rings look like they’re rotating, but they’re sitting still! These lines look tilted, but they’re straight! Visual illusions don’t prove you are bad at seeing. They prove that your visual system is doing tons of stuff under the hood to make you good at seeing, and specially-designed images can expose its clever tricks. Cognitive illusions do the same—they help us understand how the mind works by figuring out how the mind breaks, just with words and numbers instead of pictures. —Adam Mastroianni, The Radical Idea That People Aren’t Stupid
- see also: if you have to err on one side or another, err on the side of thinking people are smart, because thinking people are stupid is the gateway drug to worse ideas
- see also: multiple intelligence theory, because there’s more than one type of intelligence anyway