Nobelists Gone Wild

Abstract

Research suggests that critical thinking skills are often surprisingly domain-specific. We survey the case histories of several Nobel Prize winners in the sciences to demonstrate that even extremely bright individuals can fall prey to bizarre ideas. These findings strongly suggest that intellectual brilliance and acceptance of weird ideas are not mutually incompatible. They also highlight the domain-specificity of critical thinking and the surprising independence of general intelligence from critical thinking. A number of cognitive errors, including bias blind spot and the senses of omniscience, omnipotence, and invulnerability; personality traits such as narcissism and excessive openness; and the “guru complex” may predispose highly intelligent individuals to disastrous critical thinking errors.

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