Why Can Smart People Be Very Stupid Sometimes?
Having a high intelligence quotient (IQ) doesn’t mean being smart. You don’t have to go too far to discover incredible acts of stupidity committed by intelligent, even brilliant people.
Many of the tests that measure the IQ detect only one type of intelligence, the analytical one. This skill recognizes patterns and solves analytical problems. Most IQ tests do not cover two other aspects of human intelligence: creative intelligence and practical intelligence.
Creative intelligence is our ability to handle new situations. Practical intelligence, on the other hand, is our ability to do things. In the first 20 years of life, people are rewarded for their analytical intelligence: we have a structured educational system to instruct in this regard.
Emotions have become more important nowadays, so much so that we speak of emotional intelligence. The time has also come for values, for the so-called ethical intelligence.
Why do smart people act stupidly?
Excess of ego is one of the causes that lead intelligent people not to act as such. Their fortunate results on other occasions have served as a breeding ground for an omniscence, omnipotence or invulnerability that prevents them from seeing the real consequences of actions.
With intelligence we generate solutions to any problem. The more intelligence we have, the more and better solutions we create, as we have a greater perspective, the reality of the problem and the knowledge of the circumstances that determine it. We cannot forget that we are talking about global intelligence, understood as:
