The Fox and the Crow: Why Smart People Sometimes Act Stupid

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One bright morning, as the fox was wandering through the forest searching for food with his sharp nose, he saw a crow perched on a tree branch above him.

This wasn’t the first crow the fox had seen. What caught his attention this time and made him pause for a moment was that the lucky crow was holding a piece of cheese in its beak.

“Look no further,” thought the cunning fox. “Here’s a delicious meal for my breakfast.”

He trotted to the foot of the tree where the crow sat, and looking up in amazement, he called out, “Good morning, beautiful creature!”

The crow, with its head tilted to one side, eyed the fox suspiciously. But it kept its beak tightly closed over the cheese and didn’t return the greeting.

“What a charming creature!” said the fox. “How shiny her feathers are! How beautiful her form is, and how beautiful her wings are! Such a beautiful bird should have a most beautiful voice, for everything about her is so perfect. If she could sing just one song, I know I would call her the Queen of Birds.”

Hearing these words of praise, the crow forgot all her suspicions, and also her breakfast. She longed to be called the Queen of Birds.

So he opened his beak wide to make the loudest sound, and the cheese fell right into the fox’s open mouth.

“Thank you,” said the fox sweetly, as he walked away.

“Even though your voice is hoarse, you do have a voice. But where is your common sense?”

Paul Frampton is a renowned physicist known for his research in particle theory and cosmology. In 2011, he began an online romance with a female adult model. She invited him to a photo shoot in Bolivia. Upon arriving in Bolivia, Frampton told him she had left her bag behind and asked him to help her transport it to Argentina. Upon arriving in Argentina, Frampton found no sign of the woman. Desperate, he returned to the United States with her bag. After checking in at the airport, an announcement came over the loudspeaker demanding he meet with airport staff. He was accused of smuggling 2 kilograms of cocaine in his bag.

Frampton’s story above is a real-life example of how a crow, in this case Frampton, was deceived by a fox, in this case a female adult model. Frampton, known for his intelligence, lost his sanity because he was obsessed with the romantic emotions he had forged online. Just as the crow lost his sanity by dropping cheese from its beak because he whistled to be called the Queen of Birds, Frampton lost his sanity by destroying his intellectual reputation by carrying a bag containing 2 kilograms of cocaine to meet the woman he adored.

Anyone can lose their mind, like the crow and Frampton, but the more intelligent a person is, the more likely they are to lose their mind. Science journalist David Robson calls this the intelligence trap. People who possess intelligence are at risk of being trapped into acting unintelligently. To make it easier to understand, Robson compares intelligence to a car. In his book, The Intelligence Trap: Revolutionize Your Thinking and Make Wiser Decisions, Robson explains,

Perhaps the best analogy is a car. A faster engine can get you places more quickly if you know how to use it correctly. But simply having more horsepower won’t guarantee that you will arrive at your destination safely. Without the right knowledge and equipment – the brakes, the steering wheel, the speedometer, a compass and a good map – a fast engine may just lead to you driving in circles – or straight into oncoming traffic. And the faster the engine, the more dangerous you are.

In exactly the same way, intelligence can help you to learn and recall facts, and process complex information quickly, but you also need the necessary checks and balances to apply that brainpower correctly. Without them, greater intelligence can actually make you more biased in your thinking.

We have long assumed that the more intelligent a person is, the better they are at thinking. Based on this assumption, we believe that education is necessary to improve thinking skills and to apply skills and solve problems professionally in various fields. However, according to Robson, “intelligence and academic education not only fail to protect us from various cognitive errors, intelligent people may even be more susceptible to various types of foolish thinking.“

Thus, intelligence is one thing, common sense is another. The ability to think is one thing, the ability to think well is another. Therefore, intelligent people are not necessarily capable of rational thought. Studies of intelligence do not include rationality as a component. Robson writes,

We’ve already seen how our definition of intelligence could be expanded to include practical and creative reasoning. But those theories do not explicitly examine our rationality, defined as our capacity to make the optimal decisions needed to meet our goals, given the resources we have at hand, and to form beliefs based on evidence, logic and sound reasoning.

Findings in psychology, Robson explained, show that the relationship between intelligence and rational thinking ability is not perfectly correlated. Individuals with high scores on the Scholastic Aptitude Test (SAT ), indicating strong abilities in math, reading, and writing, may also exhibit poor rational thinking skills. This imbalance between intelligence and rationality is known as dysrationalia.

The following are the phenomena of irrationality in a number of research findings:

Mensa International, an organization with high IQ members, shows that 44 percent of its members believe in astrology, and 56 percent believe that Earth has been visited by extraterrestrials.
Intelligence plays a small role in determining whether we are willing to delay immediate gratification for greater rewards in the future.
In experiments involving diverse subjects (aged 18-88 years), their decision-making skills were only slightly related to their intelligence.
People with higher IQs tend to consume more alcohol and are more likely to smoke or use drugs.
People with high IQs are also just as vulnerable to financial difficulties, such as mortgage default, bankruptcy, or credit card debt. About 14 percent of people with an IQ of 140 have reached their credit limit, compared to 8.3 percent of people with an average IQ of 100.

Why do people experience irrationality? The roots of this phenomenon, according to Robson, were explained by two cognitive psychologists, Daniel Kahneman and Amos Tversky, who identified many cognitive biases and heuristics (easy and quick rules of thumb) that can distort our reasoning.

In the perspective of cognitive psychology, people think using two types:

System 1: An intuitive, automatic, ‘fast thinking’ way of thinking that may be prone to unconscious bias.
System 2: A ‘slower’, more analytical, and deliberative or conscious way of thinking.

According to this view, called dual-process theory , many of the irrational decisions we make arise when we rely too heavily on System 1, allowing biases in our thinking to cloud our objective judgment.

To better understand how System 1 works, consider the question below.

The total price of a racket and a shuttlecock is 110,000 rupiah. The racket is 100,000 rupiah more than the shuttlecock. How much is the shuttlecock?

If your answer is 10,000, you’re using System 1 thinking and it’s clouding your ability to think rationally. [ I often ask this question to my students in class, and most answer 10,000. I’ve asked the same question to several teachers on occasion, and most of them answered the same. The correct answer, if we activate System 2 thinking, is 5,000. It’s said that when this question was asked to Harvard students, most of them also answered incorrectly.]

Back to Frampton. To mitigate his sentence, the psychologist who served on his defense team announced that Frampton had been diagnosed with a psychological disorder that made him susceptible to gullibility. While in prison, Frampton explained to reporters there, “ I was an extreme case in terms of naiveté and IQ. Of course, there were warning signs that most people would have looked askance at, and this diagnosis as a defense explains that naiveté. However, I had no idea there were illegal drugs and no idea how to smuggle drugs to make money.”

The tendency to be easily deceived, known as gullibility, is another explanation for the phenomenon of disrationalia. Gullibility isn’t necessarily a symptom of a personality disorder; it’s a trait that exists in everyone. So, while anyone can be deceived, some people are more susceptible to gullibility than others. These individuals are blind to deception, characterized by insensitivity to cues of untrustworthiness and persuadability.

This article is an English version (Google translated) of Rubah dan Gagak: Pelajaran Mengenai Mengapa Orang Cerdas Bisa Bertindak Bodoh.