Why smart people do mistakes.. ?

I have always considered this question an annoying but easy one.

First, it is annoying; because in my eyes being smart is the key for doing the right things and things should not go wrong if we are smart enough to handle them. Right ?

Second, it is easy because, if we are smart enough, we can always analysis how things went wrong and come up with valid reasons which may turn to be lack of information, wrong assumptions, actions of other stupid people or any kind of these reasons. Right ?

Few days ago while I was reading a book about the challenges of managing people, the author raised the question “why smart people do dump things?” Actually I was surprised to find this question raised in a textbook and got the attention of academics.

My surprise did not stop here, the answer was even more interesting, the author referred to academic researches which have led scientists (Fienberg and Tarrant 1995) to identify what is called “self-destructive intelligence syndrome” as the reason of why smart people do dump things. How could intelligence be self-destructive?

Based on their research, these scientists concluded that smart people act stupid due to personality flaws. Yes personality flaws, things like pride, arrogance and what so-called unconscious need to fail. The list of personality flaws is not comprehensive and it can include things like shyness, lack of assertiveness or inflexibility. Other scientists (Lundin and Lundin 1998) came to similar conclusion: dumb behavior is the result of self-love and ego.

This academic sound conclusion was shocking to me because, it is unusual for us to question our personality when things go wrong. We simply think that the enemy is always out there and we are perfectly fine. Even we start – after looong time - to consider if there is something wrong with ourselves, it is hard to spot what is wrong and immediately shift our thinking to ready made excuses to justify what went wrong.

Moreover psychology tells us more interesting thing about how we judge and evaluate our actions and the actions of other people. We strongly tend to judge other’s people actions – specially their mistakes – as result of their personality or character while we tend to justify our mistakes as result of situational factors which are external to our control or personality. It is very common when someone does a mistake, we quickly jump to the conclusion that s/he did it because s/he is stupid while if we do the very same mistake, we refer to situational factors other than our own personality.

In summary: ... When things go wrong or turn to be stupid, the reason does not have to be our flawed logic, other people mistakes, missing information or wrong assumptions; it can be us who need to change and develop healthier personality. And when we judge other people actions, we need to learn to understand their situation more than judging their characters.