The Smart Are MORE Biased To Think They Are LESS Biased

I seem to know a lot of smart contrarians who think that standard human biases justify their contrarian position. They argue:

Yes, my view on this subject is in contrast to a consensus among academic and other credentialed experts on this subject. But the fact is that human thoughts are subject to many standard biases, and those biases have misled most others to this mistaken consensus position. For example biases A,B, and C would tend to make people think what they do on this subject, even if that view were not true. I, in contrast, have avoided these biases, both because I know about them (see, I can name them), and because I am so much smarter than these other folks. (Have you seen my test scores?) And this is why I can justifiably disagree with an expert consensus on this subject.

Problem is, not only are smart folks not less biased for many biases, if anything smart folks more easily succumb to the bias of thinking that they are less biased than others:

The so-called bias blind spot arises when people report that thinking biases are more prevalent in others than in themselves. … We found that none of these bias blind spots were attenuated by measures of cognitive sophistication such as cognitive ability or thinking dispositions related to bias. If anything, a larger bias blind spot was associated with higher cognitive ability. Additional analyses indicated that being free of the bias blind spot does not help a person avoid the actual classic cognitive biases. …

Most cognitive biases in the heuristics and biases literature are negatively correlated with cognitive sophistication, whether the latter is indexed by development, by cognitive ability, or by thinking dispositions. This was not true for any of the bias blind spots studied here. As opposed to the social emphasis in past work on the bias blind spot, we examined bias blind spots connected to some of the most well-known effects from the heuristics and biases literature: outcome bias, base-rate neglect, framing bias, conjunction fallacy, anchoring bias, and myside bias. We found that none of these bias blind spot effects displayed a negative correlation with measures of cognitive ability (SAT total, CRT) or with measures of thinking dispositions (need for cognition, actively open-minded thinking). If anything, the correlations went in the other direction.

We explored the obvious explanation for the indications of a positive correlation between cognitive ability and the magnitude of the bias blind spot in our data. That explanation is the not unreasonable one that more cognitively sophisticated people might indeed show lower cognitive biases—so that it would be correct for them to view themselves as less biased than their peers. However, … we found very little evidence that these classic biases were attenuated by cognitive ability. More intelligent people were not actually less biased—a finding that would have justified their displaying a larger bias blind spot. …

Thus, the bias blind spot joins a small group of other effects such as myside bias and noncausal base-rate neglect in being unmitigated by increases in intelligence. That cognitive sophistication does not mitigate the bias blind spot is consistent with the idea that the mechanisms that cause the bias are quite fundamental and not easily controlled strategically— that they reflect what is termed Type 1 processing in dual-process theory. (more)

Added 12June: The New Yorker talks about this paper:

The results were quite disturbing. For one thing, self-awareness was not particularly useful: as the scientists note, “people who were aware of their own biases were not better able to overcome them.” … All four of the measures showed positive correlations, “indicating that more cognitively sophisticated participants showed larger bias blind spots.”