"Why Smart People Can Be So Stupid," by Robert J. Sternberg

Scholars finally tackle the question that has plagued humanity since time immemorial.

By Gavin McNett

Jun 19, 2002 | Only a few questions can be called basic to the human condition -- such as "What can we eat?" or "Who created us?" -- and lots of very smart people have been working on them for millennia. The "eating" thing, for instance, has been minutely parsed by agriculture, economics and the culinary arts (among other fields), while the question of origins has given us religion and several branches of the hard sciences. But there's at least one question -- as basic as any other in its topical relevance and its grounding in the ancient -- that human inquiry has only recently begun seriously to address. It was asked in caves, by people clad in mastodon-hide shifts, and chances are it crossed your mind this very day. "How," it goes, "can people be so stupid?" And who knows the answer, really? I don't -- do you?

The academy is finally catching up with that one. There's long been a rich vernacular literature on stupidity, including such titles as Michael Shermer's "Why People Believe Weird Things," and Charles McKay's 1841 classic, "Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds." But recently, a couple of academic works on the topic have appeared, so that stupidity studies would seem to be something of an emerging field -- an academic trendlet. Avital Ronell, the post-structuralist theorist perhaps best known for the naked photos of herself in the Re:Search "Angry Women" collection, had a book out last year called, simply, "Stupidity." (It wasn't clear whether she was for or against it.) Psychologist Gene F. Ostrom's "Why Smart People Do Stupid Things" came out last year as well (he's against it).

Now Robert J. Sternberg, IBM professor of psychology and education at Yale and the hyperprolific editor or author of more than 60 other books, has compiled and edited "Why Smart People Can Be So Stupid," a volume of scholarly papers on the subject.

Sternberg's premise is that stupidity and intelligence aren't like cold and heat, where the former is simply the absence of the latter. Stupidity might be a quality in itself, perhaps measurable, and it may exist in dynamic fluxion with intelligence, such that smart people can do really dumb things sometimes and vice versa. Each of the 10 contributors (or teams of contributors) examines the nature and theory of stupidity from a different angle, coming up with different notions of what it is and how it works -- and making the book, on the whole, a rather compelling treatment of what could be humankind's oldest and most persistent problem. That said, there also seems to be something rather odd about the book and about the way it frames its subject.

But more on that anon. The appearance of the smart and canny Ronell amid the fray gives a hot tip as to where this small explosion of stupidity literature might be coming from. These days, when complex academic works such as Ronell's and Sternberg's cross over to a readership outside academia, all slicked-up and flashy of cover, it's often less because of what's inside than because of the immediate hook of the title -- and the lower the hook is aimed, the better.

Ronell's titles include "Crack Wars" and "The Telephone Book" (both post-structuralist treatises unreadable by civilians), while the grand exemplar of the trend is the late Dominique Laporte's "The History of Shit," issued in translation (in a deluxe black-velvet-bound edition) by MIT Press a couple of years back. Why this might be, nobody knows. Like many stupid things, it's mysterious. But one tries in vain to avoid picturing the editorial meeting behind Sternberg's book:

The editor at Yale University Press leans back in his chair, puts his arms behind his head.

"OK, Bob," he says. "I need crossover titles like you wouldn't believe, but everything's been done. 'History of Shit' is taken; there are books out on piss, armpits, you name it. University of Illinois Press just did a collection of papers by a classics professor on the pugilistic tradition of a certain Greek island, called 'Lesbian Double Fisting.' Your last thing on the psychology of love was good. What else have you got?"

The professor leans forward intently, hands in a professorial clasp. "Well, I'm also working on the psychology of hatred, and on a theory of what you'd call negative intelligence ..."

"Hey, great!" the editor says. "Title: 'You're Stupid and I Hate You: Why Everyone Hates Stupid People!'"

Next Page: The eight deadly sins of the stupid smart person

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