The article is pretty annoying, but after thinking about this for a day the positive blind-spot/IQ association doesn’t seem implausible at all. Smart people tend to know they’re smart (and tend to overestimate how far above the mean they are). And lots of people associate cognitive biases with low intelligence (in part because they are associated for many biases). So it shouldn’t be that surprising that smart people think they’re less likely to suffer from a cognitive bias after one is described to them given that they’re unlikely to be familiar with past West and Stanovich research on the relaton between that bias and IQ. Someone needs to replicate the experiment with descriptions of biases that include something like “Smart people are just as likely to suffer from this bias as anyone else.” Then see if the positive correlation remains.
The article is pretty annoying, but after thinking about this for a day the positive blind-spot/IQ association doesn’t seem implausible at all. Smart people tend to know they’re smart (and tend to overestimate how far above the mean they are). And lots of people associate cognitive biases with low intelligence (in part because they are associated for many biases). So it shouldn’t be that surprising that smart people think they’re less likely to suffer from a cognitive bias after one is described to them given that they’re unlikely to be familiar with past West and Stanovich research on the relaton between that bias and IQ. Someone needs to replicate the experiment with descriptions of biases that include something like “Smart people are just as likely to suffer from this bias as anyone else.” Then see if the positive correlation remains.