Have you ever wondered why some people make the same mistakes over and over again, convinced they’re making brilliant choices? It’s not always about being deliberately foolish. Sometimes, the very inability to recognize poor judgment prevents people from seeing the flaws in their thinking. This phenomenon affects everyone to some degree, yet it’s particularly pronounced in those who struggle with critical thinking and self-awareness.
The gap between what we think we know and what we actually understand can lead to some genuinely questionable decisions. Let’s explore the patterns that emerge when confidence outpaces competence.
Trusting Their Gut Over Facts
Some people who are intellectually able do not bother to engage very much in analytical thinking and are inclined to rely on their intuitions. This becomes a real problem when instinct replaces actual knowledge. You’ve probably met someone who dismisses research or expert advice because it “just doesn’t feel right” to them. The thing is, feelings are terrible guides when you lack the foundation to evaluate information properly.
People sometimes are intellectually lazy, and it is easier to rely on faith in authority than to carefully think things through for oneself. This creates a feedback loop where poor thinkers become even more convinced of their correctness because they never actually test their assumptions. Their gut becomes a convenient excuse to avoid the mental work of genuine analysis.
Dismissing All Experts As Equally Clueless
There’s a particularly frustrating tendency among less informed people to assume everyone is just guessing. They’ll hear conflicting opinions and conclude that nobody really knows anything, so their opinion is just as valid as someone who studied the subject for years. A survey of members of Mensa in Canada in the mid-1980s found that 44 per cent of them believed in astrology, 51 per cent believed in biorhythms and 56 per cent believed in aliens, which shows that even high IQ doesn’t guarantee rational thinking.
However, truly underdeveloped thinkers take this further. They weaponize uncertainty, using the existence of debate as proof that expertise doesn’t matter. This lets them avoid the uncomfortable reality that some people genuinely understand complex topics better than they do.
Overestimating Their Abilities Dramatically
Those who performed in the bottom quartile rated their skills far above average, with those in the 12th percentile self-rating their expertise to be, on average, in the 62nd percentile. This isn’t just mild overconfidence. It’s a staggering gap between ability and self-perception.
The truly remarkable thing is that their incompetence robs them of the ability to realize it. Imagine not having the skills to do something well and simultaneously lacking the capacity to recognize your deficiency. The poorer performers typically think they’re above average, so they’re not seeking out training and assistance. It’s a devastating combination that keeps people stuck in mediocrity while they’re convinced they’re excelling.
Refusing To Listen To Constructive Feedback
Highly unintelligent people often dismiss feedback from others, seeing it as an attack rather than an opportunity to grow, becoming defensive or ignoring suggestions for improvement. You can probably recall trying to help someone who immediately got hostile or shut down entirely. That’s not stubbornness, it’s cognitive limitation showing itself.
The inability to process criticism stems from not understanding the difference between personal attack and professional improvement. When you lack the mental frameworks to separate your identity from your performance, all feedback feels like an assault. So they protect their fragile self-image by rejecting anything that challenges it.
Making Decisions Based On Short-Term Wins
Short term bits of data are neither reliable nor a wise way to go about making important long term decisions. Yet people with limited intelligence repeatedly fall into this trap. They see immediate results and extrapolate wildly, assuming the pattern will continue forever.
Typically, the more they have invested so far, the less likely they are to pull the plug, which is not rational because what should matter is what the costs and benefits will be from this point forward. This sunk cost fallacy compounds poor initial judgment with an inability to cut losses. They double down on bad ideas because admitting the mistake feels worse than continuing to waste resources.
Thinking Complexity Is Just People Showing Off
There’s a genuine anti-intellectualism that emerges when people can’t grasp nuance. They see complex explanations as pretentious rather than necessary. People with low intelligence tend to see the world in extremes, often thinking in terms of right or wrong with no room for nuance or complexity, while intelligent people understand that most situations are multifaceted.
This binary thinking feels comfortable because it’s cognitively easier. It requires minimal mental energy to sort everything into simple categories. The problem is that reality rarely cooperates with such oversimplification, leading to consistently poor judgments about situations that actually require sophisticated analysis.
Seeking Constant Validation Instead Of Accuracy
Highly unintelligent individuals often seek constant validation from others, needing frequent praise or approval to feel good about themselves, which can stem from insecurity and a lack of self-awareness. This need supersedes the desire to be correct or effective.
When being right matters less than feeling good, you make terrible decisions. You gravitate toward people who affirm your existing beliefs rather than those who might help you improve. It’s particularly damaging because the validation feels like evidence of correctness when it’s really just emotional comfort.
Confusing Confidence With Competence
The effect causes affected people to make decisions that have bad outcomes, potentially leading poor performers into careers for which they are unfit. The really dangerous part is that lack of competence and lack of awareness form what researchers call a dual burden.
The twin burden refers to the lack of knowledge or skill that causes both the poor outcomes and prevents them from accurately evaluating their performance. They literally cannot perform well and simultaneously cannot recognize that they’re performing poorly. So they stride forward with absolute certainty into situations where they’re woefully unprepared.
Ignoring Probability And Risk Assessment
Many people have poor capacities for calculation and logic reasoning and a poor intuitive sense for coincidence, randomness, statistics, and probability reasoning, with concepts like exponential growth being generally poorly understood. This manifests in truly baffling decisions where obvious risks are completely ignored.
Watch someone buy lottery tickets as a retirement strategy or ignore basic safety precautions because “it won’t happen to me.” That’s not optimism. It’s a fundamental inability to grasp how probability actually works. They make choices as if exceptional outcomes are typical, then feel genuinely shocked when reality intrudes.
Believing Their First Idea Is Usually Right
People worry about the wrong thing at the wrong time and apply their intelligence in ways that doesn’t serve the greater good of whatever they’re trying to achieve, with wisdom being knowing what to be thinking about. Less capable thinkers lack the metacognitive ability to evaluate their own thought process.
Their first instinct becomes their conclusion. There’s no iteration, no consideration of alternatives, no stress-testing of assumptions. The initial idea simply feels right, so it must be right. This approach occasionally works through dumb luck, which then reinforces the terrible habit of never questioning yourself.
Surrounding Themselves With Similar Thinkers
Confirmation bias means we believe what we want to believe by favoring information that confirms preexisting beliefs or preconceptions. People with limited cognitive capacity take this to extremes by carefully constructing echo chambers that never challenge them.
People with low intelligence often struggle with problem-solving, giving up easily when faced with challenges, and instead of analyzing a situation and thinking of solutions, they may avoid the problem altogether. When everyone around you thinks the same limited way, you never encounter the friction that promotes growth. You simply marinate in shared misconceptions, each person validating the others’ poor reasoning in an endless cycle of mediocrity.
Taking Everything Personally
Highly unintelligent individuals often struggle with emotional regulation, having frequent emotional outbursts such as anger or frustration when things don’t go their way. This emotional volatility stems from an inability to separate facts from feelings or to see issues from multiple perspectives.
When you lack the capacity for complex thought, criticism of your ideas becomes indistinguishable from criticism of your worth as a person. Disagreement feels like betrayal. Correction feels like humiliation. So they lash out or shut down rather than engaging constructively, ensuring they never actually improve at anything.
Conclusion
The patterns we’ve explored reveal something both humbling and hopeful. These missteps aren’t necessarily permanent character flaws but often reflect a lack of self-awareness and critical thinking skills that can be developed. Recognizing these tendencies in ourselves is the first step toward actually breaking free from them.
The truly intelligent approach is acknowledging how much we don’t know and actively seeking to fill those gaps. Have you noticed any of these patterns in your own thinking? Being honest about our limitations is uncomfortable, sure, yet it’s the only way to move past them and make genuinely better decisions.
