Why Smarter People Make Dumber Decisions

So you think you're smart and talented and highly intelligent. According to research presented at the AAAS meeting this weekend, this could be your Achilles' heel.

I wasn't able to attend the session on this, but here's a press release's take on the findings:

Highly accomplished people tend to heavily rely on their abundant supply of working memory and are therefore disadvantaged when challenged to solve difficult problems, such as mathematical ones, under pressure, according to research by Sian Beilock, Assistant Professor of Psychology at the University of Chicago…

"These findings suggest that performance pressure harms higher working memory individuals by consuming the cognitive resources that they rely on for their superior performance and as a result, higher working memory individuals respond by switching to the less accurate problem solving strategies normally used by lower working memory students," Beilock said.

It's not clear whether the research has been published or peer reviewed, and it relies on experiments involving just 100 college students. Still, it's pretty intriguing.

Highly accomplished people more prone to failure than others when under stress[press release]