What is it about intelligent people that makes them so uniquely prone to cognitive bias? To understand this paradox, we must consider what intelligence actually is. Often, it can be measured as the effectiveness with which someone pursues a goal.

Rationality, on the other hand, is intelligence in pursuit of objective truth. However, intelligence can be used to pursue any number of other goals. And since the means by which the goal is selected is distinct from the means by which the goal is pursued, the intelligence with which someone pursues his goal is no guarantee that the goal itself is intelligent.

As a case in point, human intelligence has evolved less as a tool for pursuing objective truth than as a tool for pursuing personal well-being--tribal belonging such as social status and sex, and this often requires the adoption of Fashionably Irrational Beliefs (FIBs), which the people have come to excel at because we're a highly social species. Consequently, it's often intelligent for us to convince ourselves of irrational beliefs, if holding those beliefs increases our status and well-being within society.

This Behavior is called Identity Protective Cognition (IPC). By engaging in IPC, people bind their intelligence to the service of evolutionary impulses, leveraging their logic and learning, not to correct Illusions, but to justify them.



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