

It's a question I ask myself several times a day, usually after using a folding chair as a ladder or cleaning the oven with the burners on. (Okay, the obvious response is, 'Maybe you're not all that smart to begin with.' But anyways.)

The capacity for cluelessness of the clever was the subject of an Idea Festival talk by journalist Laurence Gonzales, who in Deep Survival examined the question of why some people survive crises and others die. The two questions, he said, overlap: survivors are often those who think deliberately under pressure, while deliberation is what helps people avoid stupid mistakes.

Such mistakes originate, he believes, in the tendency of people to instinctively and thoughtlessly follow already-established mental scripts rather than addressing reality directly. Of course, such patterns of behavior are what let us move through life without re-learning to tie our shoes every time we leave the house; to some extent they're necessary. And so long as the present resembles the past, this works fine in more complicated scenarios; but add a few wrinkles, and things go wrong.

Gonzales gave a personal anecdote of piloting a plane on a route he'd taken often before, feeling so comfortable that he didn't register until the last moment a looming thunderstorm that would have destroyed his plane but for a fortuitous radio message that disturbed his reveries.

"We use models and scripts, not the real world; we operate on the basis of what we learned in a slightly different situation," he said.

The antidote to this is to pay attention and think deliberately – good, common-sense advice for situations large and small. But Gonzales might push his own models and scripts a little too far. Can the Iraq war or Quaker's disastrous purchase of Snapple (to use his examples)

really be explained as misapplications of previously held assumptions

\– about the realities of Iraqi politics, or the grassroots ethos of

Snapple drinkers?

In a sense, yes. But as a standalone explanation, this just feels too glib, too easy.

On a side note, I asked Gonzales about the recent correlation between reflex control and political tendency, in which the ability to jettison faulty assumptions in a split-second situation was correlated with the ability to do the same on a measured, political level. Gonzales said he hasn't heard of anyone making such a connection, but thinks it's worth exploring.

(Attention, parents: want your kids to be democrats? Just do this experiment and reward them for succeeding! Want some little republicans instead? Do the experiment and punish them.)

Image: Pam Roth