If You’re a Smart Person, These 13 Beliefs May Be Harder for You to Accept

Smart people often feel hard to fool. In 2012, psychologists Richard West, Russell Meserve and Keith Stanovich found that higher cognitive ability did not reduce the bias blind spot, the habit of spotting flawed reasoning in others while missing it in yourself. Thirteen popular beliefs meet steady resistance from analytical minds, and if you consider yourself one, you might find all of these relatable.

Lucky Charms and Unlucky Dates

Ladders, black cats and the number 13 share one feature: none of them has ever been shown to cause anything. Folklorist Donald Dossey estimated that 17 to 21 million Americans fear Friday the 13th, while a study of university students tied higher intelligence to weaker superstitious belief. Spanish and Greek speakers dread Tuesday the 13th instead. Dossey also warned that arguing with the fear is pointless, because logic does not work on a phobia.

Money Is Enough to Keep a Relationship Strong

A national study of more than 1,700 married couples found that high-income materialistic couples fared worse than lower-income couples who cared less about money. Couples in which both spouses ranked low in materialism scored better on communication, conflict resolution and stability. A separate study of 1,153 couples married about eight years linked a heavy focus on money to weaker financial communication and lower marital satisfaction. The researchers named a specific mechanism behind the pattern.

Other People’s Approval Is What Makes You Happy

Psychologist Jennifer Crocker has spent years studying contingent self-worth, which rises and falls with outside sources such as other people’s approval. Studies link approval-based self-worth to lower well-being, though most findings come from surveys that cannot prove cause. In one study, people who valued social media likes reported bigger swings in self-esteem when approval was inconsistent. Researchers say a sense of self built this way has a structural weakness.

Lottery Tickets Are a Real Path to Wealth

Lotteries are structured so players lose on average. The odds of winning the Powerball jackpot are 1 in 292,201,338. A player buying one ticket every week would need close to 4 million years to reach even odds of a jackpot. Expected-value calculators generally find that a ticket is worth less than its price. Even so, the largest jackpot on record is $2.04 billion, won on a single ticket in California in 2022.

Fate Decides How Your Life Turns Out

Psychologists call crediting life outcomes to luck or fate an external locus of control, a concept developed by Julian Rotter. People with an internal locus credit their own effort and ability instead. A scale measuring belief in good luck tied most closely to the chance side of locus of control. A study of 224 University of Nairobi students found a significant performance difference between the two groups.

One Bad Decision Ruins Your Whole Future

A 2011 Michigan State University study recorded brain activity as 25 undergraduates made errors on a rapid-response task. Those who believed intelligence can be developed showed a stronger brain response tied to awareness of mistakes, and they were more accurate on the next attempt. For people with a fixed view, researchers note, a mistake signals a lack of ability. Critics point out that the study cannot say which came first, the mindset or the brain response.

Learning Stops the Day You Graduate

Education does not end with a diploma. In the Synapse Project, 221 adults aged 60 to 90 spent about 15 hours a week learning digital photography, quilting or both. Their memory improved compared with peers who only socialized or did easy activities. A follow-up brain-imaging study of 39 older adults examined what the learning changed inside the brain.

Only One Kind of Intelligence Exists

Many sharp thinkers doubt that school grades alone measure a person, and the popular alternative is Howard Gardner’s theory of multiple intelligences. Researchers have called it a neuromyth because no brain evidence supports separate, independent intelligences. Even so, one review found that 90% of surveyed U.S. teacher trainees planned to use its teaching strategies, and 94% of surveyed Quebec teachers already did. Mainstream psychology favors a different model, the one Gardner set out to replace.

Quick Fixes Work Without Any Effort

Overnight riches and instant weight loss follow a familiar script. The Federal Trade Commission warns that body wraps, creams, supplements, and patches promise to melt fat away, and in 2014 it charged four companies with unsubstantiated weight-loss claims. Court orders in those cases bar the sellers from making such claims without two well-controlled human clinical studies. An earlier case centered on fake news sites, complete with invented reporters, that promised up to 25 pounds gone in four weeks.

Leaders and Experts Are Never Wrong

In Stanley Milgram’s 1963 obedience study at Yale, 26 of 40 participants delivered the top 450-volt shock when an experimenter told them to continue, though every participant paused to question the task. Moving the experiment to a modest office building in Bridgeport, Connecticut, cut that figure to 47.5%. When the experimenter gave orders by phone, obedience fell to about one participant in five. A variation using an ordinary man in the experimenter’s role produced a figure just as low.

Some Beliefs Should Never Be Questioned

Open-minded thinking means revising a belief when new evidence arrives. In a 2024 analysis of 747 people, it correlated at -0.41 with belief in false conspiracies, stronger than earlier studies had found. A separate study of 159 university students found that rational thinking, thinking styles, and self-control predicted suspect beliefs, while intelligence did not. That second result complicates the idea that smart people are immune.

Conspiracy Theories Without Scientific Evidence

A meta-analysis of 145 independent samples found that people who think reflectively are less likely to believe conspiracy theories, a correlation researchers called close to a medium effect. A broader review of 170 studies found conspiracy belief only weakly tied to intelligence. Researchers also note that an intuitive thinking style is unrelated to intelligence, so a clever person who trusts gut instinct can still fall for a story. Experiments that tried to nudge people into analytical thinking have produced conflicting results.

Gossip Is Safe to Believe

MIT researchers tracked about 126,000 stories shared on Twitter from 2006 to 2017 and found that falsehoods were 70% more likely to be retweeted than the truth. Removing bots left the gap intact, which points to people. The researchers’ leading explanation is novelty: false stories were more novel, and people tend to share novel information. False stories also drew different emotions than true ones.