Updated: 10:31 a.m. MT May 24, 2007
Why some people are walking disaster areas:
Smart people don’t automatically make smart choices, research reveals
People who are walking disaster areas — the types who bounce checks monthly, miss flights and vomit on the boss at the company picnic — are the same people who have poor reasoning skills, new research shows.
Reasoning abilities are influenced by intelligence and socioeconomic status, but they may also be skills that can be learned and honed with practice, says a "decision scientist" at Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh.
Many people are affected by the way that information is framed, marketed or spun, as in advertisements, thereby exhibiting poor decision-making skills, says Wändi Bruine de Bruin. But people with strong reasoning skills make the same choices no matter how information is presented to them.
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