Identity trumps Intelligence

 

Give two people the same set of numbers, and you'd expect them to reach the same conclusion. Give two very smart people the same numbers, and you'd expect it even more.

Yet that's often not what happens. And the reason has less to do with ‘how intelligent we are’ than with ‘who we believe ourselves to be’.

 

What Indian philosophy already knew

Long before modern psychology gave it a name, Indian philosophy had mapped this territory in precise detail. Texts from the Indian philosophy describe the mind as four functions working together - The senses, coordinated by manas, constantly gather raw experience. Chitta stores it as memory. Buddhi, the intellect (and we use this interchangeably as intelligence), discriminates and decides. And then there is ahamkara, the 'I-maker': identity itself, the sense of "I am this gender, this community, this nation, this tradition." (note: the translations of these terms in Sanskrit to English are not accurate).

The texts are direct about how these four relate. Ahamkara is described as claiming authorship over the senses, memory and intellect alike. It is not one input among many. It is the filter everything else passes through before intelligence gets to weigh in. Buddhi doesn't reason on raw experience. It reasons on experience that identity has already shaped.

That's a strong claim for a text that is thousands of years old. Does it hold up?

 

Learned people, predictable conclusions

Consider India after independence. For nearly four decades, many of the country's best-trained economists, educated at Cambridge, the London School of Economics and India's finest institutions, held to a socialist, self-reliance economic identity. The evidence against it kept piling up: chronic shortages, a licensing regime that held growth to what economist Raj Krishna called the 'Hindu rate of growth', and decades of underperformance visible in the data all along. It wasn't a shortage of intelligence in the room, it was the Socialist identity driving all policies. It took an actual balance-of-payments crisis in 1991, not the data that had existed for thirty years, to force the policy change that reasoning alone couldn't.

Or look at the United States. A landmark study by legal scholars Cass Sunstein, David Schkade and Lisa Ellman examined federal appellate judges. On ideologically contested cases, a judge's vote could be predicted with high reliability by the political party of the president who appointed them – despite same legal training, same facts, same law. More striking still, the effect wasn't fixed to the individual. A judge's ideological tendency was amplified when the panel included two other judges from the same political lineage and dampened when it didn't. Identity wasn't just shaping the individual mind. It was shaping the direction in which a group's collective intelligence leaned.

 

The experiment that proved it in a lab

Yale's Dan Kahan took this out of the courtroom and into a controlled experiment. He gave people an identical set of data with same mathematical structure but framed in two different ways. Framed as a trial for a new skin cream, people across the political spectrum, including the most mathematically skilled, read the numbers correctly.

Framed as a study on gun control, using the exact same numbers, something strange happened. The most numerically skilled people got more wrong, not less, whenever the correct answer contradicted their political identity. Intelligence wasn't neutralising the bias. It was bias that was influencing the intelligence, handing people a sharper set of tools to defend what their identity had already decided.

So, does Identity trump Intelligence? On the questions that touch who we are, very often, yes.

 

And that is exactly what gets used

We all carry many identities at once: gender, religion, country, region, language, cuisine, tradition, caste, college, political party, even the cricket team we support. Most of the time they coexist quietly. But if identity can override the intellect, then whoever learns to switch an identity on, and make it feel under threat, can steer how even very smart people think.

That is the oldest trick in the political and religious playbook. Some political leaders and religious fundamentalists have always understood it: you don't need to win the argument if you can make the argument about who we are and who they are. Once a disagreement becomes a threat to identity, facts stop mattering, and the divisions do the rest of the work.

It has always been there. What has changed is speed. Social media has done two things at once. It has made it effortless for anyone to create identity-triggering content, and it has built the machinery to spread that content faster and wider than any pamphlet, pulpit or rally ever could. Creation and acceleration, side by side and aided by the algorithms, have sharply increased the pace at which societies are being pulled apart.

The ancient texts diagnosed the vulnerability long ago. We are now living in the first era in which it can be exploited at the scale of billions, in real time.