… you may want to recognize ways to avoid such self- sabotage — not that you would need such advice, of course, yet your intelligent friends might.  According to the 15 experts cited by Yale professor, Robert J. Steinberg, Why Smart People Can Be So Stupid, high I.Q. people are more likely to fall into faulty thinking, yet other experts think that some of their conclusions are faulty.

”Stupid,” for example is used in the book to mean “wrong” and “smart” refers to intelligence – of a certain sort. President Clinton, for example, is called stupid because he got caught in his lies regarding the intern. Perhaps because they are “smart” some of the book’s contributors sometimes fall into the trap of sounding fuzzy and/or contradictory in defining smart and stupid behavior.

“Intelligence by itself doesn’t make you rational. Thinking rationally demands mental skills that some of us don’t have and many of us don’t use,” suggests Kurt Kleiner. And context has considerable influence on what we see, feel, think and do.

It helps to think both fast and slow and to see how blind belief in ideology can make us fall for dumb ideas.

Yet others have suggested that we can make wiser decisions by sidestepping four apparently obvious yet sometimes ignored Mental Traps:

1. The Egocentrism Fallacy: Expecting that the world revolves, or at least should revolve, around you. Acting in ways that benefit your, regardless of how that behavior affects others.

2. The Omniscience Fallacy:  Believing that you know all there is to know and therefore do not have to listen to the advice and counsel of others

3. The Omnipotence Fallacy:  Thinking that your intelligence and education somehow make you all-powerful.

4. The Invulnerability Fallacy: Presuming that you can do whatever you want and that others will never be able to hurt you or expose you.

Improve your performance. Get motivated to persist longer.

The findings from Carol Dweck’s experiment can help us stick to a task that matters to us. Students were randomly assigned to read one of two articles, the first suggested that intelligence is “fixed”; the others argued that it was or “malleable” – open to improvement. Then all asked to do a difficult task.

Those who’d read that intelligence was malleable were more persistent in gaining mastery in that task.

Most gratifyingly, other studies found that:  “teaching students the malleable theory of intelligence not only aided their performance in the face of obstacles on an individual intellectual task, it actually raised their college grade point average and their commitment to school.”

There’s more good news.

Since, as Malcolm Gladwell and others suggest that mastery of a subject requires 10,000 hours of learning and practice, this strengthened desire to persist on a task (or subject) could evoke a self-fulfilling prophecy of mastery.

To further hone your performance, understand the Incentive Caused Bias, other decision making traps we all fall into – and how to argue better.

To this day I’m mortified when I see a box of chocolates. Perhaps sharing this story may save you from embarrassing yourself in a similar way. I was in the Antwerp airport, heading back to San Francisco. Before settling into a seat at my gate I bought two indulgences for the flight home, John LeCarre’s Our Kind of Traitor, and a box of Pierre Marcolini truffles,  one of the most popular brands in Europe.

Within minutes I was swept into LeCarre’s masterful spy mystery. But I promised myself I would savor my truffles, eating each one slowly.  At some point the motion of the man’s arm next to me caught my attention. He, too, was reading – as he casually took a truffle out of my box that was on the narrow table between us.

Flummoxed, I made a throat noise, which went unnoticed. I was angry and cowed, so I just move my box closer to me. He took three more by the time my row was called to board. I grabbed the box, got up quickly, as did he, and gave him a thin-lipped smile that he returned with vague warmth. It was only when I was in my seat, with my book and box of chocolates opened that I looked down and saw my unopened box buried in the side pocket of my commodious purse where I’d absentmindedly put it right after buying it. As you’ve anticipated, the box I was holding was his.

As soon as the safety belt light went off I managed to find him and apologize, arousing several disgusted expressions from nearby passengers. His low-voiced, gentle “It was a delight to see you enjoying them, truly. I’ve been in your place in other situations so thanks for the opportunity to play this role this time as you undoubtedly will in the future. Now go enjoy your chocolates and your book.”

Don’t let somebody else determine your behavior

It is humbling to get glimpses of how blind we are to what is actually happening, especially if we feel wronged or irritated when others appear to be acting badly. When driving we are irritated at pedestrians who dawdle in the crosswalk or walk against the light, yet our righteous feelings reverse when we are pedestrians.

Put plainly, context deeply influences our perceptions and actions.

That’s why, as Snopes reported, commuters rushed past renowned violinist Joshua Bell when he played, incognito, one of the most intricate pieces ever written with a violin worth 3.5 million dollars, while standing in a Washington, D.C. subway.

He may have been just another street performer panhandling for spare change.

That’s why, when asked to count the times individuals pass a  basketball back and forth in a video, we miss the man in a gorilla costume stroll through the scene.

Situational blindness can be self-sabotaging. It can sour relationships. It may turn everyday encounters into bruised transactions rather than opportunities to enjoy a moment that might blossom into other possibilities.

When asked what they see when looking at an aquarium, for example, Americans and Western Europeans usually comment on the school of fish swimming to the right, and one fish swimming left.  Japanese observers, on the other hand, usually describe the arrangement of plants and color of the water as well as the swimming formations.

Western cultures appear to, “notice and consider context in a way than many Americans do not,” writes psychology professor Sam Sommers in Situations Matter.

To mitigate such blindness and turn more situations into opportunities to connect rather than conflict, consider adopting these two mindsets.

Go slow to go fast

We are hard-wired by our survival instinct, to respond sooner, more intensely and longer to what we perceive as negative behaviors than positive ones.  Simply knowing this, when you start to feel upset, — and that you are blind to the other person’s true feelings and motivation – can give you pause to learn more. Someone’s apparent abruptness, for example, may be a delayed reaction to the people who had just acted badly towards them.

Your natural instinct is to either leave, which solidifies their upset, or escalate, mirroring the other person’s offensive behavior which will cause you both to spiral up in intensity. As that person acts badly toward you he may resent you for seeing him behave that way, quickly rationalize his rude response to preserve his self-esteem, and retaliate for his perceived grievance.

Instead, know speed and loudness increase tension, so adopt the calming Slower, Lower and Less Effect.  While maintaining a genial facial expression (slightly elevated eyebrows), speak and move more slowly, lowering your voice level and the amount, speed and level of your gestures. As the stripper, Gypsy Rose Lee once said, “Anything worth doing well is worth doing slowly.”

Look to their positive intent, especially when it appears they have none

Even if someone is intentionally rude, de-escalation makes life easier for your both. Speak to the side of that person you genuinely like – and that he likes in himself. In so doing make evoke the appearance of that trait.

People like people who like them. The more he enjoys how he acts around you, the greater the likelihood he will see a trait in you he admires – even if you haven’t exhibited it. That’s an example of the Fundamental Attribution Error where, for example, if we see someone cheat, we presume she would cheat in any situation. The upside of such contextual blindness is that once I see you in a possible light, I tend to project onto you the blanket assumption that you are always that way.

Wrote Malcolm Gladwell, in What the Dog Saw, “In the late 1920s, psychologist Theodore Newcomb analyzed extroversion among adolescent boys at a summer camp. He found that how talkative a boy was—say, at lunch—was highly predictive of how talkative that boy would usually be at lunch.… But told you almost nothing about how he would behave in a different setting.”

We assume that personalities are fixed yet they aren’t. As Multiplicity author, Rita Carter discovered we have diverse facets to our personality, some unbecoming as you discover in Out of Character by David DeSteno, Ph.D., and Piercarlo Valdesolo.

The upside is that while positive traits may be less entrenched than we imagine, our negative ones are also less fixed. Consequently, it is easier than we think to evoke a better side to someone, even when they are acting badly. The truffle-eating gentleman spoke to my kind side rather than referring to my rudeness in taking his truffle box.

In so doing, he reinforced a positive quality I value in myself. He also evoked my admiration for him, and modeled behavior I have since tried to emulate.

What could have escalated into an even more embarrassing incident instead served as an indelible lesson in paying it forward – in practicing bonding behavior so needed in our increasingly complex yet connected world with a steep rise in anxiety and loneliness.

Every situation with strangers can be an opportunity to bring others’ better side. Then they are more likely to see and support yours. Also, times with strangers can be opportunities to practice latent parts of your personality or interests, as Melinda Blau notes in Consequential Strangers.  My friend Arthur is consumed with software coding at his crowdsourcing start-up yet he still makes time to play the tenor sax with pick-up groups. They see an emotive side of him that does not appear as much at work.  Despite having a three year-old and twins who just turned one, my friend Claire takes night classes in advanced biology, not just to keep up with her career, but to exchange ideas with her peers that are not possible at home.

Don’t let somebody else determine your behavior

Simply recognizing how I can easily leap to wrong conclusions, biased by context, sometimes enables me to adopt these two mindsets. The indelible remembrance of that gentleman’s warm, affirming response to my halting apology is a recurring nudge for me to act similarly, not that I always manage to do so.

At any time we can alter the character role we play in the next chapter of the adventure story we want our lives to become. We can change scripts, pull in new characters and even enter new scenes. In difficult situations, how have you learned to bring out others’ better side?

Reinventing himself when he arrived at college Sam, “who had never had much luck with women” successfully beguiled a string of women into one-night stands, leaving his male friends shaking their heads in wonder because the women, though dumped, saw him as “sensitive, caring and sweet.” Also odd, Sam took up the habit of frequently washing his hands.

Now this might make you sufficiently curious to read the book in which this story is told, Out of Character. As you might have anticipated, Sam was subconsciously wiping his hands of guilt. A Macbeth effect for a man who’s dorm room was untidy.

Consider the sexual foibles of Eliot Spitzer, Tiger Woods and others. Yet, under the right circumstances we women can act as badly men. In fact, rather than acting heroically or evil we are all influenced by context and cues much of the time, according to the co-authors of this book.  Blame it our brain in constant combat, between the emotional and rational side. Yet understanding how we can convince ourselves to cheat, then minutes later, condemn others for the exact same behavior (another experiment in the book) can lead us to make more moral choices that serve us well in the long run, if not always in the tempting moment. And to stand up to bad behavior as Dan Weiss did at the Kennedy Center.

Here are three more examples of how we can be influenced to act badly – or better:

1. When angry people are more likely to see guns in the situation.

2. Experiment subjects are asked to watch video vignettes, some saw a skit from Saturday Night Live  and others got stuck watching part of a dull documentary of a quiet Mexican village. Then all were  asked how they would respond to a situation in which they are standing on a footbridge adjacent to trolley tracks. The only way they can save the lives of five men further down the tracks is to push a nearby, burly man off the bridge and onto the tracks, thus stopping the train.

Those who watched the SNL skit were three times more likely to push the man onto the tracks. What made the difference was the emotional state the videos evoked just before they were asked.  Those who watched the SNL skit felt upbeat and were thus able to overcome their aversion to killing one person to save five. They operated from their rational mind – thinking it made logical sense. Yet emotional contagion can influence our behavior in many ways. We are inclined  to belittle the next person we are around after we treated that way, for example. Co-author, David DeSteno suspects that “we act honorably—to the extent that we do—because we feel we should, not because we think we should.”

3. Sitting in a waiting room with a dirty rug, wall paintings askew and a dirty tissue on a table means you are considerably more likely to view the person who comes up to help you as not only less attractive but also less well-intentioned and skilled. You justify your less gracious behavior.  To warm others up towards you, consider storyboarding the multi-sensory cues that  people experience at your store, workplace, event or home.

Imagine the implications for our behaviors and settings at work or home. Later in the book see how you can view someone’s actions as arrogance or justifiable pride, depending on whether you believe that person knows what she or he is doing. Those asked, for example, about George Bush or Barack Obama’s actions are seeing them through the lens of their opinions about each one.  Similarly we are more likely to feel compassionate towards those with whom we can identify – they act and look like us.

That probably does not surprise you.

Yet when soldiers from vastly different backgrounds march together just once, they see and describe themselves as more alike and take more actions to support each other. One march does that.  Synchrony. It happens even when individuals in a study are asked to tap their hands in sync, some tap along with one person, others follow a different person.  Afterwards they answered questions that indicated they liked the people who tapped with them more than the others.  Makes you think of what you might want do when first convening a project team or starting the family off on a vacation?

Especially when I was younger I was astonished by heroes with feet of clay, not looking inward at my own incongruent actions. Coward or hero? Chaste or promiscuous? Bigoted or tolerant? We’ve played many roles.  As Dan Gilbert notes, “the hero and the villain that live inside each of us.” Reading this book is a fresh reminder that we all act “out of character” sometimes in ways that can make us ashamed or proud, depending on whether our emotional or rational brain is in the driver’s seat. We need both and David DeSteno and Piercarlo Valdesolo helped me see ways to balance them.

If you, too, are fascinated by what influences how we act towards each other then you may also enjoy Sway, Nudge, Multiplicity, Tell to Win, Influence, Just Listen, and Smart Choices.

If villagers living in the midst of poverty and war can be nudged to work better together with just three simple rules (honed via a parental competition study) and a reward (money, in this case) then maybe your group (team, board, committee, etc.) could too:

1. The village leaders (or your project leader) are elected by secret ballot.

2. The village (or your group) holds communal meetings – meaning open to all participants and no secret side confabs.

3. The results of all meetings are covered completely and accurately and that coverage is made available, quickly, to all participants. Here are two other posts you may find helpful:

How We Help Each Other Do the Right Thing…Sometimes

Disagree? How to Keep Talking Instead of Arguing