Do you know someone who is a walking disaster area?

[liveonearth]

from LiveScience
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.

The rest of the article.

Comments

[neptunia67.livejournal.com]

Good article. Makes perfect sense to me. I've known some pretty smart people who don't have much reasoning ability (working at a University has introduced me to several). Do you think reasoning capability is the same as common sense? I think they must be related, at least.

[liveonearth.livejournal.com]

Yeah, it made sense to me too. I think common sense is a combination of reasoning with the ability to observe the obvious. Lots of people miss things that are wholly in their face.....and pay the price of "bad luck". I have a couple of people in mind......I think we all know somebody who just attracts trouble. Some people appear to need the drama, and create it continuously. I can't stand to be too close to those people.