The Illusion of Competence

This blog post is about the illusion of competence and intelligence in fictional characters, or "hollywood smart." Now, one of the rules for creating likeable protagonists is that they need to be good at what they do. In most cases, this means that the protagonists in fiction need to be smart. However, sometimes the creator of these characters relies on a few stupid, tired tools to show how smart their beloved characters are, and it just doesn't work.

The worst method is one we typically see only in Hollywood movies. Bad ones. I'm going to use the tragedy of a movie called 21, adapted from a much better book called Bringing Down the House. In this film, the hero of our piece, some college student from either Harvard or MIT (MIT in the book), is supposed to be a genius. Never mind the fact that High/Low Card Counting doesn't require too much in the way of observational skills or mental discipline, in the movie it requires a genius.

And one of the great skills of this cognitive superstar is his ability to do math. Not the kind of math that's tricky, not calculus, not the post-calculus stuff that non-math majors such as myself manage to avoid. Not the kind of math where it ceases to be about numbers. No, this guy can multiply three digit numbers in his head. And we, as the audience, are supposed to be impressed by his intelligence, because he can replicate the functions of a two dollar calculator. Don't get me wrong, it's a neat trick, useful for calculating tips, but not much else.

So yes, Hollywood often tries to attempt to showcase intelligence through multiplication and division, and it just doesn't impress. I've never read a book that tries to do this though; if there has been one, please let me know!

This might be the stupidest way to attempt to show intelligence, but it's not the most common. So, reader, let's see how convergent our experiences are, and allow me to ask you this: when a book tries to convince you that it's doctor, lawyer, or other educated professional is the smartest guy around, what information does it always convey?

Their college. And not just college, but what their class rank was. Always. Always. Always. And that college is nearly always Harvard, MIT, Stanford, or other colleges with extremely strong brands. And their class rank is almost always one; if they didn't place first, you can be damn sure that they're second, and the first in their class is going to show up in the story.

Now, this is probably more impressive than the ability to multiply 233 by 56 in your head, don't get me wrong. Those are all good colleges, and getting a degree, especially an advanced degree, is a good way to prove you're no dummy. But I honestly think that there's more fictional characters who have graduated at the top of their class from Harvard Law than there are opportunities for them to have done so.

And let's be honest here. Getting good grades in high school is important: it helps you get into college. Getting good grades in college rather less so, since most companies don't care too much about your grades once you leave academia. And the most successful people I knew in college weren't spending all of their hours in the library inflating their GPA; they were doing internships, starting their own businesses, and moving on with their lives.

My point here is that nothing requires a fictional character to be the absolute best of the best during his education, or even at all, unless Jack Welch wrote a novel that I'm unaware of.  It's unrealistic, and gets to be a little annoying when every single fictional character ever graduated at the top of his class. Especially when you'd never know it when the same characters prove to be utter, incompetent morons throughout the entire story, simply because THE PLOT DEMANDED IT (sorry, I couldn't resist :) ).

The other common way a character's intelligence is rammed down the audience's throats is their IQ score. A smart character's IQ is never just high, it's phenomenal, at least over 150, and more commonly in the range of 180-200 for these geniuses. If not higher. Worse, this high IQ is often used as a flimsy justification for why our 'intelligent' man is able to outwit his enemies or foresee future events.

Studies have shown that there's some correlation between job performance and IQ, but having a high IQ is no substitute for training, experience, and drive. Just because my IQ is high doesn't mean that I know any more about computer hacking than anyone else (although I can quite confidently state that I know more about it than whoever wrote Die Hard 4 :) ).

The problem is that as authors, we want our characters to be smart, competent, and effective. We want them to be the kind of people we can throw all kinds of terrible problems at, and have them emerge victorious, with a little bit of luck and help from the supporting cast. So we come up with ways to tell the audience how smart these character are; after all, graduating first in class from Harvard MUST mean they're the best lawyer of their age, right?

Unfortunately, one of the very first rules of effective storytelling is to SHOW, don't TELL. The character should have some scene that shows how smart they are, how skilled they are at their job, etc. Even Conan Doyle didn't tell his readers about Sherlock Holmes's amazing record of solving police cases or his genius; he demonstrated it with an example of his deductive reasoning.

I can't think of an author that doesn't know this, yet so many resort to the TELLING us about the character's competence, and this so often falls flat, at least for me. Why don't authors do this? Because it can be hard. It often requires research. And it can delay the sections that we really want to write. But it's probably worth it.

As a confession, I resort to a similar mechanism in my fantasy novel No More Kings. There, the two main characters, Maerden and Edelle, are the two most powerful sorcerers of their land. I basically just say that they're the best, and leave it at that. Now, it's probably a bit harder to realistically show why someone is a great sorcerer, since it's all made up anyway (or maybe that makes it easier).

More importantly, however, my book is about two people who are already legends, who have already saved the world, rescued the princess, and destroyed the dark lord and his McGuffin of terror. I'm generalizing here, and invoking more than a few fantasy tropes that don't actually appear in my book. But it does show what can happen to a hero when there are no more dragons left to slay. Should I change that bit? Maybe.