Hey, it's Elise Hugh, and this is TED Talks Daily. Humans are a super smart species, right? But we also make consistently dumb decisions. Why? In this archive talk from TED Global 2010, cognitive psychologist Lori Santos uses a fascinating field experiment to shed some light.

Lori is also a podcast host of her own.

Hers is based on the popular psych course she teaches at Yale, and in it, she takes you

through the latest scientific research and shares surprising stories that'll change the way

you think about happiness.

You can check out that podcast, The Happiness Lab, from Pushkin Industries, wherever you listen to podcasts.

I want to start my talk today with two observations about the human species.

The first observation is something that you might think is quite obvious,

and that's that our species, Homo sapiens, is actually really, really smart, like ridiculously smart. Like, you're all doing

things that no other species on the planet does right now. And this is, of course, not the first

time you've probably recognized this. Of course, in addition to being smart, we're also an extremely

vain species. So we're like pointing out the fact that we're smart.

So I could turn to pretty much any sage from Shakespeare to Stephen Colbert

to point out things like the fact that we're noble in reason and infinite in faculties,

just kind of awesomer than everything else on the planet when it comes to all things cerebral.

But of course, there's a second observation about the human species that I want to focus on a little bit more. And that's the fact that even though we're

actually really smart, sometimes uniquely smart, we can also be incredibly, incredibly dumb

when it comes to some aspects of our decision making. Now, I'm seeing lots of smirks out there.

Don't worry, I'm not going to call anyone in particular out on any aspects of your own mistakes.

But of course, just in the last two years,

we see these unprecedented examples of human ineptitude.

We've watched as the tools we uniquely make

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