Is the absent-minded genius just a very clever jerk?

The stereotype goes back to the ancient Greek astronomer Thales who fell into a well because he was stargazing as he walked.

(There’s a lesson here for all thinkers with their head in the clouds, though also for anyone who texts as they walk.)

What makes this form of forgetfulness so annoying is you’re not even supposed to be annoyed by it: the absent-minded professor can fail to show up for an appointment, or forget he owes you money, and the world “treats it as though it were cute, and possibly a sign of genius”.

True high-status absent-mindedness exhibits some curious features. It’s overwhelmingly a characteristic of men. Somehow it always seems to end up benefiting the absent-minded person.

If someone is simply bad at retaining information about their daily activities, you might expect them to show up early for meetings rather than late or they’d forget you owed them money as often as the other way round.

Strategic incompetence is the tactic where people exempt themselves from tedious chores such as stacking the dishwasher or clearing paper jams at the office, by performing them so terribly, they’re never asked again.

Unlike strategic incompetence, however, high-status absent-mindedness needn’t be conscious. Sigmund Freud argued that this kind of “motivated forgetting” was a way of expressing unconscious antipathy to others in a form acceptable to the conscious mind.

They may act as though they're too important to concern themselves with small matters to demonstrate they can get away with doing so.

The evolutionary biologist Robert Trivers tells us natural selection has made us excellent at self-deception, because the best way to deceive others – in this case, to trick them into thinking you’re simply too preoccupied with big ideas to have brain space for minor obligations – is often to deceive yourself first.

That way, when you perform the part of the scatterbrained genius who can’t help himself, you get to be completely sincere and thereby more convincing. Or, to put it another way: your forgetfulness may be a status-boosting act, but you’ve forgotten you know that.