From an instrumental perspective, intelligence is understood as a problem-solving ability or error avoidance (Holm-Hadulla et al. 2022). It is used to fulfil goals through the design and selection of good strategies or attitudes. Its success can be understood in terms of the interests and expectations of each person. But when referring to inquiry, in the works of authors like Kruglanski and Boyantki (in Matheson and Vitz, 2014) and Tanesini (2021), among others, two main goals are generally shared: social recognition—direct or indirect through other kinds of non-epistemic achievements—and truth-conduciveness—including avoiding falsehoods, and not only finding truths.

Intelligence makes use of our perspective (as a set of beliefs) and epistemic evaluations for choosing strategies, believing those intentions will match their objectives at least better than others. So true beliefs are part of intelligence, as they are doxastic attitudes not only considered an approximately true (or supposed as true) description of the states of things but considered to shape our perspective and evaluation of objects and propositions, like hypotheses and, with some differences, like emotions.

I will defend that intelligence is a second-order epistemic virtue because it allows epistemic subjects to correctly choose how to display their character traits to produce good effects, generally satisfying their own interests. In this, I follow a normative contextualism approach to traits, considering them virtuous or vicious depending on several situational factors, such as the kinds of motives or effects around the actions guided by the attitudes and decisions (Kidd et al. 2021, 82). Using conspiracist echo chambers as a case study, this talk will delve into how being inside an echo chamber creates a scenario where intelligence plays a fundamental role, as in our previous beliefs, in shaping strategies and attitudes for dealing with the problems of this epistemic and emotional environment.

Thus, this work offers support for character-based and decision-making theories as a constitutive part of studies about intelligence. For this purpose, it is essential to provide empirical evidence about the circumstances influencing the psychological processes, as well as their outcomes, that occur while being immersed in social media environments, which are, according to Levy and Mandelbaum (in Matheson and Vitz, 2014), a new set of environments, different from our past ones, for which humans are not well equipped.

The research question is as follows: how can people make smart choices about what to do when they find themselves inside an echo chamber? My thesis will be that intelligence is a second-order virtue, in the sense that every person has to display their traits as virtues while countering those traits that might become vices to avoid the production of bad effects. Intelligence's main functions, if so, consist in analysing the relationships between internal and external situational factors and coordinating actions for achieving goals in each situation.

Keywords: virtue epistemology; character traits; intelligence; decision theory; echo chambers

Philosophical issues addressed in the work: the debates between situationism and virtue epistemology, and inside the latter, between responsabilism and reliabilism. Also, I address issues related to echo chambers, such as the recognition of being inside one, how to deal with this situation, and which could be the appropriate actions, depending on internal and external factors.