I also observe that self-described intellectuals tend to reify ideas, i.e. to treat them as concretes. C.S. Lewis described how this phenomenon worked with his protagonist, a sociologist named Mark, in his novel That Hideous Strength:

…his education had had the curious effect of making things that he read and wrote more real to him than the things he saw. Statistics about agricultural laboureres were the substance: any real ditcher, ploughman, or farmer’s boy, was the shadow… he had a great reluctance, in his work, to ever use such words as “man” or “woman.” He preferred to write about “vocational groups,” “elements,” “classes,” and “populations”: for, in his own way, he believed as firmly as any mystic in the superior reality of the things that are not seen.