Category: Intelligence

People with high IQs tend to share this quality.

More intelligent people tend to follow rules and be less aggressive and better behaved.

People with higher IQs are also less likely to cheat and steal.

Young people with lower IQs, though, are more likely to take part in antisocial behaviour, such as harassing or alarming others.

Boys who are antisocial have an average IQ 10 points lower than their more social counterparts.

For antisocial girls, the IQ gap is 5 points lower than their more social peers.

The conclusions come from a study of more than 1,000 young people in the UK.

All were given tests of IQ and externalising behaviour.

For psychologists, externalising behaviour refers to physical aggression, flouting rules, stealing and cheating.

The results showed that fewer externalising behaviours were linked to higher IQ.

In contrast, those with lower IQs were at greater risk of antisocial behaviour.

The study’s authors write:

“Low IQ is a consistent risk factor for emergence and continuity of antisocial behavior across the life course in both prospective and cross-sectional studies, even when other relevant risk factors are statistically controlled.”

Genetic factors are likely important in the link, as well as situational factors, the authors write:

“…cognitive deficits might promote antisocial behavior if children with low IQs misunderstand rules, find it too difficult to negotiate conflict with words, find school frustrating, or become tracked with antisocial peers.”

The study was published in the Journal of Abnormal Psychology (Koenen et al., 2008).

The behaviour is linked to more white matter, the brain’s ‘superhighway’.

People who take calculated risks are likely to be smarter than average.

People making quick decisions and taking chances have more white matter in their brains.

White matter is sometimes called the ‘superhighway’ of the brain: it transmits signals and regulates communication.

The researchers were surprised by the result as they expected the exact opposite: that smarter people would spend more time evaluating the situation before making a decision.

Dr Dagfinn Moe, study co-author, explained:

“We expected to find that young men who spend time considering what they are going to do in a given risk situation would have more highly developed neural networks in their brains than those who make quick decisions and take chances.

This has been well documented in a series of studies, but our project revealed the complete opposite.”

The research involved young men playing a driving game.

The results showed that high-risk takers did not hesitate as long during the game.

Dr Moe thinks that the ability to take risks is under-appreciated by society at large:

“Daring and risk-willingness activate and challenge the brain’s capacity and contribute towards learning, coping strategies and development.

They can stimulate behaviour in the direction of higher levels of risk-taking in people already predisposed to adapt to cope optimally in such situations.

We must stop regarding daring and risk-willingness simply as undesirable and uncontrolled behaviour patterns.”

Seeking out challenges helps to stimulate the brain, which may be why risk-takers have more white matter.

Dr Moe said:

“All the positive brain chemicals respond under such conditions, promoting growth factors that contribute to the development of the robust neural networks that form the basis of our physical and mental skills.

The point here is that if you’re going to take risks, you have to have the required skills.

And these have to be learned.

Sadly, many fail during this learning process — with tragic consequences.

So this is why we’re wording our findings with a Darwinian slant — it takes brains to take risks.”

The study was published in the journal PLOS ONE (Vorobyev et al., 2015).

People with these two traits had higher crystallised intelligence.

Being open to new experiences and more extraverted are both linked to higher intelligence, research finds.

People who are open to experience tend to have a more active imagination, higher sensitivity to beauty and more intellectual curiosity, among other things.

Open people tend to retain general information better and they are also better at storing memories in the short term.

The results come from a survey of 381 people aged 19- to 89-years-old.

They were split into different groups depending on their cognitive performance.

The type of intelligence measured in the study is known as ‘crystallised’.

This refers to the ability to use learned information and is often tested through general knowledge and vocabulary.

In a twist to the findings, though, it turned out that some adults over 60 performed as well as younger people.

Among these people, it was being disagreeable that was linked to higher IQ.

Other research has also found that people who are highly intelligent tend to be independent and aloof.

The study’s authors conclude:

“The results also suggests that there are differences in personality–intelligence relationships between those who retain a normal level of overall cognitive ability in old age and those older adults who are cognitively superior.”

The study was published in the journal Personality and individual Differences (Baker & Bichsel, 2006).

How your sense of humour, what time you go to bed and your curiosity reveal your intelligence.

Being curious, staying up late and having a dark sense of humour are all signs of a high IQ, psychological research finds.

People who are curious ask lots of questions, look for surprises, seek out sensations and make time to search out new ideas, a study finds.

Intelligence, along with curiosity and some personality factors, predicts successful performance in many areas.

Night owl

Being a night owl, meanwhile, is linked to stronger reasoning and better analytical and conceptual thinking.

Night owls prefer to stay up late at night and rise later in the morning.

Around one-third of the population are night owls, with one-quarter preferring to rise early.

The remainder fall somewhere in between, being neither early risers nor late sleepers.

Dark humour

Liking dark humour is a sign of higher intelligence, research finds.

Dark humour, the study’s authors write, is:

“…a kind of humour that treats sinister subjects like death, disease, deformity, handicap or warfare with bitter amusement and presents such tragic, distressing or morbid topics in humorous terms.

Black humour, often called grotesque, morbid, gallows or sick humour, is used to express the absurdity, insensitivity, paradox and cruelty of the modern world.

Characters or situations are usually exaggerated far beyond the limits of normal satire or irony, potentially requiring increased cognitive efforts to get the joke.”

Surprisingly, though, people who like dark humour feel the least aggressive towards others.

In other words, it is not aggressive people who like sick jokes.

Dark humour, it seems, is more difficult to enjoy without higher intelligence.

The study was published in the journals Perspectives on Psychological Science, Personality and Individual Differences & Cognitive Processing (Díaz-Morales & Escribano, 2013; von Stumm et al., 2011; Willinger et al., 2017).

The common drink is linked to a higher level of education.

Smarter people are more likely to drink alcohol daily, research finds.

Better educated people are also more likely to have a drinking problem.

Higher grades in school at the age of just 5-years-old predict greater intake of alcohol many decades later.

Among women, there is an especially strong link between alcohol consumption and being highly educated.

The reason may be that middle-class lifestyles — accessible through education — are linked to more alcohol consumption.

It could also be because intelligent people often value novel things and are at a greater risk of getting bored.

The study’s authors write:

“The more educated women are, the more likely they are to drink alcohol on most days and to report having problems due to their drinking patterns

The better-educated appear to be the ones who engage the most in problematic patterns of alcohol consumption.”

The results come from a study that followed everyone born in the UK in one week in 1970.

Women with degrees were 86% more likely to drink on most days than those with less education, the study found.

Highly-educated women were 1.7 times more likely to have a drinking problem than the less well-educated.

The authors write:

“Both males and females who achieved high-level performance in test scores administered at ages five and 10 are significantly more likely to abuse alcohol than individuals who performed poorly on those tests.”

The link between alcohol consumption and education could come down to a range of factors, the authors write:

“Reasons for the positive association of education and drinking behaviours may include: a more intensive social life that encourages alcohol intake; a greater engagement into traditionally male spheres of life, a greater social acceptability of alcohol use and abuse; more exposure to alcohol use during formative years; and greater postponement of childbearing and its responsibilities among the better educated.”

The study was published in the journal Social Science and Medicine (Huerta & Borgonovi, 2010).

The personality trait that is linked to higher intelligence.

Being cooperative is a sign of high intelligence, recent research finds.

More intelligent people tend to be cautious with their trust at first, then build it up with experience.

People who are cooperative tend to be more helpful, believe in teamwork and be mutually supportive.

In addition, those who are cooperative tend to be better at seeing the big picture and learning from experience.

Higher intelligence allows people to process information more quickly.

All these factors are signs that someone’s IQ is high.

Professor Eugenio Proto, who led the study, said:

“People might naturally presume that people who are nice, conscientious and generous are automatically more cooperative.

But, through our research, we find overwhelming support for the idea that intelligence is the primary condition for a socially cohesive, cooperative society.

A good heart and good behaviour have an effect too but it’s transitory and small.

An additional benefit of higher intelligence in our experiment, and likely in real life, is the ability to process information faster, hence to accumulate more extensive experience, and to learn from it.

This scenario can be applied to the workplace, where it’s likely that intelligent people who see the bigger picture and work cooperatively, will ultimately be promoted and financially rewarded.”

The conclusions come from people playing a series of games that tested cooperation.

Each involved trading off risk against reward.

The results showed that people who were more agreeable and conscientious were also more cooperative.

However, the influence of these personality traits was dwarfed by that of IQ.

Those with lower IQs, the study found, tend not to use a consistent strategy and disregard the consequences of their actions.

The study’s authors explain:

“Higher intelligence resulted in significantly higher levels of cooperation and earnings.

The failure of individuals with lower intelligence to appropriately estimate the future consequences of current actions accounts for these difference in outcomes.

Personality also affects behavior, but in smaller measure, and with low persistence.”

The study was published in the Journal of Political Economy (Proto et al., 2018).

The foods can even restore memory in older people.

Flavanols, which naturally occur in fruit and vegetables, can make you smarter, new research finds.

People who consumed a cocoa drink laced with flavanols performed 11 percent faster on complex cognitive tests than those given a placebo.

Flavanols work by increasing blood oxygenation.

Flavanols are present in grapes, cocoa, apples, berries, tea and many other foods.

Dark chocolate is a particularly rich source of cocoa flavanols.

Dr Catarina Rendeiro, study co-author, said:

“Flavanols are small molecules found in many fruits and vegetables, and cocoa, too.

They give fruits and vegetables their bright colors, and they are known to benefit vascular function.

We wanted to know whether flavanols also benefit the brain vasculature, and whether that could have a positive impact on cognitive function.”

The small study included 18 people given either a flavanol-rich drink or a placebo.

Two hours later, brain scans showed that those who had consumed flavanols had blood oxygenation three times higher in response to hypercapnia.

Hypercapnia means the elevation of carbon dioxide in the bloodstream.

Dr Rendeiro explained the results:

“Our results showed a clear benefit for the participants taking the flavanol-enriched drink – but only when the task became sufficiently complicated.

We can link this with our results on improved blood oxygenation – if you’re being challenged more, your brain needs improved blood oxygen levels to manage that challenge.

It also further suggests that flavanols might be particularly beneficial during cognitively demanding tasks.”

Long-term flavanol consumption

Taking cocoa flavanols over the long term has also been linked to a variety of mental benefits.

In elderly people, they have been shown to improve cognitive performance, attention, processing speed and verbal fluency.

These effects are particularly strong among elderly people starting to see age-related mental decline.

One study, published in Nature Neuroscience, found a high-flavanol diet could restore aspects of older people’s memory back to that of a typical 30- or 40-year-old.

The study was published in the journal Scientific Reports (Gratton et al., 2020).