Struggling with maths doesn’t necessarily mean you’re less intelligent.
One everyday garment came last for both perceived intelligence and trustworthiness.
One everyday garment came last for both perceived intelligence and trustworthiness.
Track pants, also known as tracksuit bottoms, receive the lower ratings for perceived intelligence compared with blouses, ordinary trousers or long skirts in a study of women’s clothing.
Of the six types of clothing the researchers compared, track pants also received the lowest average ratings for trustworthiness.
Blouses topped the rankings for intelligence and trustworthiness but scored near the bottom for confidence.
Short skirts showed almost the reverse pattern, scoring near the top for confidence and lower than long skirts on both intelligence and trustworthiness.
Short skirts also gave the strongest impression of sexual interest, showing how much people can read into a hemline.
Long skirts fell between short skirts and blouses on confidence, while ordinary trousers scored higher than tracksuit bottoms on both intelligence and trustworthiness.
Onesies gave the strongest impression of happiness and scored about as high as short skirts for confidence.
White clothes suggested a happier wearer than grey clothes did, with black clothes coming last.
These examples show how the impression changes with the question being asked: a blouse came out ahead for intelligence, while a onesie came out ahead for happiness.
The researchers began by asking about 200 people what they thought clothes could tell them about someone and comparing their answers with traits examined in previous research.
They then gathered ratings on 5,000 photographs from online shops, covering five kinds of impressions: intelligence, confidence, trustworthiness, happiness and sexual interest.
Participants formed these impressions from photographs of the garments alone, without seeing anyone wearing them.
The results showed that who was doing the judging explained more of the variation in ratings than which garment they saw.
For example, one person might associate tracksuit bottoms with training for a race, while another might picture someone spending a Sunday on the sofa.
The researchers draw a parallel between judging people by their clothes and judging them by their faces:
“That is, much like inferences from faces, the inferred attributes often lie in the eye of the beholder.”
The study was published in the Journal of Computational Social Science (Rosenbusch et al., 2021).
Could childhood exposure to fluoridated water leave a lasting mark on cognition? Decades of data offer clues.
Could childhood exposure to fluoridated water leave a lasting mark on cognition? Decades of data offer clues.
Fluoride in community drinking water is not linked to lower adolescent IQ or poorer thinking skills later in life, a long-running US study finds.
Researchers followed a generation of Wisconsin school-leavers, examining cognitive performance from adolescence into their eighties.
Those exposed to fluoridated water did not show a consistent disadvantage compared with people whose communities had no fluoridation.
The findings address concerns that adding fluoride to drinking water to prevent tooth decay could undermine intellectual development.
Professor John Robert Warren, the study’s first author, said:
“Utah, Florida and many municipalities have chosen to remove fluoride from drinking water based on flawed studies that considered the IQ effects of exposure to massive doses of fluoride.
Because levels of fluoride added to municipal drinking water in the U.S. are so much lower, almost all prior evidence from those international studies is not relevant to U.S. public policy debates.”
The research draws on the Wisconsin Longitudinal Study, which began with over 10,000 people who graduated from high school in 1957.
Researchers combined school IQ records with historical information about community water fluoridation and naturally occurring fluoride levels.
Following participants into old age allowed researchers to examine whether childhood exposure was associated with lasting differences in cognitive performance.
Comparing communities requires care because their residents can differ in ways that also relate to cognitive performance.
Once those background differences were taken into account, there was no consistent evidence that exposure was associated with either better or worse performance.
The same broad pattern appeared when researchers focused on people who had lived in the same county since early childhood, increasing confidence in their estimates of exposure.
Overall, the findings suggest that growing up with fluoridated community water is not associated with poorer cognitive performance in old age.
The study was published in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (Warren et al., 2026).
How you respond to beauty may have more in common with your thinking skills than you realise.
How you respond to beauty may have more in common with your thinking skills than you realise.
Intellectual curiosity and an appreciation of beauty are both linked to stronger thinking skills.
People with these qualities tend to perform better on tests of literacy, numeracy and problem-solving.
The findings suggest that a person’s interest in ideas and aesthetic experiences may offer clues to their cognitive abilities.
Curiosity could encourage people to seek out opportunities to learn, while stronger thinking skills could make exploring complex ideas more rewarding, with both processes reinforcing one another.
Intellectual curiosity involves enjoying ideas, wanting to understand things and being drawn to questions that require thought.
Aesthetic sensitivity describes an appreciation of art and beauty.
Both qualities belong to the broader personality trait of openness to experience, which captures how receptive people are to unfamiliar ideas and experiences.
However, openness also includes creative imagination, and this aspect showed no significant independent association with cognitive performance.
Imagination, curiosity and an appreciation of beauty may overlap in everyday life, but their relationships with thinking skills differ.
The conclusions come from an analysis of almost 68,000 people across 12 countries, including Canada, Germany, Italy and New Zealand.
They completed personality questionnaires alongside assessments of literacy, numeracy and the ability to solve problems as circumstances change.
Intellectual curiosity and aesthetic sensitivity were linked to better performance across all three assessments, even after accounting for other personality traits.
The connections between personality and cognitive skills also varied between countries.
Educational systems and cultural practices could help explain such differences, although the reasons remain uncertain.
Overall, the findings link both a desire to understand the world and an appreciation of its beauty with stronger thinking skills.
The study was published in the journal Large-scale Assessments in Education (Rammstedt et al., 2026).
How to use clothes to appear more competent.
How to use clothes to appear more competent.
Wearing more clothing makes you look more competent, a study finds.
Something as simple as taking off a sweater is enough to make you look less competent, the researchers found.
The finding applies to both men and women, said Dr Kurt Gray, the study’s first author:
“An important thing about our study is that, unlike much previous research, ours applies to both sexes.
It also calls into question the nature of objectification because people without clothes are not seen as mindless objects, but they are instead attributed a different kind of mind.”
The effect occurs because seeing more flesh encourages us to think about a person’s body, rather than their mind.
Dr Gray said:
“We also show that this effect can happen even without the removal of clothes.
Simply focusing on someone’s attractiveness, in essence concentrating on their body rather than their mind, makes you see her or him as less of an agent [someone who acts and plans] more of an experiencer.”
Showing bare skin, though, does have some advantages, explained Dr Gray:
“A focus on the body, and the increased perception of sensitivity and emotion it elicits might be good for lovers in the bedroom.
Others appear to be less inclined to harm people with bare skin and more inclined to protect them.
In one experiment, for example, people viewing male subjects with their shirts off were less inclined to give those subjects uncomfortable electric shocks than when the men had their shirts on.”
The study’s authors write:
“Even more than robbing someone of agency, the increased experience that may accompany body perceptions may lead those who are characterized in terms of their bodies to be seen as more reactive and emotional, traits that may also serve to work against career advancement.”
The study was published in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology (Gray et al., 2011).
Four things that indicate high intelligence in a person.
Four things that indicate high intelligence in a person.
Being open to experience, cooperative, happy and having strong perceptual skills are all signs that you have a high IQ, psychological research finds.
Of these, being open to experience is a particularly strong sign…
Insatiable curiosity, an active fantasy life, a sensitivity to emotions and an appreciation of art and beauty are all linked to high IQ.
These are all aspects of the major personality trait called ‘openness to experience’.
People who are open to experience are more interested in things that are complex, new and unconventional.
Being open to experience is so powerful that it is linked to intelligence when measured almost 40 years later.
Children who scored higher on IQ tests at just 11-years-old were more open to experience when they were 50-years-old, the psychologists found.
Intelligent people are better at cooperating with others.
While personality traits like being generous and conscientious have an effect on cooperation, higher IQ is the main factor that encourages people to work well together.
People with higher intelligence use more consistent strategies and consider the consequences of their actions.
That is why people with high IQs are so essential: without them society would not work.
Happy people have higher intelligence.
The finding goes against the popular idea that being intelligent somehow predisposes people to unhappiness.
The study looked at happiness in the best-known sense of feeling positive emotions and being satisfied with your life.
The results showed that people with the lowest IQ (70 – 99) were the least happy in comparison to those with the highest IQs (120 – 129).
People with high IQs have stronger basic perceptual skills, research finds.
For example, they can tell which way objects are moving more quickly.
They are also better at blocking out background information to make their judgement.
Imagine a ball thrown at high speed — a more intelligent person can pick up its trajectory faster.
A higher IQ makes the brain faster at a fundamental level.
It helps underline that high IQ is about more than just solving puzzles or making the ‘right’ decision.
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Four aspect of personality stands out for their connection to memory, knowledge and cognitive ability.
Four aspect of personality stands out for their connection to memory, knowledge and cognitive ability.
People who are energetic and physically active tend to perform better on a range of cognitive abilities, including information processing, memory and general knowledge, research finds.
In other words, being an active person is associated with knowing more across a wide range of subjects.
Activity is one aspect of extraversion, one of the major dimensions of personality. Other facets of extraversion include warmth, sociability, assertiveness, excitement seeking and positive emotionality.
The finding comes from a massive review examining the relationship between personality and cognitive abilities.
The researchers brought together more than 1,000 studies involving over 2 million people, covering approximately a century of research.
The study’s first author, Dr Kevin Stanek, explained that the project took more than 13 years and involved over 30 people working to locate, translate, enter and analyse more than 1,300 studies.
The review also found strong links between openness to experience and a broad range of cognitive abilities.
Of the major personality traits, openness to experience is most strongly associated with a high IQ.
People who score highly on openness tend to be curious about unfamiliar, complicated and unconventional things.
They are often interested in exploring new ideas and are more willing to entertain perspectives that differ from their own.
One reason for the connection with intelligence may be that high IQ is associated with a strong appetite for thinking and learning.
The researchers also found that industriousness and compassion were positively associated with most measures of cognitive ability.
Industriousness is a facet of conscientiousness, while compassion forms part of the broader personality trait of agreeableness.
The relationship between agreeableness and intelligence is particularly noteworthy because it is not always recognised.
Research suggests that agreeable people can also be more intelligent.
Highly intelligent people have also been found to be more trusting, as well as more straightforward and altruistic.
Study co-author Professor Deniz Ones said that understanding the relationship between personality and intelligence opens up deeper questions about why these characteristics are connected.
She argued that the findings provide a broader picture of the differences between individuals and could help people better understand their own characteristics and abilities.
Neuroticism showed a contrasting pattern, being consistently associated with lower cognitive abilities.
The trait is characterised by greater susceptibility to anxiety, sadness, irritability and self-consciousness.
People higher in neuroticism tend to perform less well on measures of logical reasoning and are also less likely to accumulate knowledge.
One possible explanation, however, is that the association partly reflects test-taking anxiety rather than differences in underlying cognitive ability, as some psychologists have suggested.
At the opposite end of neuroticism is emotional stability, which is consistently associated with higher IQ.
Emotionally stable people tend to cope better with stress and everyday frustrations.
They also generally have greater control over their impulses and are less preoccupied with how they are perceived by others.
The study was published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (Stanek et al., 2023).
Scientists tracked thousands of children and discovered that this habit offers the same cognitive benefits as a full night’s sleep.
Study of over 7,000 finds diet linked to IQ.
Study of over 7,000 finds diet linked to IQ.
People fed a healthier diet from an early age have a higher IQ, research reveals.
Children who were breastfed and later given plenty of fruits, vegetables and other healthy foods had IQs up to two points higher at age 8.
Dr Lisa Smithers, the study’s first author, said:
“Diet supplies the nutrients needed for the development of brain tissues in the first two years of life, and the aim of this study was to look at what impact diet would have on children’s IQs.
We found that children who were breastfed at six months and had a healthy diet regularly including foods such as legumes, cheese, fruit and vegetables at 15 and 24 months, had an IQ up to two points higher by age eight.
The results come from a study of over 7,000 children whose eating habits were analysed at ages 6 months, 15 months and two years.
They were followed until age 8.
Set against the benefits of healthy eating, children fed junk food had lower IQs, Dr Smithers said:
“Those children who had a diet regularly involving biscuits, chocolate, sweets, soft drinks and chips in the first two years of life had IQs up to two points lower by age eight.
We also found some negative impact on IQ from ready-prepared baby foods given at six months, but some positive associations when given at 24 months.”
Eating well is particularly important in the formative years, said Dr Smithers:
“While the differences in IQ are not huge, this study provides some of the strongest evidence to date that dietary patterns from six to 24 months have a small but significant effect on IQ at eight years of age.
It is important that we consider the longer-term impact of the foods we feed our children.”
The study was published in the European Journal of Epidemiology (Smithers et al., 2012).
These household products might be doing lasting damage to fetal development.
These household products might be doing lasting damage to fetal development.
Routine exposure to common plastics, cosmetics, and household cleaners during pregnancy is linked to lower IQ scores in children.
Mothers with higher exposure to endocrine-disrupting chemicals during their first trimester gave birth to children who scored lower on IQ tests at age seven.
The suspect chemicals include:
Both types of bisphenol — the original and the so-called ‘safer’ substitute — had the strongest link to lower IQ in children, researchers found.
Dr Eva Tanner, the study’s first author, said:
“This study is significant because most studies evaluate one chemical at a time; however, humans are exposed to many chemicals at the same time, and multiple exposures may be harmful even when each individual chemical is at a low level.”
The research included 718 mothers whose blood was tested for 26 different chemicals.
All of the chemicals are thought to disrupt the endocrine system.
This vital system regulates everything from metabolism and growth to sleep and mood.
The results showed that mothers with higher levels of endocrine-disrupting chemicals had children with lower IQs.
Boys were particularly affected, with an average of 2 points lower IQ.
Other chemicals of concern include chlorpyrifos, polyfluoroalkyl and triclosan, which are found in a wide range of consumer products.
Dr Tanner explained the suspected mechanism:
“Some of these chemicals cross the placenta during pregnancy, exposing the fetus and potentially causing irreversible developmental damage.
While ending exposure to a short-lived pollutant may eliminate adverse effects in adults, exposure during critical periods of fetal development may be permanent, with subtle endocrine changes potentially influencing health outcomes into adulthood.”
The study was published in the journal Environment International (Tanner et al., 2019).
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