Category: Intelligence

Three ways to tell if you have a high IQ.

People who can predict the behaviour of others have higher personal intelligence, research finds.

Two other signs of high personal intelligence are self-motivation and being able to anticipate desires.

The idea of personal intelligence is broader than IQ.

It involves using intelligence to predict people’s behaviour.

Someone high in personal intelligence is able to analyse correctly their own and other people’s personalities.

People high in personal IQ know how best to deal with other people and how they will react.

Professor John Mayer, the expert on personality and intelligence who came up with the theory, said:

“Think of all the ways we read and interpret the people around us each day: We notice body language and facial expressions to estimate one another’s moods.

We draw initial guesses about personalities based on how people dress and present themselves, and we adjust how we interact with them accordingly.

We run through scenarios in our heads, trying to anticipate how others will react, in order to choose the best course in dealing with a boss, a coworker, or a partner.”

Reviewing decades of research on personality and intelligence, Professor Mayer has found it comes more naturally to some:

“We pick up on small pieces of feedback about ourselves from others, which we incorporate into a fuller and more accurate perception of ourselves.

And we make all kinds of decisions–about work-life balance, the neighborhood we live in, or who we spend our time with–based on what we think will be the best fit for our personalities.”

Professor Mayer concludes:

“People who are high in personal intelligence are able to anticipate their own desires and actions, predict the behavior of others, motivate themselves over the long term, and make better life decisions.”

→ Discover 22 more signs of intelligence.

The book is called Personal Intelligence: The Power of Personality and How It Shapes Our Lives and is published by Scientific American/Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2014.

People with higher intelligence tend to have this musical ability.

People who can learn a tune more easily have higher intelligence, research suggests.

People with higher IQs were able to learn to play “Happy Birthday” on the piano more accurately in the study.

Whether or not people believed they could improve did not seem to matter.

Instead, pure intelligence predicted how well they did, not a ‘growth mindset’.

A growth mindset is a belief that basic abilities can be improved through hard work.

Musical aptitude was the only other factor that mattered, said Mr Alexander Burgoyne, the study’s first author:

“The strongest predictor of skill acquisition was intelligence, followed by music aptitude.

By contrast, the correlation between growth mindset and piano performance was about as close to zero as possible.”

The study included 171 people who had little or no experience playing the piano.

All were given tests of their mindset and their intelligence.

They followed a video guide that taught them to play “Happy Birthday”, which contained 25 notes.

Afterwards they were rated on their performance of the simple song.

The results showed that IQ mattered most in predicting who did well.

When IQ was taken into account, even musical aptitude paled into insignificance.

Mr Burgoyne said:

“The results were surprising, because people have claimed that mindset plays an important role when students are confronted with challenges, like trying to learn a new musical instrument.

And yet, it didn’t predict skill acquisition.”

There were also some interesting patterns in the results:

• Some learned quickly within six minutes.
• Some were poor at first, but soon improved.
• Some faded away as they lost motivation.
• The rest could not work it out at all.

Mr Burgoyne said:

“Our study examined one of the earliest stages of skill acquisition.

Early experiences can be formative, but I would caution against drawing conclusions about skilled musicians based on our study of beginners.”

The study was published in the journal Intelligence (Burgoyne et al., 2019).

These qualities are not usually associated with intelligence.

Highly intelligent people are more likely to be trusting and generous, research finds.

Trusting people tend to believe that others are honest and will not harm them.

Intelligent people are able to override the perfectly natural worry that other people will betray them.

While being trusting is not something people usually associate with intelligence — this research clearly shows a link.

The reason for the link may be that human intelligence has evolved to be trusting as it helps society function.

For the study, 80 people played an economic game that tested how trusting they were.

They were also given a test of their ‘cognitive reflection’.

Cognitive reflection measures people’s ability to override a quick, obvious response that turns out to be wrong in order to get the right answer.

Here are two of the tests of cognitive reflection used in the study:

• If it takes 5 machines 5 minutes to make 5 widgets, how long will it take 100 machines to make 100 widgets?
• In a lake, there is a patch of lily pads. Every day, the patch doubles in size. If it takes 48 days for the patch to cover the entire lake, how long would it take for the patch to cover half of the lake?

The answers are at the bottom of the article.

More trusting

The research also showed that smarter people behaved in a more trusting way towards others.

The study’s authors write:

“It is not hard to imagine that the ability to trust is largely beneficial in a society where survival and prosperity crucially hinge upon the capacity to exchange with counterparts with various degrees of familiarity.

All such transaction […] require an important element of trust.”

In other words, society gets on better if people trust each other.

The study’s authors write:

“…trust has been shown to impact economic variables such as growth and financial development as well as entrepreneurship and trade.

In sum, trust is seen as the lubricant that facilitates exchange in society so its relevance cannot be overstated.”

The answers are…

The answers are 5 minutes to the first problem and 47 days to the second.

If you didn’t get this, remember the test is designed to make you think a little longer and harder.

The study was published in the Journal of Behavioral and Experimental Economics (Corgnet et al., 2015).

This bold and confident sign is linked to higher academic achievement.

People who are very sure of their intellectual abilities are, in fact, smarter than others, research finds.

Intellectual arrogance was linked to achieving higher grades in the study.

People who are intellectually arrogant tend to agree with statements like, “I believe my own ideas are superior to others.”

People are seen as intellectually arrogant by others when they are extraverted and dominate the group, wanting to be the centre of attention.

Professor Wade C. Rowatt, study co-author, said:

“One possibility is that people who view themselves as intellectually arrogant know what they know and that translates to increases in academic performance.”

For the study, the work of 103 students was followed over a semester.

The results showed that those who felt they were superior to others performed better in their coursework.

However, people who were more humble about their abilities were liked better by their peers.

So, intellectual arrogance may come with a penalty to social relationships.

The study’s authors were surprised by the results: they had predicted that intellectual humility would be linked to better performance.

However, this was not the case.

Dr Benjamin R. Meagher, the study’s first author, still thinks humility is a vital trait:

“What I think is important about intellectual humility is its necessity for not only science, but for just learning generally — and that applies to the classroom, a work setting, wherever.

Learning something new requires first acknowledging your own ignorance and being willing to make your ignorance known to others.

People clearly differ in terms of their willingness to do something like that, but that willingness to learn, change one’s mind and value the opinion of others is really needed if people and groups are going to develop and grow.”

The study was published in the Journal of Research in Personality (Meagher et al., 2015).

People with this personality type have higher crystallised intelligence.

Being open to experience is a sign of high intelligence, research reveals.

People who are open to experience are more interested in things that are complex, new and unconventional.

They are sensitive to their feelings, intellectually curious and seekers of variety.

Curiosity and an appreciation of beauty are particularly strong signs of crystallised intelligence, the study found.

Crystallised intelligence roughly equates to general knowledge: knowing many things about the world.

It is natural that people who are curious and interested in new things tend to pick up more general information.

The conclusions come from a study of around 500 people who were given tests of intelligence and personality.

Openness to experience is one of the five major aspects of personality.

Openness also has a number of facets of its own, the study authors explain:

“The Openness to Experience construct involves the tendency to fantasize (Fantasy), aesthetic sensitivity (Aesthetics), awareness of one’s emotions (Feelings), preference for novelty (Actions), intellectual curiosity (Ideas), and preference for non-traditional values (Values).”

The results revealed that more intelligent people were particularly appreciative of beauty: they had a strong aesthetic sense.

They were also likely to be intellectually curious and to have an interest in ideas for their own sake.

These two facets of openness were most strongly linked to higher crystallised intelligence.

The study was published in the Journal of Research in Personality (Ashton et al., 2000).

People with high intelligence tend to have this quality.

Being nice is a sign that your IQ is high, research reveals.

Highly intelligent people are better at cooperating and are more generous to others.

Smart people are almost three times as generous as those with lower cognitive abilities, the study found.

The reason may be that smarter people are more patient — a quality that is critical for cooperation.

More patience allows people to step back from the situation and exert self-control.

The study involved hundreds of people given a test of a type of intelligence call ‘cognitive reflection’.

This measures people’s ability to override a quick, obvious response that turns out to be wrong in order to get the right answer.

Here are two of the tests of cognitive reflection used in the study:

• If it takes 5 machines 5 minutes to make 5 widgets, how long will it take 100 machines to make 100 widgets?
• In a lake, there is a patch of lily pads. Every day, the patch doubles in size. If it takes 48 days for the patch to cover the entire lake, how long would it take for the patch to cover half of the lake?

The answers are at the bottom of the article.

Clever people are more patient at searching out the real answer, it emerges.

Subsequently, people who did better in this test were also up to three times more generous in a game that tested people’s generosity.

The reason could be that people with intelligence have more patience, the study’s author, Dr Lohse writes:

“Subjects with higher cognitive abilities have been shown to be more patient and to be able to exert higher levels of self-control.

[…]

Martinsson et al. (2014) demonstrate that subjects with higher self-control capabilities cooperate more.

Similarly, Fehr and Leibbrandt (2011) show that more patient subjects in the lab cooperate more in the field.”

The answers are…

The answers are 5 minutes to the first problem and 47 days to the second.

If you didn’t get this, remember the test is designed to make you think a little longer and harder.

The study was published in the Journal of Behavioral and Experimental Economics (Lohse, 2016).