Category: Intelligence

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).

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).

This test can quickly identify someone with higher IQ.

People with high IQs have stronger basic perceptual skills, research finds.

People with higher IQs find it easier to tell which way an object is moving.

They are also better at blocking out background information to make their judgement.

The reason is that the brains of people with higher IQs work faster.

It helps underline that high IQ is about more than just solving puzzles or making the ‘right’ decision.

For the study, people had to judge lines moving across a screen.

Here is an example:

The results showed that the more intelligent people were, the quicker they picked up the direction of the drifting lines.

Dr Duje Tadin, co-author of the paper, said:

“Because intelligence is such a broad construct, you can’t really track it back to one part of the brain.

But since this task is so simple and so closely linked to IQ, it may give us clues about what makes a brain more efficient, and, consequently, more intelligent.”

However, sometimes people were shown small images, sometimes large.

What this shows is that people with high IQs are better at suppressing background information.

Mr Michael Melnick, study co-author, said:

“Being ‘quick witted’ and ‘quick on the draw’ generally go hand in hand.

From previous research, we expected that all participants would be worse at detecting the movement of large images, but high IQ individuals were much, much worse.”

The study may help researchers identify the neural correlates of intelligence, said Dr Tadin:

“We know from prior research which parts of the brain are involved in visual suppression of background motion.

This new link to intelligence provides a good target for looking at what is different about the neural processing, what’s different about the neurochemistry, what’s different about the neurotransmitters of people with different IQs.”

The study was published in the journal Current Biology (Melnick et al., 2013).

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).

High intelligence is linked to holding certain attitudes, psychological research finds.

More intelligent people are less likely to be prejudiced against same-sex couples, research finds.

People of lower intelligence, though, are more likely to hold homophobic attitudes.

The conclusions come from an Australian study of 11,654 people who were given intelligence tests.

All were asked if they agreed with this statement:

“Homosexual couples should have the same rights as heterosexual couples do.”

Less intelligent people were more likely to be prejudiced on LGBT issues, the results showed.

People with low scores on the verbal ability test were particularly likely to be prejudiced.

Higher levels of education were, however, consistently linked to being less prejudiced.

Dr Francisco Perales, the study’s author, writes:

“Altogether, the findings provide clear evidence that cognitive ability is an important precursor of prejudice against same-sex couples.”

Dr Perales explained that studies have generally found that prejudice is more prevalent among people of low intelligence:

“Research conducted chiefly in the US, Canada and Western Europe reports correlations between low cognitive ability and support of prejudicial or non-egalitarian attitudes towards certain social groups (including ethnic minorities, migrants, women and people with AIDS), as well as related constructs, such as conservatism, ethnocentrism, authoritarianism,
and dogmatism.”

High IQ prejudice

Some psychologists, though, think this is not the whole story about the link between intelligence and prejudice.

A survey of 5,914  people in the US has tested prejudice against 24 different groups.

It found that both people of high and low intelligence are prejudiced — just against different groups.

People of higher intelligence showed prejudice towards groups perceived as conservative and conventional.

These included the military, Christians and big business.

Dr Mark Brandt, the study’s first author, explained:

“Whereas prior work by others found that people with low cognitive ability express more prejudice, we found that this is limited to only some target groups.

For other target groups the relationship was in the opposite direction.

For these groups, people with high levels of cognitive ability expressed more prejudice.

So, cognitive ability also does not seem to make people immune to expressing prejudice.”

The rather depressing conclusion is that most people are prejudiced against those they don’t agree with.

The studies were was published in the journals Intelligence and Social Psychological and Personality Science (Brandt & Crawford, 2016; Perales, 2018).

Thousands of people were asked how smart they wanted to be.

When asked, people choose an average IQ of around 130, research shows,

This level makes a person smart, mildly gifted even, but certainly not a genius.

In fact, people are surprisingly modest across a wide range of personal traits, when asked their ideal level.

When asked how long they’d like to live, the average is 90 years, which is only a little higher than normal life expectancy.

Even when given the option of taking a magic pill that gives eternal youth, they still only go for 120 years, on average.

Professor Matthew J. Hornsey, who led the research, said:

“Our research shows that people’s sense of perfection is surprisingly modest.

People wanted to have positive qualities, such as health and happiness, but not to the exclusion of other darker experiences — they wanted about 75% of a good thing.”

People who live in more holistic cultures — like Japan and China — were even more modest in the ideal levels they chose.

This reflects the fact that Eastern philosophies often emphasise the coexistence of good and bad.

Professor Hornsey explained:

“Interestingly, the ratings of perfection were more modest in countries that had traditions of Buddhism and Confucianism.

This makes sense — these Eastern philosophies and religions tend to place more emphasis on the notion that seemingly contradictory forces coexist in a complementary, interrelated state, such that one cannot exist without the other.”

The study’s conclusions come from 2,392 people in Australia, Chile, China, Hong Kong, India, Japan, Peru, Russia, and the United States.

The results showed that people were much more interested in being perfectly healthy than perfectly happy.

Professor Hornsey said:

“This principle of maximization is threaded through many prominent philosophical and economic theories.

But our data suggest that people have much more complex, blended notions of perfection, ones that embrace both light and dark.”

The study was published in the journal Psychological Science (Hornsey et al., 2018).