Category: Intelligence

Cognitive ability is higher in this personality type.

Laid back and unhurried people tend to have a higher IQ, psychological research finds.

Intelligent people become more laid back because they can do things quicker than others, so do not need to rush, the authors speculate.

High IQ people also have a tendency towards procrastination — perhaps because another benefit of higher intelligence is being able to start tasks later.

The study also found that higher IQs was linked to be cautious and being a perfectionist.

This may be because being a perfectionist takes longer and people with higher IQs have the patience to wait until the job is done right.

The conclusions come from a study of 722 people who were given personality and IQ tests.

The personality tests focused on conscientiousness, one of the five major traits of personality.

Different aspects of conscientiousness were examined, including being cautious, deliberate, orderly and having a tendency to procrastinate.

The results revealed a consistent link between being unhurried and having a higher IQ.

The study’s authors explain:

“The common feature of these three characteristics (procrastination, perfectionism and caution) is timing or hurriedness.

One possible interpretation of our results is that people with greater cognitive ability tend to be less hurried in their general approach to life’s activities.

This interpretation implies both positive aspects (e.g., the cautiousness involved in checking details, delaying acting, and continuing with tasks until their product is “perfect”) and negative ones (e.g., the tendency to procrastinate).”

The link between procrastination and higher IQ is down to greater abilities, the authors think:

“This suggests a slower internal pace among more intelligent people that more easily allows for interruptions or the incorporation of new information while completing a task.

This is not to imply that more intelligent people are physically slower in their tasks, as in fact they appear to be faster at most tasks.

Rather, we are suggesting that one way in which those demonstrating higher levels of cognitive ability may differ from those exhibiting lower levels of cognitive ability is a behavioral tendency to pace their work or other tasks at less than their maximum potential ability.”

The study was published in the Journal of Personality Research (Rikoon et al., 2016).

Certain personality traits and this interest are signs of high IQ.

Musical training is a fascinating sign of high IQ, a study finds.

People with musical training tend to have IQs up to 10-15 points higher than those who do not.

The reason is probably that an interest in learning music is linked to higher intelligence, as well as certain personality traits.

Children whose openness to experience is greater are more likely to be interested in music lessons.

Typically people who are open to experience tend to have more interest in beauty, new ideas and be more curious about the world.

Higher IQ is strongly linked to the personality trait of openness to experience.

People who are conscientious are also more likely to stick at their musical training, the study found.

However, the study does not support the so-called ‘Mozart effect’, the idea that listening to certain music can make you more intelligent.

Professor Glenn Schellenberg explained:

“The prevailing bias is that music training causes improvements in intelligence.

But you can’t infer causation simply because children with music training have higher IQs than children who haven’t had music training.”

The study included 167 12-year-olds and 118 young adults who were asked about their musical training and given IQ tests.

The results showed that having a higher IQ was linked to taking music lessons, but personality predicted who stuck with it.

Professor Schellenberg said:

“The differences in personality are at least as important as cognitive variables among adults, and even more important among children in predicting who is likely to take music lessons and for how long.

Much previous research may have overestimated the effects of music training and underestimated the role of pre-existing differences between children who do and do not take music lessons.

Children who take music lessons may have relatively high levels of curiosity, motivation, persistence, concentration, selective attention, self-discipline and organization.”

The study was published in the journal Frontiers in Psychology (Corrigall et al., 2013).

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).

The personality traits that are signs of high intelligence.

People whose personalities are happy, energetic and lively have higher IQs, research finds.

Higher IQ is linked to experiencing more positive emotions, enjoying complex problems, having a larger vocabulary and understanding things more quickly.

The researchers found that smarter people were less stressed when given a taxing task to do.

They were also more engaged with it.

People with higher IQs were more likely to agree with statements like:

• I am quick to understand things.
• I have a large vocabulary and enjoy being intellectually engaged.
• I enjoy tackling difficult problems.

The more people agreed with statements like these, the higher their IQ was, researchers found.

The study included 440 people who completed surveys of their happiness and IQ.

The results showed that energetic lively people had higher fluid intelligence.

The study’s authors conclude:

“The results indicated that Intellect was generally associated with lower stress (low distress and worry and high task engagement) before and after intelligence tests.”

Fluid intelligence refers to the speed at which the brain works.

It is like the raw power of an engine or the speed at which a computer can process information.

Fluid intelligence is contrasted with crystallised intelligence.

Crystallised intelligence is something like general knowledge: the information that people have learnt about the world over the years.

The reason that IQ and happiness are linked could be down to how much importance is placed on being smart in Western cultures.

The authors write:

“It is striking that Intellect was correlated with affect even in Study 1, in which there was no requirement to perform an intellectual task.

At least in Western cultures, intellect may be of sufficient importance to the self-schema that it influences general emotional functioning.”

The study was published in the journal Personality and Individual Differences (Zajenkowskia & Matthews, 2019).

The surprising traits that indicate high intelligence.

Being genuine, cooperative and sincere are all linked to having a high IQ, research finds.

Although being ‘nice’ is not linked in the popular imagination with being intelligent, this study found that it was.

The study also found that half of the connection between high IQ and being ‘nice’ was down to genetics.

Other personality features that are linked to high IQ include being a seeker of variety, intellectually curious, imaginative and sensitive to emotions.

All of these are aspects of ‘openness to experience’, which is one of the five major aspects of personality.

Openness to experience is frequently strongly linked to high IQ by studies.

The study included 2,488 people who were given tests of personality and intelligence at 12 and 18-years-old.

Genetic modelling was used to examine the links between intelligence, personality and genes.

The results were explained by the study’s authors:

“Intelligence as measured by IQ was positively associated with
openness to experience and agreeableness.

Moderate phenotypic correlations [genetic associations] between agreeableness and IQ were also of interest.

Earlier studies reported small correlations between intelligence and agreeableness.

There have been a few studies on altruistic behavior in young children that found a positive relation with IQ.”

In fact, people with high IQs are better at working well with other people, other studies have found.

That is why those with high IQs are so essential: without them society would not work.

Being cooperative, in particular, may have strong links to higher IQ, the authors write:

“…unique aspects of human cognition are driven by social cooperation.

The cooperative attitudes of the subjects scoring high on agreeableness could therefore be the shared underlying factor in the relationship with IQ.”

The study was published in the journal Personality and Individual Differences (Bartels et al., 2012).