Category: Intelligence

An easy way to tell that you have higher intelligence.

Being a free spirit and refusing to conform with others is a sign of high IQ.

People with higher intelligence are less likely to follow the crowd, preferring to make their own decisions.

As a species, humans are remarkably open to social influence: people like to copy others, feeling that there is safety in numbers.

However, the effect can be damaging as some will deny their own senses to go along with others.

Instead, those with higher IQs only follow the crowd strategically.

For the study, 101 people were given a test that involved comparing the lengths of different lines.

They only had to decide which was longest, but not until they had been informed what other people thought.

The results clearly showed that people would deny information from their own senses to fit in with what other people thought.

In other words, many people preferred to be in the majority, rather than to be correct.

However, more intelligent people were less likely to go along with the majority.

The classic study on social influence (the Asch conformity experiment) was carried out by Professor Solomon Asch almost 70 years ago.

He found that 76% of people denied their own senses at least once to go along with others.

Often, though, social conformity is no bad thing, said Dr Michael Muthukrishna, who led the study:

“People are conformist – and that’s a good thing for cultural evolution.

By being conformist, we copy the things that are popular in the world.

And those things are often good and useful.

Our whole world is made up of things that we do that are good for us, but we don’t know why.

And we don’t need to know why.

We just need to know that most people do those things.”

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The study was published in the journal Evolution and Behavior (Muthukrishna et al., 2015).

The traits are so powerful that they are linked to intelligence when measured almost 40 years later.

Insatiable curiosity, an active fantasy life, a sensitivity to emotions and an appreciation of art and beauty are all linked to high IQ, a study finds.

High IQ may have a particularly strong link to curiosity because intelligence creates a ‘cognitive hunger’ — a desire to think.

Over the years, higher IQ drives people to keep exploring new experiences to satiate this hunger.

Curiosity, along with sensitivity to emotions, appreciation of beauty and an active fantasy life are all aspects of the major personality trait called ‘openness to experience’.

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.

The study’s authors explain their results:

“…childhood intelligence is indeed positively associated with adult trait Openness, even when it was assessed almost four decades earlier when participants were at 11 years.

Intelligence may influence the development of personality in that intelligent people develop habits to satisfy their curiosity and ‘‘cognitive hunger’’ which are an essential ingredient of Openness.”

The conclusions come from a huge study of 17,415 people born in the UK in one week in March 1958.

Over the following 50 years they were given various personality and intelligence tests.

Children with higher IQs were more open to experience because of higher motivation at school, greater support from their families and higher social status, the researchers found.

They explain how these factors fit together:

“Parents of higher socioeconomic status may foster children’s trait Openness by providing better resources such as choosing good schools and cultural environment (theaters, museums, traveling abroad, etc.); intelligent children tend to use more mental activities (such as abstract ideas, learning new
vocabularies, or math formulas) than those who are less intelligent; school settings (quality of teaching, good facilities) may enhance pupils to engage more in school learning.

All these three factors may influence educational and
occupational achievement, which in turn, may increase
the scores on Openness.”

In other words, they believe that it is a higher IQ that mainly drives the development of greater openness to experience.

The study was published in the Journal of Individual Differences (Furnham & Cheng, 2016).

The drop comes about because of subtle social signals sent between people about their place in the hierarchy.

Being in a group can make some people lose around 15 percent of their IQ.

People who tried to solve problems in a group behaved as though they were significantly less smart than their IQ scores suggested.

The drop comes about because of subtle social signals sent between people about their place in the hierarchy.

In other words, some people start to feel inferior in a group and this affects their ability to think clearly.

Professor Read Montague, who led the research, explained how it worked:

“We started with individuals who were matched for their IQ.

Yet when we placed them in small groups, ranked their performance on cognitive tasks against their peers, and broadcast those rankings to them, we saw dramatic drops in the ability of some study subjects to solve problems.

The social feedback had a significant effect.”

In the real world, social signals can be sent in more subtle ways than announcing everyone’s performance.

It could be a social hierarchy known to everyone, how people speak or even their gender.

Women are particularly vulnerable to an IQ drop from being in a group, the researchers found.

Dr Kenneth Kishida, the study’s first author, said:

“Our study highlights the unexpected and dramatic consequences even subtle social signals in group settings may have on individual cognitive functioning.

And, through neuroimaging, we were able to document the very strong neural responses that those social cues can elicit.”

Professor Montague concluded:

“You may joke about how committee meetings make you feel brain dead, but our findings suggest that they may make you act brain dead as well.”

The study was published in the journal Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B (Kishida et al., 2012).