Category: Intelligence

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).

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.

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).

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).

This is not something people usually associate with intelligence — but the study clearly shows a link.

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

Altruistic people are unselfish and sometimes deny themselves so that others can have more.

Intelligent people may be more generous partly because they can afford it.

People with higher IQs generally have greater resources, or can expect to recover what they have given later on.

Generosity is not something people usually associate with intelligence — but this study clearly shows a link.

The study’s authors write:

“In the first study, we found that those who contributed more than their fair share to a public good were more intelligent, as measured by two relatively independent measures of general intelligence.

In the second study, we showed that those who possess a dispositional tendency to value joint benefits more than
their own, scored higher on an intelligence test.”

For the study, 301 people played games that involved either donating to others or keeping things for themselves.

The results revealed that intelligent people were more generous to others.

People who were more egotistical — keeping more for themselves — tended to be less intelligent.

People with higher IQs were more concerned with the public good.

The authors write:

“The evidence presented supports the possibility that unconditional altruism may serve as a costly signal of general intelligence because altruism is costly and is reliably linked to the quality ‘general intelligence’.

Consistent with the finding that children’s intelligence
predicts later socio-economic success better than parents’ attributes, we assume that intelligence is an indicator of future resources.

As a consequence, someone with high cognitive skills may be able to donate more in advance than someone with lower skills.”

In other words, intelligent people can afford to be more generous because they have more to give.

The study was published in the Journal of Research in Personality (Millet & Dewitte, 2007).

People with these two traits had higher crystallised intelligence.

Being open to new experiences and more extraverted are both linked to higher intelligence, research finds.

People who are open to experience tend to have a more active imagination, higher sensitivity to beauty and more intellectual curiosity, among other things.

Open people tend to retain general information better and they are also better at storing memories in the short term.

The results come from a survey of 381 people aged 19- to 89-years-old.

They were split into different groups depending on their cognitive performance.

The type of intelligence measured in the study is known as ‘crystallised’.

This refers to the ability to use learned information and is often tested through general knowledge and vocabulary.

In a twist to the findings, though, it turned out that some adults over 60 performed as well as younger people.

Among these people, it was being disagreeable that was linked to higher IQ.

Other research has also found that people who are highly intelligent tend to be independent and aloof.

The study’s authors conclude:

“The results also suggests that there are differences in personality–intelligence relationships between those who retain a normal level of overall cognitive ability in old age and those older adults who are cognitively superior.”

The study was published in the journal Personality and individual Differences (Baker & Bichsel, 2006).

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).

Two signs of a knowledgeable personality.

Introverts who have more stable personalities have higher levels of general knowledge, research finds.

These two personality factors, along with being open to experience, predict people’s general knowledge.

General knowledge — or as psychologists call it, crystallised intelligence — is one of two broad aspects of intelligence.

General knowledge is often linked to success in life because innate talent is not enough — application matters.

The other type is called ‘fluid intelligence’, and refers to abstract reasoning and the speed at which the brain works.

The conclusions come from a survey of 201 university students in the UK.

All were given tests of the five major aspects of personality: neuroticism, extraversion, openness to experience, agreeableness and conscientiousness.

They were also asked general knowledge questions such as:

• Who discovered penicillin?
• Who wrote Anna Karenina?
• Which Beatle was shot in New York?

(The answers are: Alexander Fleming, Leo Tolstoy and John Lennon, respectively.)

The strongest predictor of people’s general knowledge was their cognitive ability.

In other words, people whose brains work faster absorb more knowledge over the years.

However, personality was also important in how much general knowledge people had picked up.

Having a stable personality (being non-neurotic) and being more introverted, were both linked to greater general knowledge.

Other studies have also consistently linked the personality trait of openness to experience to general knowledge.

People who are open to experience are more likely to be imaginative, sensitive to their feelings, intellectually curious and seekers of variety.

With increasing age, general knowledge becomes more important, the study’s authors write:

“…at more advanced stages of life, performance and achievement are best predicted by crystallized intelligence (gc), rather than the biologically-based, content-free, and so-called ‘‘culture-free’’ tests of fluid abilities (gf) (traditionally
regarded as the best measures of g).

It thus seems that the predictive power of gf tends to decline as individuals progress through the educational system, and as acquired information and learned skills play a greater role in determining job performance.”

The study was published in the journal Personality and Individual Differences (Chamorro-Premuzic et al., 2006).