Category: Intelligence

The statement that massively reduces a person’s IQ.

Being socially rejected massively reduces a person’s effective IQ, research finds.

People told, “you will end up alone in life” experienced drops in analytical reasoning skills of 30 percent.

Their IQs also dropped around 25 percent.

Not only does rejection lower IQ, it also makes people more aggressive, other studies have shown.

The results suggest that intelligence may have evolved primarily to facilitate social relations.

For the study, people took a personality test and some were then told (falsely) that it indicated they would end up alone in life.

Afterwards they were given an IQ test.

The study’s authors explain the results:

“In all three studies, people exhibited significant cognitive decrements after they were told that they were likely to end up alone in life.

Thus, the prospect of social exclusion reduced people’s capacity for intelligent thought.

Moreover, the decrements in intelligent performance qualified as large effects every time.”

The researchers think that people’s IQ drops because they are in distress:

“…we can best explain the pattern of cognitive decrements by proposing that social exclusion constitutes a threatening, aversive event but that people strive to suppress their emotional distress, and the resulting drain on their executive function impairs their controlled processes.”

In other words, being told they would end up alone made it harder for them to concentrate, because they were trying to suppress negative emotions.

There is an intimate link between intelligence and social relations, the authors write:

“Our results are more consistent with the view that
intelligence evolved as a means to support and facilitate social relations rather than to compensate for the absence of their advantages.

[…]

Our findings could even be taken to suggest that people responded as if being excluded from social groups removed the need for intelligent thought.”

The study was published in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology (Baumeister et al., 2002).

One common sign of high IQ is obvious in childhood.

Learning to read at an earlier stage is a sign of higher IQ, a study finds.

The better a person’s reading skills at age 7, the higher their intelligence in later life.

It may be that reading from an earlier age helps to improve IQ.

If this is true, then helping children to read sooner may boost their intelligence.

Dr Stuart J. Ritchie, the study’s first author, said:

“Since reading is an ability that can be improved, our findings have implications for reading instruction.

Early remediation of reading problems might aid not only the growth of literacy, but also more general cognitive abilities that are of critical importance across the lifespan.”

The conclusions come from a study of 1,890 twins whose IQ and reading levels were tested between the ages of 7 and 16.

Twins were included because the researchers wanted to rule out the effect of the environment and genes.

It emerged from the results that among each pair of twins, the one that began to read earlier had a higher IQ later on.

Dr Ritchie said:

“If, as our results imply, reading causally influences intelligence, the implications for educators are clear.

Children who don’t receive enough assistance in learning to read may also be missing out on the important, intelligence-boosting properties of literacy.”

Dyslexia

Dyslexia — a type of learning difficulty causing problems with reading and writing — is not a sign of low IQ.

Professor John D. E. Gabrieli, who has published research on dyslexia and IQ, said:

“We found that children who are poor readers have the same brain difficulty in processing the sounds of language whether they have a high or low IQ.

Reading difficulty is independent of other cognitive abilities.”

The study was published in the journal Child Development (Ritchie et al., 2015).

The reason people with a higher IQ also tend to be healthier could be down to their diet.

People with a higher IQ are more likely to be vegetarian, psychological research finds.

In fact, vegetarians could be up to 10% more intelligent than red meat eaters, according to some studies.

A higher IQ is also seen among those who describe themselves as vegetarian, but also eat chicken and fish.

The conclusion comes from a survey of 8,170 men and women whose IQ was tested when they were 10-years-old.

By age 30, 4.5% had become vegetarian, of these 2.5% were vegan and 33.6% said they were vegetarian, but still ate chicken and/or fish.

People with higher IQs at age 10, the analysis showed, were more likely to be vegetarians at age 30.

There was no difference between stricter vegetarians (ovo-lacto vegetarians) and those who ate some chicken and/or fish as well.

The findings could help to explain why more intelligent people are also healthier, since a vegetarian diet is better for the heart and for maintaining a healthy body mass.

Does money and class explain it?

Part of the link between IQ and vegetarianism was explained by social status and education.

In other words, people of higher social class are more likely to be intelligent and more likely to be vegetarian anyway.

Still, even when these two factors were accounted for statistically, the relationship between vegetarianism and IQ remained.

The study’s authors write:

“Might the nature of the vegetarians’ diet in this cohort have enhanced their apparently superior brain power?

Was this the mechanism that helped them to achieve the disproportionate number of higher degrees?

Benjamin Franklin and George Bernard Shaw, both ardent vegetarians, would have us believe so.

According to Shaw in an article published in The Star in 1890, “A mind of the calibre of mine cannot derive its nutriment from cows.”

The study was published in the British Medical Journal (Gale et al., 2007).

Intelligent people often value novel things and also tend to be offbeat and rebellious.

People with high IQs are more likely to consume mind-altering substances, research finds.

Whether it is alcohol, tobacco or psychoactive drugs like LSD, intelligence and drug-taking are linked.

More intelligent people are also more likely to have sampled a variety of different recreational drugs in the past.

The explanation could be that intelligent people are attracted to novelty or that they do not fear becoming addicted due to higher self-control.

Offbeat and rebellious

On top of this people with higher intelligence are more likely to be original, offbeat and rebellious, research finds.

More intelligent people have a distinct, individual style and avoid following the crowd.

Non-conformists may be more intelligent because they are less afraid to break society’s conventions.

The conclusions come from a small study that asked 46 people about their ‘need for uniqueness’ and tested their intelligence.

They were asked whether they agreed with statements like:

• “I do not always need to live by the rules and standards of society.”
• “I tend to express my opinions publicly, regardless of what others say.”
• “When a style of clothing I own becomes too commonplace, I usually quit wearing it.”

The results showed that people with higher IQs were more likely to endorse statements indicating a preference for uniqueness.

More intelligent people may be more resourceful, which explains their independence, the study’s authors write:

“…the more intelligent someone is, the less dependent this person is on the group to acquire resources.

This means that highly intelligent people can afford more non-conformist behavior because of their capacity to secure resources in isolation.

…as general intelligence increases the need to conform to group norms decreases.”

These findings fit with another study that has found that people with high IQs drink more alcohol, although they are unlikely to be heavy drinkers.

Another possibility is that more intelligent people are more likely to get bored.

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The findings for fluid intelligence — the brain’s raw speed — were different for men and women.

The brains of people with high IQ have very efficient wiring, research shows.

The brain’s ‘wiring’ or ‘white matter’ refers to the nerve fibres that transmit information between areas.

White matter is sometimes called the superhighway of the brain: it transmits signals and regulates communication.

People with more efficient white matter, the study found, had greater general knowledge.

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

Dr Erhan Genç, the study’s first author, said:

“Although we can precisely measure the general knowledge of people and this wealth of knowledge is very important for an individual’s journey through life, we currently know little about the links between general knowledge and the characteristics of the brain.”

For the study, 324 were given brain scans and asked to answer a series of general knowledge questions.

The results showed that people with more efficient structural networks in their brain got more general knowledge questions correct.

Dr Genç said:

“We assume that individual units of knowledge are dispersed throughout the entire brain in the form of pieces of information.

Efficient networking of the brain is essential in order to put together the information stored in various areas of the brain and successfully recall knowledge content.”

The findings for fluid intelligence — the brain’s raw speed — were different for men and women.

Men, it emerged, who had bigger brains tended to have higher fluid intelligence.

Women with better functional connectivity, though, had higher intelligence.

Efficient brain networking is vital for intelligence, said Dr Genç:

“We assume that more efficient networking of the brain contributes to better integration of pieces of information and thus leads to better results in a general knowledge test.”

The study was published in the European Journal of Personality (Genç et al., 2019).

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, research finds.

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).

The risk of mental illness is up to 4 times higher in those with a high IQ. Why?

Highly intelligent people are at increased risk of mental illness, according to research.

This is because the brains of intelligent people are hyperexcitable, the researchers think.

A higher IQ leads to a greater awareness of their surroundings and what is going on.

This causes the central nervous system to be more reactive, making intelligent people more ‘jumpy’.

Dr Nicole Tetreault, study co-author, said:

“A minor insult such as a clothing tag or an unnatural sound may trigger a low level, chronic stress response which then activates a hyper body response.

When the sympathetic nervous system becomes chronically activated, it finds itself in a continuous fight, flight, or freeze state that triggers a series of immune changes in both the body and the brain-altering behavior, mood, and functioning.”

The conclusions come from a survey of 3,715 members of MENSA, whose members all have high IQs (above 130).

They reported their own mood and anxiety disorders as well as other conditions such as ADHD, autism and any physiological problems.

This data was compared to the national averages for these conditions.

Ms Audrey Kinase Kolb, study’s co-author, said:

“If high intelligence was not a risk factor for these diseases and disorders, we would see a similar prevalence rate between the two groups.

However, in this study, the Mensa population had significantly higher rates across the board.

For example, just over 10% of the US has a diagnosed anxiety disorder, compared to 20% for Mensans.

For these conditions, having a high intelligence is related to having between 2 to 4 times the chance of having a diagnosis compared to the average American.”

Ms Ruth Karpinski, the study’s first author, said:

“While falling within the extreme right tail of the Bell Curve is generally touted as a ‘gift’ leading to exceptional outcomes, this is not always the case.

Those with high IQ possess unique intensities and overexcitabilities which can be at once both remarkable and disabling on many levels.”

The study was published in the journal Intelligence (Karpinski et al., 2017).