If ignorance is bliss, does a high IQ equal misery? Popular opinion would have it
so. We tend to think of geniuses as being plagued by existential angst,
frustration, and loneliness. Think of Virginia Woolf, Alan Turing, or Lisa Simpson
– lone stars, isolated even as they burn their brightest. As Ernest Hemingway
wrote: “Happiness in intelligent people is the rarest thing I know.”
The question may seem like a trivial matter concerning a select few – but the
insights it offers could have ramifications for many. Much of our education
system is aimed at improving academic intelligence; although its limits are well
known, IQ is still the primary way of measuring cognitive abilities, and we
spend millions on brain training and cognitive enhancers that try to improve
those scores. But what if the quest for genius is itself a fool’s errand?
The first steps to answering these questions were taken almost a century ago,
at the height of the American Jazz Age. At the time, the new-fangled IQ test
was gaining traction, after proving itself in World War One recruitment centres,
and in 1926, psychologist Lewis Terman decided to use it to identify and study
a group of gifted children. Combing California’s schools for the creme de la
creme, he selected 1,500 pupils with an IQ of 140 or more – 80 of whom had
IQs above 170. Together, they became known as the “Termites”, and the highs
and lows of their lives are still being studied to this day.
As you might expect, many of the Termites did achieve wealth and fame – most
notably Jess Oppenheimer, the writer of the classic 1950s sitcom I Love Lucy .
Indeed, by the time his series aired on CBS, the Termites’ average salary was
twice that of the average white-collar job . But not all the group met Terman’s
expectations – there were many who pursued more “humble” professions such
as police officers, seafarers, and typists. For this reason, Terman concluded
that “intellect and achievement are far from perfectly correlated”. Nor did their
smarts endow personal happiness. Over the course of their lives, levels of
divorce, alcoholism and suicide were about the same as the national average.
As the Termites enter their dotage, the moral of their story – that intelligence
does not equate to a better life – has been told again and again. At best, a
great intellect makes no differences to your life satisfaction; at worst, it can
actually mean you are less fulfilled.
That’s not to say that everyone with a high IQ is a tortured genius, as popular
culture might suggest – but it is nevertheless puzzling. Why don’t the benefits
of sharper intelligence pay off in the long term?
A weighty burden
One possibility is that knowledge of your talents becomes something of a ball
and chain. Indeed, during the 1990s, the surviving Termites were asked to look
back at the events in their 80-year lifespan. Rather than basking in their
successes, many reported that they had been plagued by the sense that they
had somehow failed to live up to their youthful expectations .
That sense of burden – particularly when combined with others’ expectations –
is a recurring motif for many other gifted children. The most notable, and sad,
case concerns the maths prodigy Sufiah Yusof. Enrolled at Oxford University
aged 12, she dropped out of her course before taking her finals and started
waitressing. She later worked as a call girl, entertaining clients with her ability
to recite equations during sexual acts.
Another common complaint, often heard in student bars and internet forums , is
that smarter people somehow have a clearer vision of the world’s failings.
Whereas the rest of us are blinkered from existential angst, smarter people lay
awake agonising over the human condition or other people’s folly.
Constant worrying may, in fact, be a sign of intelligence – but not in the way
these armchair philosophers had imagined. Interviewing students on campus
about various topics of discussion, Alexander Penney at MacEwan University in
Canada found that those with the higher IQ did indeed feel more anxiety
throughout the day. Interestingly, most worries were mundane, day-to-day
concerns, though; the high-IQ students were far more likely to be replaying an
awkward conversation, than asking the “big questions”. “It’s not that their
worries were more profound, but they are just worrying more often about more
things,” says Penney. “If something negative happened, they thought about it
more.”
Probing more deeply, Penney found that this seemed to correlate with verbal
intelligence – the kind tested by word games in IQ tests, compared to prowess
at spatial puzzles (which, in fact, seemed to reduce the risk of anxiety). He
speculates that greater eloquence might also make you more likely to verbalise
anxieties and ruminate over them. It’s not necessarily a disadvantage, though.
“Maybe they were problem-solving a bit more than most people,” he says –
which might help them to learn from their mistakes.
Mental blind spots
The harsh truth, however, is that greater intelligence does not equate to wiser
decisions; in fact, in some cases it might make your choices a little more
foolish. Keith Stanovich at the University of Toronto has spent the last decade
building tests for rationality, and he has found that fair, unbiased decision-
making is largely independent of IQ. Consider the “my-side bias” – our
tendency to be highly selective in the information we collect so that it reinforces
our previous attitudes. The more enlightened approach would be to leave your
assumptions at the door as you build your argument – but Stanovich found
that smarter people are almost no more likely to do so than people with
distinctly average IQs.
That’s not all. People who ace standard cognitive tests are in fact slightly more
likely to have a “bias blind spot”. That is, they are less able to see their own
flaws, even when though they are quite capable of criticising the foibles of
others. And they have a greater tendency to fall for the “gambler’s fallacy” –
the idea that if a tossed coin turns heads 10 times, it will be more likely to fall
tails on the 11th. The fallacy has been the ruination of roulette players planning
for a red after a string of blacks, and it can also lead stock investors to sell
their shares before they reach peak value – in the belief that their luck has to
run out sooner or later.
A tendency to rely on gut instincts rather than rational thought might also
explain why a surprisingly high number of Mensa members believe in the
paranormal; or why someone with an IQ of 140 is about twice as likely to max
out their credit card .
Indeed, Stanovich sees these biases in every strata of society. “There is plenty
of dysrationalia – people doing irrational things despite more than adequate
intelligence – in our world today,” he says. “The people pushing the anti-
vaccination meme on parents and spreading misinformation on websites are
generally of more than average intelligence and education.” Clearly, clever
people can be dangerously, and foolishly, misguided.
So if intelligence doesn’t lead to rational decisions and a better life, what does?
Igor Grossmann, at the University of Waterloo in Canada, thinks we need to turn
our minds to an age-old concept: “wisdom”. His approach is more scientific
that it might at first sound. “The concept of wisdom has an ethereal quality to
it,” he admits. “But if you look at the lay definition of wisdom, many people
would agree it’s the idea of someone who can make good unbiased judgement.”
In one experiment, Grossmann presented his volunteers with different social
dilemmas – ranging from what to do about the war in Crimea to heartfelt crises
disclosed to Dear Abby , the Washington Post’s agony aunt. As the volunteers
talked, a panel of psychologists judged their reasoning and weakness to bias:
whether it was a rounded argument, whether the candidates were ready to
admit the limits of their knowledge – their “intellectual humility” – and whether
they were ignoring important details that didn’t fit their theory.
High scores turned out to predict greater life satisfaction, relationship quality,
and, crucially, reduced anxiety and rumination – all the qualities that seem to
be absent in classically smart people. Wiser reasoning even seemed to ensure a
longer life – those with the higher scores were less likely to die over intervening
years. Crucially, Grossmann found that IQ was not related to any of these
measures, and certainly didn’t predict greater wisdom. “People who are very
sharp may generate, very quickly, arguments [for] why their claims are the
correct ones – but may do it in a very biased fashion.”
Learnt wisdom
In the future, employers may well begin to start testing these abilities in place
of IQ; Google has already announced that it plans to screen candidates for
qualities like intellectual humility , rather than sheer cognitive prowess.
Fortunately, wisdom is probably not set in stone – whatever your IQ score. “I’m
a strong believer that wisdom can be trained,” says Grossmann. He points out
that we often find it easier to leave our biases behind when we consider other
people, rather than ourselves. Along these lines, he has found that simply
talking through your problems in the third person ( “he” or “she”, rather than
“I ”) helps create the necessary emotional distance, reducing your prejudices and
leading to wiser arguments. Hopefully, more research will suggest many similar
tricks.
The challenge will be getting people to admit their own foibles. If you’ve been
able to rest on the laurels of your intelligence all your life, it could be very hard
to accept that it has been blinding your judgement. As Socrates had it: the
wisest person really may be the one who can admit he knows nothing.

God bless the dude that invented copy and paste.

Lemme comment B4 I read.....just incase dis hits front page

Long post though. I know how it feels,just 20 and ady out of uni