If Things Didnt End Bad Will He Most Likely Contact You Again

The surprising downsides of existence clever

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Tin can high intelligence be a burden rather than a boon? David Robson investigates.

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If ignorance is bliss, does a high IQ equal misery? Popular opinion would have it so. Nosotros tend to call up of geniuses as existence plagued by existential angst, frustration, and loneliness. Think of Virginia Woolf, Alan Turing, or Lisa Simpson – lone stars, isolated fifty-fifty every bit they burn their brightest. As Ernest Hemingway wrote: "Happiness in intelligent people is the rarest affair I know."

The question may seem like a trivial matter concerning a select few – but the insights information technology offers could have ramifications for many. Much of our teaching system is aimed at improving academic intelligence; although its limits are well known, IQ is notwithstanding the primary manner 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'south errand?

Anxiety can exist common amidst the highly intelligent (Credit: Thinkstock)

The showtime steps to answering these questions were taken nearly 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 State of war One recruitment centres, and in 1926, psychologist Lewis Terman decided to use information technology to place 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 yet being studied to this day.

As you lot might expect, many of the Termites did reach wealth and fame – most notably Jess Oppenheimer, the author of the classic 1950s sitcom I Love Lucy. Indeed, by the fourth dimension his series aired on CBS, the Termites' average salary was twice that of the boilerplate white-collar task. Simply not all the group met Terman'due south expectations – there were many who pursued more than "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 class of their lives, levels of divorce, alcoholism and suicide were about the same as the national average.

It'south solitary being smart (Credit: Thinkstock)

Every bit 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 peachy intellect makes no differences to your life satisfaction; at worst, information technology can actually mean you lot are less fulfilled.

That's non to say that anybody with a high IQ is a tortured genius, as popular culture might suggest – merely information technology is nevertheless puzzling. Why don't the benefits of sharper intelligence pay off in the long term?

A weighty burden

I possibility is that knowledge of your talents becomes something of a brawl and concatenation. Indeed, during the 1990s, the surviving Termites were asked to look dorsum at the events in their fourscore-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.

Early on achievers don't always continue to be successful (Credit: Thinkstock)

That sense of brunt – particularly when combined with others' expectations – is a recurring motif for many other gifted children. The almost notable, and sad, example concerns the maths prodigy Sufiah Yusof. Enrolled at Oxford University anile 12, she dropped out of her course before taking her finals and started waitressing. She later worked as a call girl.

Another common complaint, frequently heard in student bars and internet forums, is that smarter people somehow have a clearer vision of the globe'due south failings. Whereas the residue 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 than feet throughout the 24-hour interval. 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'due south 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 information technology more than."

Probing more deeply, Penney establish that this seemed to correlate with verbal intelligence – the kind tested by discussion 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 non necessarily a disadvantage, though. "Maybe they were problem-solving a bit more than well-nigh people," he says – which might help them to larn from their mistakes.

Mental blind spots

The harsh truth, withal, is that greater intelligence does non equate to wiser decisions; in fact, in some cases information technology 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 establish that off-white, unbiased conclusion-making is largely independent of IQ. Consider the "my-side bias" – our tendency to be highly selective in the data we collect so that it reinforces our previous attitudes. The more than enlightened approach would be to leave your assumptions at the door as you lot build your argument – but Stanovich found that smarter people are almost no more than probable to do and then than people with distinctly average IQs.

Members of high IQ society Mensa are not immune to belief in the paranormal (Credit: Thinkstock)

A tendency to rely on gut instincts rather than rational thought might also explicate why a surprisingly high number of Mensa members believe in the paranormal; or why someone with an IQ of 140 is about twice equally probable to max out their credit carte du jour.

Indeed, Stanovich sees these biases in every strata of social club. "At that place is plenty of dysrationalia – people doing irrational things despite more than acceptable 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 than average intelligence and teaching." Clearly, clever people can exist dangerously, and heedlessly, misguided.

People with an IQ above 140 are twice every bit likely to overspend on their credit card (Credit: Thinkstock)

So if intelligence doesn't pb 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. "Only if you look at the lay definition of wisdom, many people would concord it's the idea of someone who tin can make practiced unbiased sentence."

In one experiment, Grossmann presented his volunteers with different social dilemmas – ranging from what to practise nigh the state of war in Crimea to heartfelt crises disclosed to Dearest Abby, the Washington Post's agony aunt. As the volunteers talked, a console of psychologists judged their reasoning and weakness to bias: whether it was a rounded argument, whether the candidates were set to admit the limits of their knowledge – their "intellectual humility" – and whether they were ignoring important details that didn't fit their theory.

High achievers tend to lament opportunities missed in their lives (Credit: Thinkstock)

High scores turned out to predict greater life satisfaction, relationship quality, and, crucially, reduced feet and rumination – all the qualities that seem to be absent in classically smart people. Wiser reasoning fifty-fifty seemed to ensure a longer life – those with the higher scores were less probable to die over intervening years. Crucially, Grossmann establish 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 brainstorm 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'one thousand a strong believer that wisdom can be trained," says Grossmann. He points out that we oft find it easier to leave our biases behind when we consider other people, rather than ourselves. Forth 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 than inquiry 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 sentence. As Socrates had information technology: the wisest person really may exist the one who can acknowledge he knows nothing.

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Source: https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20150413-the-downsides-of-being-clever

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