Like You Know Whatever Lisa Simpson

The surprising downsides of existence clever

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Can high intelligence be a burden rather than a benefaction? David Robson investigates.

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If ignorance is elation, does a high IQ equal misery? Popular stance would have it then. Nosotros tend to call back of geniuses as existence plagued past existential malaise, frustration, and loneliness. Recall of Virginia Woolf, Alan Turing, or Lisa Simpson – alone stars, isolated even equally they burn their brightest. As Ernest Hemingway wrote: "Happiness in intelligent people is the rarest affair I know."

The question may seem similar a trivial thing concerning a select few – but the insights it offers could have ramifications for many. Much of our education organisation is aimed at improving academic intelligence; although its limits are well known, IQ is still the principal fashion of measuring cognitive abilities, and nosotros spend millions on brain preparation and cognitive enhancers that endeavour to better those scores. But what if the quest for genius is itself a fool'due south errand?

Anxiety can be common among the highly intelligent (Credit: Thinkstock)

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 State of war I 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 beingness studied to this 24-hour interval.

Equally you might wait, many of the Termites did achieve wealth and fame – most notably Jess Oppenheimer, the writer of the archetype 1950s sitcom I Honey 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 grouping met Terman's expectations – there were many who pursued more "apprehensive" professions such as law 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 equally the national average.

It's lonely beingness smart (Credit: Thinkstock)

Equally 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 nifty intellect makes no differences to your life satisfaction; at worst, information technology tin can actually mean you are less fulfilled.

That's non to say that everyone with a high IQ is a tortured genius, equally pop culture might suggest – but it is nevertheless puzzling. Why don't the benefits of sharper intelligence pay off in the long term?

A weighty brunt

Ane possibility is that cognition of your talents becomes something of a brawl and chain. Indeed, during the 1990s, the surviving Termites were asked to await dorsum 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 alive up to their youthful expectations.

Early on achievers don't always go on to exist successful (Credit: Thinkstock)

That sense of burden – especially when combined with others' expectations – is a recurring motif for many other gifted children. The most notable, and distressing, case concerns the maths prodigy Sufiah Yusof. Enrolled at Oxford University aged 12, she dropped out of her course earlier taking her finals and started waitressing. She afterwards worked as a telephone call girl.

Another common complaint, oft heard in student bars and net forums, is that smarter people somehow have a clearer vision of the globe's failings. Whereas the remainder of the states are blinkered from existential angst, smarter people lay awake agonising over the homo status or other people's folly.

Constant worrying may, in fact, exist a sign of intelligence – but non in the way these armchair philosophers had imagined. Interviewing students on campus almost various topics of discussion, Alexander Penney at MacEwan University in Canada constitute that those with the higher IQ did indeed feel more anxiety throughout the mean solar day. Interestingly, nearly worries were mundane, day-to-day concerns, though; the high-IQ students were far more probable to be replaying an awkward chat, than asking the "big questions". "Information technology's not that their worries were more than profound, but they are just worrying more often about more things," says Penney. "If something negative happened, they thought near it more than."

Probing more securely, 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 chance of anxiety). He speculates that greater eloquence might also brand you more probable to verbalise anxieties and ruminate over them. It's not necessarily a disadvantage, though. "Maybe they were trouble-solving a bit more than well-nigh people," he says – which might aid them to learn from their mistakes.

Mental bullheaded spots

The harsh truth, nonetheless, is that greater intelligence does not equate to wiser decisions; in fact, in some cases information technology might brand your choices a little more foolish. Keith Stanovich at the University of Toronto has spent the last decade edifice tests for rationality, and he has found that fair, unbiased decision-making is largely independent of IQ. Consider the "my-side bias" – our trend to be highly selective in the information we collect and so that information technology reinforces our previous attitudes. The more than aware approach would be to leave your assumptions at the door as yous build your argument – but Stanovich found that smarter people are virtually no more probable to do and then than people with distinctly average IQs.

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

A trend 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 every bit likely to max out their credit card.

Indeed, Stanovich sees these biases in every strata of lodge. "At that place is enough 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 average intelligence and education." Clearly, clever people can exist dangerously, and foolishly, misguided.

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

And so if intelligence doesn't lead to rational decisions and a improve life, what does? Igor Grossmann, at the University of Waterloo in Canada, thinks we need to plough our minds to an age-former concept: "wisdom". His approach is more than scientific that it might at first audio. "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 concord it's the thought of someone who can make good unbiased judgement."

In ane experiment, Grossmann presented his volunteers with dissimilar social dilemmas – ranging from what to do about the war in Crimea to heartfelt crises disclosed to Love Abby, the Washington Post's desperation aunt. As the volunteers talked, a console of psychologists judged their reasoning and weakness to bias: whether it was a rounded statement, whether the candidates were set up 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 anxiety and rumination – all the qualities that seem to exist absent in classically smart people. Wiser reasoning even seemed to ensure a longer life – those with the higher scores were less likely to dice over intervening years. Crucially, Grossmann institute that IQ was not related to whatever 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 – only may do it in a very biased fashion."

Learnt wisdom

In the time to come, employers may well begin to offset 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 non ready in stone – any your IQ score. "I'thousand a strong believer that wisdom can be trained," says Grossmann. He points out that we often detect information technology easier to exit our biases behind when nosotros 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 inquiry will suggest many similar tricks.

The challenge will be getting people to admit their ain foibles. If you've been able to residual on the laurels of your intelligence all your life, it could be very difficult to accept that it has been blinding your judgement. As Socrates had it: the wisest person really may be the 1 who can acknowledge he knows nada.

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

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