Tag: Intelligence

The Relationship Between Personality and Intelligence: A Detailed Study

The  the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS), a peer reviewed journal of the National Academy of Sciences (NAS), quantitatively synthesized 1,325 studies including millions of individuals from more than 50 countries to identify novel, considerable ties between personality traits and cognitive abilities. 


https://twitter.com/cremieuxrecueil/status/1677791286848356353

🪄Smart summary:
A recent study published in PNAS has found that intelligence is negatively related to uneven temper and anxiety, and is associated with increased interpersonally sensitivity, compassion, and managerial potential. It is also related to both factors alpha and beta, which are stability/socialization and plasticity/knowledge acquisition respectively. The study’s appendix is 440 pages.
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PNAS recently published what is hands-down the most detailed study of the relationship between measured personality and intelligence

Let’s go through it

First up: Neuroticism and the General Factor of Personality

Intelligence is negatively related to uneven temper and anxiety!



Next up: Agreeableness and Conscientiousness.

Pages: Page 1, Page 2, Page 3, Page 4, Page 5, Page 6, Page 7

The Disadvantage of Smarts

Why would being a good problem solver mean you were less good at the ordinary more instinctive behavior?

General intelligence evolved to solve evolutionarily novel problems, so intelligent people are more likely to acquire and espouse evolutionarily novel preferences and values. They are more likely to recognize and develop tastes for things that our ancestors did not have 100,000 years ago. For example, more intelligent people are more likely to be left-wing liberals because our ancestors were “conservative” by the contemporary American definition—they only cared about the well-being of their friends and family. They are more likely to be atheist because the preferred theory in evolutionary psychology is that humans are designed to believe in God.

Really?

Humans appear to be designed to be paranoid; they are designed to see intentional agents behind natural phenomena. This is because making the mistake of thinking that a natural event has an intentional agent behind it is less potentially costly than being oblivious and thinking that an intentional event, like someone trying to kill you, has a coincidental cause. The paranoid outlive the oblivious. Belief in God may be a consequence of this tendency. Intelligent people are more likely to be nocturnal because humans are designed to wake up when the sun comes up and go to sleep when the sun goes down. They are more likely to be homosexual, because humans are evolutionarily designed to reproduce heterosexually. They are more likely to enjoy instrumental music because music in its evolutionary origin was vocal, and they are more likely to consume alcohol, cigarettes and drugs because all of these substances are evolutionarily novel.

via Quick study: Satoshi Kanazawa on intelligence: The disadvantage of smarts | The Economist.

Why Smart people Are Stupid

Here’s a simple arithmetic question: A bat and ball cost a dollar and ten cents. The bat costs a dollar more than the ball. How much does the ball cost?

The vast majority of people respond quickly and confidently, insisting the ball costs ten cents. This answer is both obvious and wrong. (The correct answer is five cents for the ball and a dollar and five cents for the bat.)

A new study in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology led by Richard West at James Madison University and Keith Stanovich at the University of Toronto suggests that, in many instances, smarter people are more vulnerable to these thinking errors. Although we assume that intelligence is a buffer against bias—that’s why those with higher S.A.T. scores think they are less prone to these universal thinking mistakes—it can actually be a subtle curse.

via Research Shows That the Smarter People Are, the More Susceptible They Are to Cognitive Bias : The New Yorker.

People Aren’t Smart Enough for Democracy to Flourish, Scientists Say

The research, led by David Dunning, a psychologist at Cornell University, shows that incompetent people are inherently unable to judge the competence of other people, or the quality of those people’s ideas. For example, if people lack expertise on tax reform, it is very difficult for them to identify the candidates who are actual experts. They simply lack the mental tools needed to make meaningful judgments.

As a result, no amount of information or facts about political candidates can override the inherent inability of many voters to accurately evaluate them. On top of that, “very smart ideas are going to be hard for people to adopt, because most people don’t have the sophistication to recognize how good an idea is,” Dunning told Life’s Little Mysteries. Continue reading “People Aren’t Smart Enough for Democracy to Flourish, Scientists Say”