Drawing on the ideas of Kanazawa, my suggested explanation for this association between intelligence and personality is that an increasing relative level of IQ brings with it a tendency differentially to over-use general intelligence in problem-solving, and to over-ride those instinctive and spontaneous forms of evolved behaviour which could be termed common sense. Preferential use of abstract analysis is often useful when dealing with the many evolutionary novelties to be found in modernizing societies; but is not usually useful for dealing with social and psychological problems for which humans have evolved ‘domain-specific’ adaptive behaviours. And since evolved common sense usually produces the right answers in the social domain; this implies that, when it comes to solving social problems, the most intelligent people are more likely than those of average intelligence to have novel but silly ideas, and therefore to believe and behave maladaptively.
Wednesday, October 07, 2009
In case you wondered ...
... Clever Sillies - Why the high IQ lack common sense. (Hat tip, Dave Lull.)
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
Hi Frank,
ReplyDeleteI disagree with the essential premise, that highly intelligent people will lack common sense, and we need to come to find a reason why this is so. I was just in Hanover NH, where Dartmouth College is, and where my son who has a lot of common sense is also in a PhD program. And to look around, it seems the city is a haven for high IQ people functioning quite well.
On the other hand, I recall going back to school in my 30s, and having to take Pascal, a programming language. Entering the hall area outside the classroom, where my fellow students were, I would encounter pockets of geeks talking to each other in computer lingo. You would think that geeks like this would be highly intelligent. I did each of the assignments, and was the only one who completed the final, which was to program a strategic game. So these geeks were B and C students, hanging out in the abstract world. Cool. That's what floated their boats. I cannot tell you whether they had low common sense, but they could easily be confused for highly intelligent people, by personality type, and the stereotype is just a faulty synapse away.
My point here is that even when we encounter a person who truly is highly intelligent, and who lacks common sense, we hold him or her up as a type, versus an oddity. After all, anyone, no matter how intelligent, can lack common sense. And I would hypothesize that people with low IQs lack more common sense more often. Yet, it must make people who don't score as highly as they would like to on intelligence tests, or people who were B and C students who would like to think their common sense makes them superior to those who were A students around them--it must make them feel better.
This whole question of IQ, and not having a high one, is so psychologically damaging, to think that there are people all around you who can figure things out better and faster than you, can be intimidating. It would be very soothing to such distress to have the idea that high-IQ people are missing some important way of thinking. This simply does not seem to be so, in Hanover anyway. However, I can imagine pockets of average-to-low IQ people hanging out in Hanover stereotyping the high-IQ people as probably not having too much common sense. This is a form of prejudice, as damaging as saying that blacks are lazy and Jews are cheap.
Yours,
Rus
I'm pretty much in agreement with you, Rus. I actually don;t think we can measure intelligence in til we first define it it. To define it in terms of what we think we can measure is circular. From my observation there are different kinds and degrees of intelligence. Some people can absorb large quantities. Others can absorb less but appreciate more. Still others can, as it were, run with what the both absorb and appreciate and be creative. How much any of this can be quantified is anybody's guess.
ReplyDelete