The Psychology of Intelligence

Sonja Falck

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2020
• eBook ISBN: 9781000196900
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Psychology
• Subtopic: Cognitive Psychology & Cognition
• Index: Psychology

What fascinates us about intelligence? How does intelligence impact our daily lives? Why do we sometimes fear intelligence?

Human intelligence is a vital resource, yet the study of it is pervaded by neglect and misconceptions. The Psychology of Intelligence helps make sense of the contradictory social attitudes and practices in relation to intelligence that we have seen over the decades, from the idea that it drove eugenicist policies and actions in the past, to our current backlash against "experts" and critical thinking. Showing how our approach to intelligence impacts our everyday lives in educational, occupational, medical, and legal settings, the book asks if it is possible to lift the taboo and move beyond the prejudices surrounding intelligence.

Challenging popular assumptions, The Psychology of Intelligence encourages us to face intelligence in ourselves and others as an important fact of life that we can all benefit from embracing more openly.

1

Intelligence in our daily lives

It was time for the weekly session of one of my regular clients, Ida (for confidentiality that’s not her real name). Ida walked into my consulting room looking like she was preparing herself to raise something difficult with me. She lay down on the couch, took a deep breath, and said: “There’s something I’ve been avoiding with you. I am avoiding intelligence. And I’ve bought your book Extreme Intelligence, but I’m avoiding reading it. Because I realise I am afraid of intelligence”. She went on to tell me a heart-breaking story of an experience she had as a child that has ever since determined the way she feels about her own intelligence and intelligence in others, as well as how she reacts to – or avoids – the subject.

Ida had a chaotic upbringing and suffered serious neglect in a home where there was alcoholism and abuse. No-one was paying any attention to what a struggle it was for her to survive. Unable to hold it all together, she often ran away from school. However, there was one subject – biology – that she lived for. She loved it and would get absolutely absorbed in reading about it. One day the biology teacher pulled her aside and said to her “I don’t know why you’re spending all this time doing all that reading. There’s no point, because all you’re ever going to be is a social dropout”.

In Ida’s school, as is typical, academic interest and achievement were associated with intelligence. She admired this teacher’s mastery of his subject as a sign of his intelligence, but experienced him as using it against her, to reject her. His declaration of academic involvement as something irrelevant for her left her feeling that intelligence was something possessed by and recognised in others, but absent in herself, and that others’ intelligence was something she could be hurt by.

I have started with Ida’s story as an example of how feeling positively or negatively about intelligence comes to be shaped, beginning in our childhoods. Each of us, if we take a moment to think about it, has a story of our own about how experiences we had while growing up have affected our views and attitudes towards intelligence. Our experiences could have left us feeling that we are overall pretty stupid, or overall pretty smart. That self-concept then moulds our assumptions about how others see us and what they expect of us, as well as what we expect we are ourselves capable of.¹ This in turn impacts how we behave, affecting what tasks we take on or avoid. This chapter focuses on how we feel about intelligence, how intelligence makes us feel about ourselves and each other, and how intelligence manifests in our daily lives. It also begins to explore what might constitute “stupid” or “smart”.

Intelligence everywhere

Intelligence is a subject that affects every single one of us. We will examine over the course of this book how ideas, prejudices, and assumptions about intelligence underlie the way our educational systems are constructed, the way our businesses are conducted, and the way we treat each other. If we are impressed by something someone does, we often call it intelligent. Negative violations of behaviour expectations – in other words, someone doing something we don’t like – we call stupid.² And we are always assessing – often unconsciously, and often instantaneously – what we consider the level of intelligence to be of the people we encounter.

We are actually quite good at such assessments. Research has shown that there is a significant correlation – and much higher than by chance – between people’s measured intelligence and what others perceive their level of intelligence to be based on what their faces look like³ and how they behave, including language use⁴ and nonverbal behaviour.⁵ For example, the stable facial features that are associated with intelligence include face height, interpupillary distance, and nose size: taller faces, wider-set eyes, and larger noses are perceived as more intelligent.⁶ Transitory facial cues – meaning those that can be affected by, for example, tiredness – that are associated with intelligence include eyelid openness and mouth curvature: more open eyes and slightly upturned corners of the mouth are perceived as more intelligent.⁷

In terms of behaviour, people are perceived as being more intelligent the more upright their body posture is, the more responsive they are to a conversational partner, the more they hold eye gaze while they are listening to someone and while they are speaking, the clearer and faster their speech is, and the more they use hand gestures while talking.⁸ Fidgeting prompts others to form a lower estimation of your intelligence.⁹ In summary it is behaviours that are engaged, attentive, and watchful that are perceived as intelligent.

These kinds of evaluations that we all make have a considerable impact in social situations. Seeking similarity in intelligence is a significant element involved in how we choose friends and lovers: research has confirmed that regardless of sex, race, and other variables, children create best-friend pairs by bonding with peers who are strongly correlated in intelligence.¹⁰ This has also been shown to be true of romantic partners, where people choose mates based more on similarity in intelligence than in personality or physical traits.¹¹ Different sources have suggested that in personal and professional relationships there is a “zone of tolerance” between people of about 20 IQ points¹², and that a difference in IQ of greater than 30 points presents a prohibitive communication barrier.¹³

In recruitment settings, job interviewers make judgments about candidates’ intelligence which can then bias their hiring decisions.¹⁴ When we choose business leaders, we prefer individuals whom we see as being more intelligent.¹⁵ In organisational contexts, respective levels of intelligence between leaders and followers influence whether a leader succeeds: it is that same discrepancy in IQ of greater than 30 points between a leader and his or her followers that has been shown to cause leadership failure.¹⁶

From these findings a key realisation emerges: intelligence is something that people are always noticing and looking out for in each other, even if they do not explicitly think about or talk about how they are doing this. From this it is also apparent that intelligence is treated as a trait that exists in individuals, and in varying levels in various individuals, and that the principle of compatibility is important: personal and professional relationships are more successful where levels of intelligence are matched between individuals. The successful carrying out of tasks is another area where a matching of intelligence is necessary – in this case, the matching of intelligence to the demands of the task.

Using intelligence in daily life: matching intelligence to task

The matching of intelligence to task might again be something that is often not consciously thought about, or not outside of formal selection procedures in educational or occupational contexts. But there are dozens of daily activities where different levels of intelligence are required and where people self-select to take on or avoid a task according to what they find a comfortable cognitive match. For example, in London, this is apparent in the options that are available in several supermarkets for how to conduct and pay for your shopping. (Although it must be remembered that what tasks any given person chooses to take on or avoid at any given time is not just about level of actual cognitive capability. This is affected by several other factors, including self-concept – as described previously – and motivation, as well as the energy a person has for exerting themselves. However, the next paragraphs refer to the use of everyday technologies, and research has shown that ease of use of everyday technologies is related to cognitive capability, with people who have cognitive impairments struggling to use such technologies.¹⁷)

The traditional, and also the intellectually simplest, way of carrying out your shopping, is to fill your shopping basket then queue up at a check-out till that is operated by a cashier. You pass your items to that person, who logs them through the till. He or she then tells you how much to pay and takes your payment and processes it for you. Here you don’t have to do any thinking for yourself, and you have someone else’s help all the way through the task.

A relatively recent development, one which demands more cognitive exertion, is the alternative where you fill your basket and then take it to a self-check-out till. There you scan all the items yourself and also process the payment yourself. This method of payment requires being able to self-navigate the technology involved, initiate the steps needed, and complete them correctly in the correct sequence.

An even more recent development, which is the most intellectually demanding of all, is the option where, every time you take an item off the shelf, you use your own smart phone to scan the item before packing it into your basket. (Or, with this option you can pack the items directly into your shopping bag.) At the end of such a shop you have to use a different functionality at the self-check-out till, which involves scanning your phone against the machine and completing that transaction correctly together with the processing of the payment.

This last method has the advantages for shoppers of providing the greatest independence and vastly reducing the time spent at check-out tills. And it has the advantages to supermarkets of lowering costs by reducing the number of staff members and check-out tills that they need to supply. However, it is also the method that is least frequently used. In a general population it will always be the smallest number of people who will voluntarily choose to take on tasks that involve the highest level of independence and complexity, and this generally corresponds with distribution of intelligence within a population (see the bell curve explained in the next chapter). Greater intelligence is required in order to learn and master more complex tasks.

Given varying levels of intelligence within a society, there always has to be provision of different methods or routes for achieving basic necessary tasks such as the weekly undertaking of food shopping. There also have to be ways of identifying which individuals will be suitable for carrying out necessary societal functions of varying complexity. For example, one simple and low-risk – and essential – task is the weekly removal of garbage from households. One complex and high-risk task is the safe piloting of very high-expense, high-powered, and high-speed aircraft that have the responsibility for hundreds of lives, whether as commercial passenger jets or as war-time fighter planes. Finding some way of assessing intelligence therefore becomes a key element of formal selection procedures in educational and occupational settings that seek to make appropriate matches between cognitive capability and task. And the adept accomplishment of the most complex of tasks, together with the securing of positions in society that involve carrying out such tasks effectively, typically attracts fascination and prestige precisely because it is a minority of people who manage to achieve such feats.

Our fascination with intelligence

Alcatraz is probably the most famous “super-maximum security”¹⁸ prison ever designed. Opened as a federal penitentiary in 1934, it was situated on an island of impenetrable rock off the coast of San Francisco, USA, surrounded by swift and erratic frigid tides that make swimming practically impossible. The nearest shore point is one-and-a-half miles away. Now disused, the four cellblocks on the island housed 600 individual cells and each had 18-inch-thick reinforced concrete walls and steel fronts. A network of gun towers trained searchlights over the grounds. In nearly 30 years of operation very few had the hubris to even attempt escape.

Contrary to all of these odds, on the night of 11 June 1962 three inmates disappeared without ever being traced. A fourth convict – Allen West – was meant to be with them, but on the night of escape he encountered a problem that caused him to be left behind. After that he agreed to share the details of how their bid for freedom had been meticulously planned.

It had all been masterminded by Frank Morris, age 35, who had had a lifetime of crime related to robbery. The escape plan involved collaborating with his fellow inmates to inventively source materials for improvising the tools and equipment they needed, and persevering together secretively over a period of six months to make all the necessary preparations. They made lifelike dummy heads that tricked the patrolling guards into thinking they were asleep in their beds, tunnelled through the cement behind their cells, climbed the ventilation shaft to the top, drilled through the roof, kept within what they had identified as the watchtowers’ blind spot, scaled two 12-foot barbed-wire fences, and then paddled away into the night on homemade flotation devices.

Succeeding at this supposedly impossible feat of escaping from Alcatraz – which has been called the greatest escape in American history – set Morris apart from ordinary people. Another – very related – way in which he was set apart is that he had an IQ score of 133,¹⁹ meaning that his measured intelligence was higher than that of 98% of people. This score puts him in the range of what is classified as “giftedness”, or what I prefer to call extreme intelligence or intellectual agility. His behaviour certainly has all the hallmarks of high intelligence, such as seeking to acquire new knowledge and skills, wilfulness, persistence, and creative adaptation of resources. High intelligence easily makes a riveting story: we are fascinated by intelligence precisely because of it being colloquially associated with – and scientifically correlated with – the highest of human achievement. Albert Einstein, Marie Curie, Leonardo da Vinci, Ludwig van Beethoven: geniuses like these are people we admire and are inspired by.

Research conducted over a period of more than 100 years has proven that intelligence is the variable that has the strongest impact on the largest number of life outcomes. These include mental and physical health and illness, life expectancy, educational attainment, income, job performance, criminal behaviour, dementia, and even death by motorcar accident.²⁰ Given that it is such a fundamental and influential trait, intelligence could be expected to be something that is widely and openly acknowledged and talked about. The fact that this is not the case reflects the complicated history and relationship we have with intelligence – collectively as a society but also, often, personally.

Our fear of intelligence

My client Ida said that she realised she was avoiding intelligence because she was afraid of it. Why might intelligence be feared? In the research interviews I conducted with individuals whose IQ is in the top 2% of the population, several had experienced being described by others as “scarily intelligent”. People feel most at ease when they are within their “comfort zone”, which is a psychological state in which a person feels familiar with what is around them and perceives themselves to be in control of what may happen, therefore feeling secure and experiencing low levels of anxiety and stress. It appears to be the case that perceiving someone as being very intelligent creates an anticipation that he or she might say or do something that is outside of one’s familiar range of expectation and understanding, which could take one by surprise, with a negative implication. A synonym for being intelligent is being “sharp”: something that is sharp can hurt. When we realise that someone else has knowledge, skill, foresight, or a power of analysis that is beyond our own, we often greet it as threatening. Let’s consider for a moment that this is something that you can remember – or imagine – yourself experiencing: what exactly is the nature of the threat that is involved?

One type of threat involved...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Series
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of illustrations
• Acknowledgements
• Explaining the book: a new way of viewing human intelligence
• 1 Intelligence in our daily lives
• 2 Idealisation of intelligence
• 3 Devaluation of intelligence
• 4 Integration of neurodiversity
• 5 Applied (human) intelligence
• In conclusion: which approach do you choose?
• Further reading
• Notes
• References