24 ms·

Why People Dislike Really Smart Leaders

275 points by jrwan 9y ago

bob_theslob646 9y ago
The link is broken, FYI. EDIT. Link is fixed.
- gumby 9y ago
  Might have been fixed — works for me.
zafka 9y ago
I would really like to see this study reproduced in an engineering environment. I wonder if the same trend holds, just a higher set point.
- mhluongo 9y ago
  Or the same, or gasp lower?.. The STEM condescension is pretty intense here.
- Infernal 9y ago
  The article alluded to the point of diminishing IQ return varying depending on the industry - I think it would be interesting to also measure the IQ of the team behind that leader - I wouldn't be surprised to find the tipping point to be some multiplier of the median IQ of the team in question.
  - jpeloquin 9y ago
    The underlying work, published in Journal of Applied Psychology, was explicitly meant to the test the idea that the tipping point is a multiplier of the team's IQ. From the abstract: "Following Simonton's (1985) theory, we tested a specific model, indicating that the optimal IQ for perceived leadership will appear at about 1.2 standard deviations above the mean IQ of the group membership." The researchers' findings are consistent with this theory in the group examined ("midlevel leaders", which I think means middle management); they say future work will test the theory with other groups who have different median IQs. http://psycnet.apa.org/record/2017-14279-001 http://psycnet.apa.org/record/2017-14279-001
oblib 9y ago
When I was a kid my family would often chide me for using "big words" and told I was trying to "impress everyone" doing that. The truth is, I was just trying to relate something I'd learned and thought was interesting and every time that happened I was kind of shocked and left wondering how they'd missed the gist of what I was talking about. My own mother did it. I finally stopped sharing things I thought they'd attack me for like that. Then, in the 4th grade the city I went to school in had all the kids in the district take a test to measure intelligence, though they didn't tell us students that was what we were doing. About a month later my teacher asked my mother to meet her. She told my mom that I'd tested the 2nd highest in the district. She recommended that I be bumped up a couple grades so I could learn more. My mother told her "No. He'll be in the same grade as his older brother and that will cause problems at home." She also told the teacher that she didn't believe I was "that smart". My teacher was shocked by that. She pulled me aside the next day and told me about the test, her conversation with my mother, and that she was sorry that she couldn't do more for me. I'd never given a thought about me being "smarter" than anyone. I knew that school was easy for me as compared to some of the other kids that seemed to struggle but I figured they'd get the lessons soon enough. I never talked to anyone in my family about it. I knew they'd just humiliate me if I did. A few years later I looked into IQ tests and saw the Bell Curve Graph and where I stood on it. Since then I've almost never, ever, mentioned it to anyone but a very few close friends who are no doubt in the same general area on that graph because the first few times I did I got hammered on hard. Just a few years ago (50 years later) one of my cousins came to visit where I live now and I started talking about something I'd just read and they stopped me right in the middle of it and said "Why are you always trying to impress everyone by using big words." Brought me right back to when we were kids. I've always known I couldn't be alone with these kinds of experiences, and this article confirms that, but it got me to thinking about how little this has has been discussed and how this kind of exposes that it's probably a far more pervasive problem than we know. I do know that over the years I've pointed out why something wouldn't work as planned and been told I was wrong and then later proved right. More than a few times it was an expensive lesson to be learned for those who ignored me. And pretty much every time I was hated for pointing it out. I've never given any thought to the problem or how to fix it but it would probably be interesting to attempt to measure the costs and ponder solutions to it.
- 9y ago
grawprog 9y ago
I wonder how the study was conducted. Was it only iq they tested? Did they test the social abilities of the leaders? It may have more to do with higher iq people generally having less good social skills than people with lower iq's than anything to do with the actual intelligence of the person.
kaycebasques 9y ago
I appreciate that that article was short and to the point.
- craftyguy 9y ago
  Definitely. I really dislike the current trend in article writing, where the author(s) feel a need to start off with a multi-paragraph, tangentially-related (at best) narative about how their cousin's friend's sister's aunt felt this way and that about something, and the actual meat of the article is buried somewhere in the last 1/4th of the text.
  - criddell 9y ago
    They even do that for simple things like recipe websites. I google some food, find a recipe, and most of the time the first four paragraphs are describing the first time the author cooked with saffron or the cultural impact of the spice trade a thousand years ago. You know what? All I want is the recipe for my pressure cooker.
    - mywittyname 9y ago
      Serious Eats is good about this. They have a 'read the whole story' link on the recipe page for people that really care that a Magnum Unicorn is the best device for cracking peppercorns for steak au poivre. But the recipe page right to the point for those that don't care.
Toast_25 9y ago
Looked up an IQ test to see if I'm too smart or too stupid to communicate. Apparently I'm too smart. Thankfully that can be fixed! Lead poisoning, here I come! I'll pick up my old weed habit just to be safe.
- IshKebab 9y ago
  Don't believe online IQ tests...
  - Toast_25 9y ago
    It wasn't really an IQ test, it was the mensa "IQ test" where they tell you if you might be able to join mensa based on your results. Apparently it's within my possibilities. You can see it here: https://www.mensa.lu/en/mensa/online-iq-test/online-iq-test.html https://www.mensa.lu/en/mensa/online-iq-test/online-iq-test....
WalterBright 9y ago
There could be something else at work here. My father told me that con men preferred to go after smart people, like doctors. The reason is that smart people thought they were too smart to get conned, and hence were more gullible. He was also an economist, and told me that there wasn't an economist born who could stand the idea that the economy would run better (i.e. free market) without their "help". And I've noticed many smart leaders who thought they were much smarter than they actually were, and didn't need to listen to others' advice, leading to some very poor decisions.
- myth_drannon 9y ago
  Nassim Taleb calls them IYI, Intellectuals Yet Idiots
  - WJW 9y ago
    Nassim Taleb is prime example of an IYI himself. He is often so busy denouncing what he perceives to be ivory tower intellectuals that he sweeps aside everything academia has ever created. Sure, some of it is not useful in the trading pit, but IMO in his hate of academia he is throwing away the baby with the bath water.
  - 77pt77 9y ago
    Great self-awareness he displays there
- guelo 9y ago
  > the economy would run better (i.e. free market) without their "help". As if boom and bust business cycles aren't a thing in free markets. Or monopolies. Or monetary policy. Or externalized costs. Or tragedy of the commons. That's just run of the mill anti-intellectualism.
  - roenxi 9y ago
    If putting economists in charge somehow curtails monopolies, externalised costs, tragedies of the commons and boom and bust business cycles then someone really should sit down and get that news out there. Nothing I've heard suggests economists outperform a healthy democratic process. Monetary policy is one that is more up for debate - it seems reasonable that it can have a positive effect on gdp, but something has decoupled GDP from measures that actually effect people. I think that something is monetary policy, and note in passing that GDP was, prior to 1970, a much better proxy for energy/capita than it is now [1]. I watch the US economy with curiosity and note, for example, that core inflation, the central plank of US monetary policy, excludes basically anything I spend money on. [1] EDIT: https://wilcoxen.maxwell.insightworks.com/pages/804.html https://wilcoxen.maxwell.insightworks.com/pages/804.html
corpMaverick 9y ago
May be related to this. I have the feeling that white rural Americans dislike "smart" people more than they dislike immigrants, blacks, city slickers and even billionaires.
- dasil003 9y ago
  If by "smart" you mean arrogant urban sophisticates who think very highly of their own intelligence then you're probably right.
  - goatlover 9y ago
    Or it could mean more cosmopolitan dwellers who understand living in a connected, diverse world that's always changing better than your average rural dweller.
    - dasil003 9y ago
      How would they identify that quality enough to dislike it? I'll tell you how: the smugness.
    - ebcode 9y ago
      In defense of your average rural dweller, things really do move a lot more slowly in rural areas in comparison to metropolises. There's less diversity as well. So, you know, please take it easy on us dumb hicks out in the sticks. We're less connected, sure, but we're getting there.
- deleted 9y ago
  [deleted]
- akgerber 9y ago
  No one I met in Appalachia or other parts of rural America was remotely mean to me when I was biking across the country after college.
carapace 9y ago
With the best kind of leader, when the work is finished, the people all say, "We did it ourselves." ~Tao Te Ching
invalidOrTaken 9y ago
>The study’s lead author, John Antonakis, a psychologist at the University of Lausanne in Switzerland, suggests leaders should use their intelligence to generate creative metaphors that will persuade and inspire others—the way former U.S. President Barack Obama did. “I think the only way a smart person can signal their intelligence appropriately and still connect with the people,” Antonakis says, “is to speak in charismatic ways.” This stood out to me. I would be interested to hear the thoughts of HN readers on this.
- jasonkostempski 9y ago
  Maybe the title should be "Why Really Dumb People Dislike Really Smart Leaders". "Talk to them like they're five" is what that suggestion sounds like to me.
  - bfung 9y ago
    "Talk to them like they're five" when they're adults that can figure out that they're being talked down upon is a quick way to alienate the crowd even more. If instead you mean to use more common words and to make concepts relatable to everyday life - that usually works out pretty well in my experience. It's not an easy thing to do either for the "smart" leader.
  - Jtsummers 9y ago
    There's a difference between metaphors and speaking down to someone. When I talk about topics in CS or mathematics with my girlfriend or some members of my family, I speak in metaphors. I don't speak to them like they're five. I speak to them like they're intelligent people who have a model of the world that is different than mine or the things I want to discuss, and I relate my work or interests to their models.
    - alexashka 9y ago
      Plenty of people don't talk down to 5 year olds. That's an assumption you've made regarding 'explain like I'm 5'. Ironically, that's what makes 'explain like I'm 5' so useful - it takes away the assumptions people have in their heads and forces them to use simple language and explain things from first principles. It's quite powerful really. Richard Feynman was famous for being to explain physics in a way a layman could understand. Neil deGrasse Tyson does the same and people love it.
rb808 9y ago
Related: 'George W. Bush is smarter than you'. Elite leaders often make themselves look dumber than they really are. https://keithhennessey.com/2013/04/24/smarter/ https://keithhennessey.com/2013/04/24/smarter/
- strictnein 9y ago
  Great article. Especially the bit about the creation of the GWB caricature. People are so beholden to the idea that he was an idiot that almost no amount of evidence will change that.
- mlevental 9y ago
  this is a crock. it was a crock when it was written and it's still a crock now. the idea that someone can for 8 years in the spotlight disguise themselves so much so that appear wholly opposite is ludicrous. it takes months for professional actors to produce 90 minutes of performance - the guy was on camera for literally weeks. he's not "smarter than you" this kind of revisionist nonsense is politically motivated - people were saying the same exact thing about Trump before he took office and we are now all very sure it's not the case.
  - QAPereo 9y ago
    Some people probably can, but then in addition to being intelligent he’d have to be an incredibly talented and disciplined actor. Unlikely.
  - monochromatic 9y ago
    > people were saying the same exact thing about Trump before he took office and we are now all very sure it's not the case Don't be so sure. First, he outsmarted both political parties to become the most powerful man in the world. And in his first year as president, he's been far more effective at getting things done than most. The fact that some people dislike the things he's getting done doesn't take anything away from that.
    - macintux 9y ago
danharaj 9y ago
In my experience really smart people can be arbitrarily wrong, perhaps moreso than less smart people, because they can create elaborate mental models to justify bad ideas, and someone significantly smarter than me can create difficult to refute arguments that serve as a bulwark against pushback. Remember that sophistry requires sophistication but is still little more than the smart person's stupidity.
- exolymph 9y ago
  Metacontrarianism! I'm always delighted when I get a chance to link to this: http://lesswrong.com/lw/2pv/intellectual_hipsters_and_metacontrarianism/ http://lesswrong.com/lw/2pv/intellectual_hipsters_and_metaco...
  - invalidOrTaken 9y ago
    To readers wondering if they should click the link: you should!
  - danharaj 9y ago
    It's a bit ironic to me that you linked lesswrong, because one example of an argument I consider sophistic is the quantum mechanics sequence. In particular because the relational formulation of quantum mechanics [0] pulls the carpet right from underneath the argument in a rather dramatic way. [0] https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/qm-relational/ https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/qm-relational/
  - psergeant 9y ago
    Oooh, I like that a lot. Many people whose political views I find offensive are people who would identify themselves as intelligent, while generally their views on things seem pretty facile.
- tormeh 9y ago
  People mostly, I think, believe what they want to believe regardless of intellect. Their reasons for doing so are more advanced among the more intelligent. Only when we don't care which of some mutually exclusive ideas are true do we use our intellect to decide.
insickness 9y ago
Immediately when I saw the title I assumed this had something to do with Trump. Both Bush II and Trump have been chided as being stupid. Yet their seemingly stupid demeanor is part of what attracts people. When people come across as super intelligent they can also come across as fake, particularly if there is already an inherent lack of trust in a domain like politics. When Trump tweets, his lack of diplomacy and unpolished grammar make him sound like a normal guy just talking about what he thinks rather than an elite, lifelong politician which no one can relate to.
- goatlover 9y ago
  And that's kind of scary. I don't want some average Joe I can relate to being the most powerful person in the world. I want someone smarter than me with a lot of solid political experience who knows how to navigate issues while being pragmatic enough to get stuff done. Being president of the US isn't like being a plumber.
  - mamon 9y ago
    But that's the "issue" with democracy. There's a lot more of "average Joe's" than "really smart people" and the former gets the same number of votes (1) as the latter. So for the politician who wants to do something good for his country there are just two choices: pretend to be an idiot in order to win Average Joe's votes, or watch an actual idiot beating you to the office. I'm not exactly sure which one of those to cases we are now experiencing in the US ;)
  - wfo 9y ago
    If you believe this you will always get a technocrat with a great resume who has spent years enforcing the status quo, and, once elected, will do nothing to change it. If you want anything to be better you need to move away from gatekeeping "qualifications" because they are always bestowed upon proponents of business as usual by proponents of business as usual. What does "smart" mean? They went to Harvard and are therefore best buddies with the ultrawealthy and elites of society? The pundit class says they're smart? Rarely, once in 200 years, you'll get lucky with this approach and land on a class traitor and hero like FDR, but you're actively selecting away from that on purpose. For a leader, you want a strong vision for the future, passion, a very strong will, charisma. It's ridiculous that people obsess about "intelligence" or "qualifications" -- Obama was brilliant and supremely qualified, how did that work out for us? We picked a constitutional law scholar who continued and made permanent all the constitutional violations of the Bush admin. Friends with the very intelligent economic experts on Wall Street and able to recognize their expertise, he let them run his cabinet and bail themselves out and let them pillage our country's economy.
louithethrid 9y ago
The problem with highly intelligent people is that they have a competition among themselves, and the most intelligent one coming out of those competitions is usually the one with the most measurable success (money) for the least amount of measurable input (work). Meaning, there is a herd effect at work here, where renomee is nothing and looking down among the less intelligent ones is everything. Thus its a race away from productive intelligent endavours with lots of input (science) towards optimal endavours (hacking the system aka lawyer, investor). Meaning that blackhats among the intelligent always outcrowd the white hats in the long term deteriorating society as a whole. Some streetsmarts might recognize the dynamic and engage it with disrupting countermeasures before the system itself is destroyed by a upper society where it is not feasible to be anything else then a well dressed game theory con-men.
- robocat 9y ago
  The smartest people I know mostly have widely different goals, and mostly don't use money as a proxy for a measure of success (however I am not from the US...) > competitions is usually the one with the most measurable success (money) for the least amount of measurable input (work) I remember thinking this way during my education years, but out in the real world I have learnt otherwise.
rossdavidh 9y ago
Simplest answer: IQ doesn't measure inter-personal skills, and people who are really good at one type of thing (measurable by IQ) are often not as good at other things (various proposed metrics of social intelligence).
- vamin 9y ago
  Anecdotally, I've found the opposite. People who are smart tend to be good at lots of things.
4bpp 9y ago
I am put off by the circumstance that in spite of the title, nowhere in the article does it seem to say (nor even suggest that the paper answers) why people dislike really smart leaders.
killjoywashere 9y ago
Personal anecdote, but I wonder if my experience as a junior officer in the Navy helped with this. The last comments in the piece are that intelligent leaders should 1) seek creative metaphors and 2) speak charismatically. Coming to the fleet from a bachelor's in physics, I knew I was reasonably intelligent, but also that there were some people much smarter than me (at least my battered ego assured me of that). So, walking aboard a frigate with sort of an academic's self-awareness and certainty that the world is an uncertain place, I had to lead a division of sailors who would do things that just left me dumbfounded. "Why would you attempt to drive through the closed base gate?" "Why would you test the 440V circuit with your fingers?" "Why would you go in the engine room without hearing protection?" "Do you realize you installed all the valves backward?" "Where did you meet this woman? No, she can't come on the ship!" Then you have to get these folks to do work. They're not lazy, but trying motivate them with the bigger picture could be challenging. Metaphor came to hand more and more. And you sort of settle in. You're not intellectually challenged, and repetition and comfort bring confidence, which makes charismatic patterns of speech easier. When I went to grad school, I found myself using these same patterns of speech to get things done. And I still do. It's always poor form to toot your own horn, but the last few years, I have to say, I've realized more and more, having a hard science degree and early leadership experience are an extremely valuable combination. I have no idea how I'd be doing what I do now without that.
- deleted 9y ago
  [deleted]
- Zak 9y ago
  I have to ask... Why did sailors try to drive through the closed base gate and test 440V circuits with their fingers?
  - ozim 9y ago
    Some people do stuff just because they can. Some because of bad day and some because of thinking those doors are always open so just drive without paying attention.
  - Raphmedia 9y ago
scotty79 9y ago
How did they establish that leaders with iq over 120 are not objectively worse, not just in the eyes of their followers? I think it's common intuition that you need some degree of stupidity to sometimes make a prompt decision when more intelligent person would rather wait for more data to make better (but possibly harmfully late decission). If there's a yes or no decission to be made you already have 50% chance of success as a leader even if you are no smarter than a cointoss. Smart leader might take too long to try to improve the odds or to verify that you can't improve them. Slightly dumber leader can decide faster "it's too hard, let's go with my gut feeling". Maybe 120 is perfect for recognizing that often more thinking doesn't matter but at the same time recognizing instances when thinking pays off.
MollyR 9y ago
My takeaway was that people don't like leaders that can't relate to them. Obama related well to one part of the country, and Trump related well to another part of the country. Trump's case being more surprising since he's tries very hard to come off as a class traitor. ex. Notice his love of the peoples food (fast food)
- goatlover 9y ago
  Question is why do we need a leader we relate to? We're not living in tribes any longer. The president of a country isn't likely to sit down and have a beer with us.
  - dwaltrip 9y ago
    Genetically speaking, we are basically still living in tribes.
  - Buldak 9y ago
    People feel that leaders they can relate to are more likely to take their interests seriously.
    - wolfgke 9y ago
      > People feel that leaders they can relate to are more likely to take their interests seriously. The statement that if one can relate to a leader, he will take ones interests more seriously is a strong assumption that I cannot believe in.
      - deleted 9y ago
        [deleted]
    - ambrosite 9y ago
      It would be better to say, if a leader can relate to the people, then he may be more likely to take their interests seriously.
candybar 9y ago
I'm not sure if I would buy this conclusion without more data - it's quite possible that higher-IQ types are in qualitatively different roles than lower-IQ types in the same study. This would be very difficult to control for because if you do control such that you're comparing two individuals who are in similar roles but different IQ, you're then implicitly selecting for people who have other compensating characteristics.
drozycki 9y ago
How you define intelligence? The person who knows their audience and speaks in a way that connects with them is more intelligent than one who does not. And this is not measured by an IQ test.
- matte_black 9y ago
  Not necessarily. You might not care about connecting with your audience, or you might be maliciously intelligent and purposefully choose to alienate your audience by sounding smart.
unabst 9y ago
I'm a smart leader, and I am disliked. And it's this exact tone that they dislike most. They feel I lack empathy, but empathy is why I do it. And when someone likes me, I know they know we know what's up. That's also why I do it. I find those who work hard to be liked creepy. I also find managers and supervisors who are paid to be your friend disingenuous. And I'm not going to butter someone up before I tell them they made a mistake. The last thing I want is to spoil them or keep them in a bubble. But I'll also tell them to focus on the problem, and not themselves. Don't be part of the problem. Being liked is work in business. In our private lives it's personal preference, but you can also choose your friends. Professionally, it's a strategic decision, because it will inevitably involve people you may struggle to like personally. The prevalent anti-intellectualism does intellects injustice more than anything else. Many would rather be spoiled than informed. They'd rather protect their ego than gain competence. They'd rather be forgiven than corrected for their mistakes. And they'd rather be paid for being who they are, than be told they need to work or put in the work. No one is paid for being who they are, not even celebrities. We're all being paid for our work. Our image is part of our work, even for non-celebrities. Anti-intellectualism is also at the root of anti-professionalism. And it's a huge issue in America. Out of pragmatism, out of optimism, and out of empathy, I am sorry, but I choose to be unapologetically professional. I am the apologetic asshole. And that's what's up. (didn't expect this comment to turn out this way, but I'm submitting it anyway)
thriftwy 9y ago
I guess it's not an option that gets widely offered. Most people would like a leader who is a) really smart and that's proven by "peer review", b) cares for their needs and not some other agenda, c) doesn't hesitate to display all that. But that's just not who gets offered in e.g. modern democracy setting.
golemiprague 9y ago
The problem is that even the smarter person can't compute and analyse all the existing data and factors to make a decision. Most big decisions are made on some conviction or a hunch because reality is too complicated and nobody is a prophet. Therefore being slightly smarter doesn't give somebody such a huge advantage, for example many smart people supported communism, many others didn't because honestly nobody could predict the outcome of the communist movement.
emmett 9y ago
Correlation is not causation! This article says, very high IQ is anti-correlated with perception of effectiveness. That might be because having a high IQ causes people to perceive you as less effective. It also might be because having really high IQ makes you more likely to be promoted, and is independent of other traits (like charisma or conscientiousness) which impact perception of effectiveness and therefore the population of people promoted without really high IQ tends to score higher on those other traits on average. Selection bias, in other words. Based on the evidence presented, we just don’t know. Everyone arguing over why very high IQ “causes” the effect we are seeing might just be making stuff up, because we don’t know if there is a causal relationship at all.
chunsj 9y ago
Here, smart means intellectual quality and their subject on leadership is private profit making. Why the rest of us should like those smart (highly intellectual, however their interest lies in their own profit) leader? I'd like to see the study on the subject of public/social interest and I think that the result will be different.
elihu 9y ago
It's possible that people have an innate tendency to be resentful of leaders who are smarter than them, but there may be other explanations. Perhaps high IQ test results correlate with some negative trait that wasn't captured. Perhaps it's unusually difficult for some reason to simultaneously be successful in business, well liked by employees, and really smart. Perhaps the population of business leaders contains an abnormally high proportion of highly intelligent sociopaths. Perhaps high IQ correlates with wealth, and employees tend to be resentful of business leaders who earn, say, 100x or 1000x what they earn. Perhaps on average high IQ leaders were more likely to have goals that contradicted the goals of the workers (e.g. maximize profit at all costs vs. make this a great place to work).
- carlmr 9y ago
  Yeah, the article is quite shallow. I was thinking especially of your last point. I'm working in software engineering. We have a lot of the smart and driven software developers that you would want in management positions. However they are smart and driven developers because they enjoy toying with technical problems. They enjoy being developers. They mostly hate meetings where we're talking about fluff. They don't WANT to go into management. There's a strong self-selection going on, at least in my company.
DoreenMichele 9y ago
If you are struggling with such issues, you might find some of the resources at Hoagies Gifted Page helpful. I don't read it myself anymore, in part because it is the smart version of poor little rich boy. In other words, it whines a lot about "Oh woe is me. I am so smart and it is ruining my life." But if you are having social challenges as a smart person, that isn't necessarily a bad thing to be exposed to. You can also search for social and emotional needs of the gifted for additional material. You could look up Beyond IQ as well.
- cryoshon 9y ago
  i never got the self pity vibe from hoagies' page. i felt it was more explanatory than comiserational. it's a great resource, though.
  - deleted 9y ago
    [deleted]
Rifu 9y ago
Sci-hub link to the actual paper[0] [0] http://sci-hub.tw/10.1037/apl0000221 http://sci-hub.tw/10.1037/apl0000221
bjourne 9y ago
Maybe I'm just dumb. But I read tfa twice now, and I can't find a hint of an explanation. If I read an article is titled "Why People Dislike Really Smart Leaders" I expect to read about why people dislike really smart leaders. I feel that perhaps this article is just clickbait.
sagebird 9y ago
There is a simpler explanation. It is the Peter principle. A person is promoted until failure. All else being equal, if two people are leaders, leader A will be on average as good as leader B. If one were significantly better, they would be promoted to the next level - eg a retired philanthropist billionaire or enlightened monk or what have you. If P and Q are qualities correlated with leadership, if P and Q are independently randomly distributed, then a leader with higher P is expected to have a lower Q. An analogy: farmers who grew 2 truck loads of bananas meet up to compare farms. On average the farms are 4 square miles. If farmer Joe tells you his farm is half a mile wide, you might guess it is 8 miles high, because the area is expected to be average. There was no causation at work — having a half mile wide plot did not cause the plot to be 8 miles tall. Why should we assume that there is a causal link between high iq and being disliked, when it could be chalked up to correlation between factors of an equivalence relation? High iq allows non-charasmatics to function higher than they normally would, just as charisma may make up for a lack of brains.
- ACow_Adonis 9y ago
  That's um... neither how stats nor reasoning works :(
  - floriferous 9y ago
    Can you elaborate on what’s wrong with his comment? The Peter principle looks like it has some legs (after a couple minutes of searching), and the analogy sounds reasonable to me.
    - carlmr 9y ago
      On the second part I can kind of follow your argument. But what has this got to do with the Peter Principle? I didn't see the argument being tied back to people being promoted until incompetence, which is not even what the article suggests. But the P and Q argument does make sense. IQ is helpful, charisma is helpful. If you have a lot of charisma you need less IQ to get there. I find that part of the argument statistically sound.
    - 9y ago
doctorstupid 9y ago
It's simple. People are selfish so they like those which are like themselves and they want their self-images to be successful.
evolighting 9y ago
Maybe the "Really Smart Leaders" not the real smart one?
godelmachine 9y ago
Trump these days is bragging how smart and genius he is, and well, we all know how disliked he is !! :)
ksec 9y ago
I think there is "Smart", and there is "Wise". I have been thinking "Smart", as intellectually, is little over rated. Wise, I dont quite know how to describe it yet, but is a combination of many many things.

275 points by jrwan 9y ago

bob_theslob646 9y ago

The link is broken, FYI. EDIT. Link is fixed.

gumby 9y ago
Might have been fixed — works for me.

zafka 9y ago

I would really like to see this study reproduced in an engineering environment. I wonder if the same trend holds, just a higher set point.

mhluongo 9y ago
Or the same, or gasp lower?.. The STEM condescension is pretty intense here.
Infernal 9y ago
The article alluded to the point of diminishing IQ return varying depending on the industry - I think it would be interesting to also measure the IQ of the team behind that leader - I wouldn't be surprised to find the tipping point to be some multiplier of the median IQ of the team in question.
- jpeloquin 9y ago
  The underlying work, published in Journal of Applied Psychology, was explicitly meant to the test the idea that the tipping point is a multiplier of the team's IQ. From the abstract: "Following Simonton's (1985) theory, we tested a specific model, indicating that the optimal IQ for perceived leadership will appear at about 1.2 standard deviations above the mean IQ of the group membership." The researchers' findings are consistent with this theory in the group examined ("midlevel leaders", which I think means middle management); they say future work will test the theory with other groups who have different median IQs. http://psycnet.apa.org/record/2017-14279-001 http://psycnet.apa.org/record/2017-14279-001

oblib 9y ago

When I was a kid my family would often chide me for using "big words" and told I was trying to "impress everyone" doing that. The truth is, I was just trying to relate something I'd learned and thought was interesting and every time that happened I was kind of shocked and left wondering how they'd missed the gist of what I was talking about. My own mother did it. I finally stopped sharing things I thought they'd attack me for like that. Then, in the 4th grade the city I went to school in had all the kids in the district take a test to measure intelligence, though they didn't tell us students that was what we were doing. About a month later my teacher asked my mother to meet her. She told my mom that I'd tested the 2nd highest in the district. She recommended that I be bumped up a couple grades so I could learn more. My mother told her "No. He'll be in the same grade as his older brother and that will cause problems at home." She also told the teacher that she didn't believe I was "that smart". My teacher was shocked by that. She pulled me aside the next day and told me about the test, her conversation with my mother, and that she was sorry that she couldn't do more for me. I'd never given a thought about me being "smarter" than anyone. I knew that school was easy for me as compared to some of the other kids that seemed to struggle but I figured they'd get the lessons soon enough. I never talked to anyone in my family about it. I knew they'd just humiliate me if I did. A few years later I looked into IQ tests and saw the Bell Curve Graph and where I stood on it. Since then I've almost never, ever, mentioned it to anyone but a very few close friends who are no doubt in the same general area on that graph because the first few times I did I got hammered on hard. Just a few years ago (50 years later) one of my cousins came to visit where I live now and I started talking about something I'd just read and they stopped me right in the middle of it and said "Why are you always trying to impress everyone by using big words." Brought me right back to when we were kids. I've always known I couldn't be alone with these kinds of experiences, and this article confirms that, but it got me to thinking about how little this has has been discussed and how this kind of exposes that it's probably a far more pervasive problem than we know. I do know that over the years I've pointed out why something wouldn't work as planned and been told I was wrong and then later proved right. More than a few times it was an expensive lesson to be learned for those who ignored me. And pretty much every time I was hated for pointing it out. I've never given any thought to the problem or how to fix it but it would probably be interesting to attempt to measure the costs and ponder solutions to it.

9y ago

grawprog 9y ago

I wonder how the study was conducted. Was it only iq they tested? Did they test the social abilities of the leaders? It may have more to do with higher iq people generally having less good social skills than people with lower iq's than anything to do with the actual intelligence of the person.

kaycebasques 9y ago

I appreciate that that article was short and to the point.

craftyguy 9y ago
Definitely. I really dislike the current trend in article writing, where the author(s) feel a need to start off with a multi-paragraph, tangentially-related (at best) narative about how their cousin's friend's sister's aunt felt this way and that about something, and the actual meat of the article is buried somewhere in the last 1/4th of the text.
- criddell 9y ago
  They even do that for simple things like recipe websites. I google some food, find a recipe, and most of the time the first four paragraphs are describing the first time the author cooked with saffron or the cultural impact of the spice trade a thousand years ago. You know what? All I want is the recipe for my pressure cooker.
  - mywittyname 9y ago
    Serious Eats is good about this. They have a 'read the whole story' link on the recipe page for people that really care that a Magnum Unicorn is the best device for cracking peppercorns for steak au poivre. But the recipe page right to the point for those that don't care.

Toast_25 9y ago

Looked up an IQ test to see if I'm too smart or too stupid to communicate. Apparently I'm too smart. Thankfully that can be fixed! Lead poisoning, here I come! I'll pick up my old weed habit just to be safe.

IshKebab 9y ago
Don't believe online IQ tests...
- Toast_25 9y ago
  It wasn't really an IQ test, it was the mensa "IQ test" where they tell you if you might be able to join mensa based on your results. Apparently it's within my possibilities. You can see it here: https://www.mensa.lu/en/mensa/online-iq-test/online-iq-test.html https://www.mensa.lu/en/mensa/online-iq-test/online-iq-test....

WalterBright 9y ago

There could be something else at work here. My father told me that con men preferred to go after smart people, like doctors. The reason is that smart people thought they were too smart to get conned, and hence were more gullible. He was also an economist, and told me that there wasn't an economist born who could stand the idea that the economy would run better (i.e. free market) without their "help". And I've noticed many smart leaders who thought they were much smarter than they actually were, and didn't need to listen to others' advice, leading to some very poor decisions.

myth_drannon 9y ago
Nassim Taleb calls them IYI, Intellectuals Yet Idiots
- WJW 9y ago
  Nassim Taleb is prime example of an IYI himself. He is often so busy denouncing what he perceives to be ivory tower intellectuals that he sweeps aside everything academia has ever created. Sure, some of it is not useful in the trading pit, but IMO in his hate of academia he is throwing away the baby with the bath water.
- 77pt77 9y ago
  Great self-awareness he displays there
guelo 9y ago
> the economy would run better (i.e. free market) without their "help". As if boom and bust business cycles aren't a thing in free markets. Or monopolies. Or monetary policy. Or externalized costs. Or tragedy of the commons. That's just run of the mill anti-intellectualism.
- roenxi 9y ago
  If putting economists in charge somehow curtails monopolies, externalised costs, tragedies of the commons and boom and bust business cycles then someone really should sit down and get that news out there. Nothing I've heard suggests economists outperform a healthy democratic process. Monetary policy is one that is more up for debate - it seems reasonable that it can have a positive effect on gdp, but something has decoupled GDP from measures that actually effect people. I think that something is monetary policy, and note in passing that GDP was, prior to 1970, a much better proxy for energy/capita than it is now [1]. I watch the US economy with curiosity and note, for example, that core inflation, the central plank of US monetary policy, excludes basically anything I spend money on. [1] EDIT: https://wilcoxen.maxwell.insightworks.com/pages/804.html https://wilcoxen.maxwell.insightworks.com/pages/804.html

corpMaverick 9y ago

May be related to this. I have the feeling that white rural Americans dislike "smart" people more than they dislike immigrants, blacks, city slickers and even billionaires.

dasil003 9y ago
If by "smart" you mean arrogant urban sophisticates who think very highly of their own intelligence then you're probably right.
- goatlover 9y ago
  Or it could mean more cosmopolitan dwellers who understand living in a connected, diverse world that's always changing better than your average rural dweller.
  - dasil003 9y ago
    How would they identify that quality enough to dislike it? I'll tell you how: the smugness.
  - ebcode 9y ago
    In defense of your average rural dweller, things really do move a lot more slowly in rural areas in comparison to metropolises. There's less diversity as well. So, you know, please take it easy on us dumb hicks out in the sticks. We're less connected, sure, but we're getting there.
deleted 9y ago
[deleted]
akgerber 9y ago
No one I met in Appalachia or other parts of rural America was remotely mean to me when I was biking across the country after college.

carapace 9y ago

With the best kind of leader, when the work is finished, the people all say, "We did it ourselves." ~Tao Te Ching

invalidOrTaken 9y ago

>The study’s lead author, John Antonakis, a psychologist at the University of Lausanne in Switzerland, suggests leaders should use their intelligence to generate creative metaphors that will persuade and inspire others—the way former U.S. President Barack Obama did. “I think the only way a smart person can signal their intelligence appropriately and still connect with the people,” Antonakis says, “is to speak in charismatic ways.” This stood out to me. I would be interested to hear the thoughts of HN readers on this.

jasonkostempski 9y ago
Maybe the title should be "Why Really Dumb People Dislike Really Smart Leaders". "Talk to them like they're five" is what that suggestion sounds like to me.
- bfung 9y ago
  "Talk to them like they're five" when they're adults that can figure out that they're being talked down upon is a quick way to alienate the crowd even more. If instead you mean to use more common words and to make concepts relatable to everyday life - that usually works out pretty well in my experience. It's not an easy thing to do either for the "smart" leader.
- Jtsummers 9y ago
  There's a difference between metaphors and speaking down to someone. When I talk about topics in CS or mathematics with my girlfriend or some members of my family, I speak in metaphors. I don't speak to them like they're five. I speak to them like they're intelligent people who have a model of the world that is different than mine or the things I want to discuss, and I relate my work or interests to their models.
  - alexashka 9y ago
    Plenty of people don't talk down to 5 year olds. That's an assumption you've made regarding 'explain like I'm 5'. Ironically, that's what makes 'explain like I'm 5' so useful - it takes away the assumptions people have in their heads and forces them to use simple language and explain things from first principles. It's quite powerful really. Richard Feynman was famous for being to explain physics in a way a layman could understand. Neil deGrasse Tyson does the same and people love it.

rb808 9y ago

Related: 'George W. Bush is smarter than you'. Elite leaders often make themselves look dumber than they really are. https://keithhennessey.com/2013/04/24/smarter/ https://keithhennessey.com/2013/04/24/smarter/

strictnein 9y ago
Great article. Especially the bit about the creation of the GWB caricature. People are so beholden to the idea that he was an idiot that almost no amount of evidence will change that.
mlevental 9y ago
this is a crock. it was a crock when it was written and it's still a crock now. the idea that someone can for 8 years in the spotlight disguise themselves so much so that appear wholly opposite is ludicrous. it takes months for professional actors to produce 90 minutes of performance - the guy was on camera for literally weeks. he's not "smarter than you" this kind of revisionist nonsense is politically motivated - people were saying the same exact thing about Trump before he took office and we are now all very sure it's not the case.
- QAPereo 9y ago
  Some people probably can, but then in addition to being intelligent he’d have to be an incredibly talented and disciplined actor. Unlikely.
- monochromatic 9y ago
  > people were saying the same exact thing about Trump before he took office and we are now all very sure it's not the case Don't be so sure. First, he outsmarted both political parties to become the most powerful man in the world. And in his first year as president, he's been far more effective at getting things done than most. The fact that some people dislike the things he's getting done doesn't take anything away from that.
  - macintux 9y ago

danharaj 9y ago

In my experience really smart people can be arbitrarily wrong, perhaps moreso than less smart people, because they can create elaborate mental models to justify bad ideas, and someone significantly smarter than me can create difficult to refute arguments that serve as a bulwark against pushback. Remember that sophistry requires sophistication but is still little more than the smart person's stupidity.

exolymph 9y ago
Metacontrarianism! I'm always delighted when I get a chance to link to this: http://lesswrong.com/lw/2pv/intellectual_hipsters_and_metacontrarianism/ http://lesswrong.com/lw/2pv/intellectual_hipsters_and_metaco...
- invalidOrTaken 9y ago
  To readers wondering if they should click the link: you should!
- danharaj 9y ago
  It's a bit ironic to me that you linked lesswrong, because one example of an argument I consider sophistic is the quantum mechanics sequence. In particular because the relational formulation of quantum mechanics [0] pulls the carpet right from underneath the argument in a rather dramatic way. [0] https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/qm-relational/ https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/qm-relational/
- psergeant 9y ago
  Oooh, I like that a lot. Many people whose political views I find offensive are people who would identify themselves as intelligent, while generally their views on things seem pretty facile.
tormeh 9y ago
People mostly, I think, believe what they want to believe regardless of intellect. Their reasons for doing so are more advanced among the more intelligent. Only when we don't care which of some mutually exclusive ideas are true do we use our intellect to decide.

insickness 9y ago

Immediately when I saw the title I assumed this had something to do with Trump. Both Bush II and Trump have been chided as being stupid. Yet their seemingly stupid demeanor is part of what attracts people. When people come across as super intelligent they can also come across as fake, particularly if there is already an inherent lack of trust in a domain like politics. When Trump tweets, his lack of diplomacy and unpolished grammar make him sound like a normal guy just talking about what he thinks rather than an elite, lifelong politician which no one can relate to.

goatlover 9y ago
And that's kind of scary. I don't want some average Joe I can relate to being the most powerful person in the world. I want someone smarter than me with a lot of solid political experience who knows how to navigate issues while being pragmatic enough to get stuff done. Being president of the US isn't like being a plumber.
- mamon 9y ago
  But that's the "issue" with democracy. There's a lot more of "average Joe's" than "really smart people" and the former gets the same number of votes (1) as the latter. So for the politician who wants to do something good for his country there are just two choices: pretend to be an idiot in order to win Average Joe's votes, or watch an actual idiot beating you to the office. I'm not exactly sure which one of those to cases we are now experiencing in the US ;)
- wfo 9y ago
  If you believe this you will always get a technocrat with a great resume who has spent years enforcing the status quo, and, once elected, will do nothing to change it. If you want anything to be better you need to move away from gatekeeping "qualifications" because they are always bestowed upon proponents of business as usual by proponents of business as usual. What does "smart" mean? They went to Harvard and are therefore best buddies with the ultrawealthy and elites of society? The pundit class says they're smart? Rarely, once in 200 years, you'll get lucky with this approach and land on a class traitor and hero like FDR, but you're actively selecting away from that on purpose. For a leader, you want a strong vision for the future, passion, a very strong will, charisma. It's ridiculous that people obsess about "intelligence" or "qualifications" -- Obama was brilliant and supremely qualified, how did that work out for us? We picked a constitutional law scholar who continued and made permanent all the constitutional violations of the Bush admin. Friends with the very intelligent economic experts on Wall Street and able to recognize their expertise, he let them run his cabinet and bail themselves out and let them pillage our country's economy.

louithethrid 9y ago

The problem with highly intelligent people is that they have a competition among themselves, and the most intelligent one coming out of those competitions is usually the one with the most measurable success (money) for the least amount of measurable input (work). Meaning, there is a herd effect at work here, where renomee is nothing and looking down among the less intelligent ones is everything. Thus its a race away from productive intelligent endavours with lots of input (science) towards optimal endavours (hacking the system aka lawyer, investor). Meaning that blackhats among the intelligent always outcrowd the white hats in the long term deteriorating society as a whole. Some streetsmarts might recognize the dynamic and engage it with disrupting countermeasures before the system itself is destroyed by a upper society where it is not feasible to be anything else then a well dressed game theory con-men.

robocat 9y ago
The smartest people I know mostly have widely different goals, and mostly don't use money as a proxy for a measure of success (however I am not from the US...) > competitions is usually the one with the most measurable success (money) for the least amount of measurable input (work) I remember thinking this way during my education years, but out in the real world I have learnt otherwise.

rossdavidh 9y ago

Simplest answer: IQ doesn't measure inter-personal skills, and people who are really good at one type of thing (measurable by IQ) are often not as good at other things (various proposed metrics of social intelligence).

vamin 9y ago
Anecdotally, I've found the opposite. People who are smart tend to be good at lots of things.

4bpp 9y ago

I am put off by the circumstance that in spite of the title, nowhere in the article does it seem to say (nor even suggest that the paper answers) why people dislike really smart leaders.

killjoywashere 9y ago

Personal anecdote, but I wonder if my experience as a junior officer in the Navy helped with this. The last comments in the piece are that intelligent leaders should 1) seek creative metaphors and 2) speak charismatically. Coming to the fleet from a bachelor's in physics, I knew I was reasonably intelligent, but also that there were some people much smarter than me (at least my battered ego assured me of that). So, walking aboard a frigate with sort of an academic's self-awareness and certainty that the world is an uncertain place, I had to lead a division of sailors who would do things that just left me dumbfounded. "Why would you attempt to drive through the closed base gate?" "Why would you test the 440V circuit with your fingers?" "Why would you go in the engine room without hearing protection?" "Do you realize you installed all the valves backward?" "Where did you meet this woman? No, she can't come on the ship!" Then you have to get these folks to do work. They're not lazy, but trying motivate them with the bigger picture could be challenging. Metaphor came to hand more and more. And you sort of settle in. You're not intellectually challenged, and repetition and comfort bring confidence, which makes charismatic patterns of speech easier. When I went to grad school, I found myself using these same patterns of speech to get things done. And I still do. It's always poor form to toot your own horn, but the last few years, I have to say, I've realized more and more, having a hard science degree and early leadership experience are an extremely valuable combination. I have no idea how I'd be doing what I do now without that.

deleted 9y ago
[deleted]
Zak 9y ago
I have to ask... Why did sailors try to drive through the closed base gate and test 440V circuits with their fingers?
- ozim 9y ago
  Some people do stuff just because they can. Some because of bad day and some because of thinking those doors are always open so just drive without paying attention.
- Raphmedia 9y ago

scotty79 9y ago

How did they establish that leaders with iq over 120 are not objectively worse, not just in the eyes of their followers? I think it's common intuition that you need some degree of stupidity to sometimes make a prompt decision when more intelligent person would rather wait for more data to make better (but possibly harmfully late decission). If there's a yes or no decission to be made you already have 50% chance of success as a leader even if you are no smarter than a cointoss. Smart leader might take too long to try to improve the odds or to verify that you can't improve them. Slightly dumber leader can decide faster "it's too hard, let's go with my gut feeling". Maybe 120 is perfect for recognizing that often more thinking doesn't matter but at the same time recognizing instances when thinking pays off.

MollyR 9y ago

My takeaway was that people don't like leaders that can't relate to them. Obama related well to one part of the country, and Trump related well to another part of the country. Trump's case being more surprising since he's tries very hard to come off as a class traitor. ex. Notice his love of the peoples food (fast food)

goatlover 9y ago
Question is why do we need a leader we relate to? We're not living in tribes any longer. The president of a country isn't likely to sit down and have a beer with us.
- dwaltrip 9y ago
  Genetically speaking, we are basically still living in tribes.
- Buldak 9y ago
  People feel that leaders they can relate to are more likely to take their interests seriously.
  - wolfgke 9y ago
    > People feel that leaders they can relate to are more likely to take their interests seriously. The statement that if one can relate to a leader, he will take ones interests more seriously is a strong assumption that I cannot believe in.
    - deleted 9y ago
      [deleted]
  - ambrosite 9y ago
    It would be better to say, if a leader can relate to the people, then he may be more likely to take their interests seriously.

candybar 9y ago

I'm not sure if I would buy this conclusion without more data - it's quite possible that higher-IQ types are in qualitatively different roles than lower-IQ types in the same study. This would be very difficult to control for because if you do control such that you're comparing two individuals who are in similar roles but different IQ, you're then implicitly selecting for people who have other compensating characteristics.

drozycki 9y ago

How you define intelligence? The person who knows their audience and speaks in a way that connects with them is more intelligent than one who does not. And this is not measured by an IQ test.

matte_black 9y ago
Not necessarily. You might not care about connecting with your audience, or you might be maliciously intelligent and purposefully choose to alienate your audience by sounding smart.

unabst 9y ago

I'm a smart leader, and I am disliked. And it's this exact tone that they dislike most. They feel I lack empathy, but empathy is why I do it. And when someone likes me, I know they know we know what's up. That's also why I do it. I find those who work hard to be liked creepy. I also find managers and supervisors who are paid to be your friend disingenuous. And I'm not going to butter someone up before I tell them they made a mistake. The last thing I want is to spoil them or keep them in a bubble. But I'll also tell them to focus on the problem, and not themselves. Don't be part of the problem. Being liked is work in business. In our private lives it's personal preference, but you can also choose your friends. Professionally, it's a strategic decision, because it will inevitably involve people you may struggle to like personally. The prevalent anti-intellectualism does intellects injustice more than anything else. Many would rather be spoiled than informed. They'd rather protect their ego than gain competence. They'd rather be forgiven than corrected for their mistakes. And they'd rather be paid for being who they are, than be told they need to work or put in the work. No one is paid for being who they are, not even celebrities. We're all being paid for our work. Our image is part of our work, even for non-celebrities. Anti-intellectualism is also at the root of anti-professionalism. And it's a huge issue in America. Out of pragmatism, out of optimism, and out of empathy, I am sorry, but I choose to be unapologetically professional. I am the apologetic asshole. And that's what's up. (didn't expect this comment to turn out this way, but I'm submitting it anyway)

thriftwy 9y ago

I guess it's not an option that gets widely offered. Most people would like a leader who is a) really smart and that's proven by "peer review", b) cares for their needs and not some other agenda, c) doesn't hesitate to display all that. But that's just not who gets offered in e.g. modern democracy setting.

golemiprague 9y ago

The problem is that even the smarter person can't compute and analyse all the existing data and factors to make a decision. Most big decisions are made on some conviction or a hunch because reality is too complicated and nobody is a prophet. Therefore being slightly smarter doesn't give somebody such a huge advantage, for example many smart people supported communism, many others didn't because honestly nobody could predict the outcome of the communist movement.

emmett 9y ago

Correlation is not causation! This article says, very high IQ is anti-correlated with perception of effectiveness. That might be because having a high IQ causes people to perceive you as less effective. It also might be because having really high IQ makes you more likely to be promoted, and is independent of other traits (like charisma or conscientiousness) which impact perception of effectiveness and therefore the population of people promoted without really high IQ tends to score higher on those other traits on average. Selection bias, in other words. Based on the evidence presented, we just don’t know. Everyone arguing over why very high IQ “causes” the effect we are seeing might just be making stuff up, because we don’t know if there is a causal relationship at all.

chunsj 9y ago

Here, smart means intellectual quality and their subject on leadership is private profit making. Why the rest of us should like those smart (highly intellectual, however their interest lies in their own profit) leader? I'd like to see the study on the subject of public/social interest and I think that the result will be different.

elihu 9y ago

It's possible that people have an innate tendency to be resentful of leaders who are smarter than them, but there may be other explanations. Perhaps high IQ test results correlate with some negative trait that wasn't captured. Perhaps it's unusually difficult for some reason to simultaneously be successful in business, well liked by employees, and really smart. Perhaps the population of business leaders contains an abnormally high proportion of highly intelligent sociopaths. Perhaps high IQ correlates with wealth, and employees tend to be resentful of business leaders who earn, say, 100x or 1000x what they earn. Perhaps on average high IQ leaders were more likely to have goals that contradicted the goals of the workers (e.g. maximize profit at all costs vs. make this a great place to work).

carlmr 9y ago
Yeah, the article is quite shallow. I was thinking especially of your last point. I'm working in software engineering. We have a lot of the smart and driven software developers that you would want in management positions. However they are smart and driven developers because they enjoy toying with technical problems. They enjoy being developers. They mostly hate meetings where we're talking about fluff. They don't WANT to go into management. There's a strong self-selection going on, at least in my company.

DoreenMichele 9y ago

If you are struggling with such issues, you might find some of the resources at Hoagies Gifted Page helpful. I don't read it myself anymore, in part because it is the smart version of poor little rich boy. In other words, it whines a lot about "Oh woe is me. I am so smart and it is ruining my life." But if you are having social challenges as a smart person, that isn't necessarily a bad thing to be exposed to. You can also search for social and emotional needs of the gifted for additional material. You could look up Beyond IQ as well.

cryoshon 9y ago
i never got the self pity vibe from hoagies' page. i felt it was more explanatory than comiserational. it's a great resource, though.
- deleted 9y ago
  [deleted]

Rifu 9y ago

Sci-hub link to the actual paper[0] [0] http://sci-hub.tw/10.1037/apl0000221 http://sci-hub.tw/10.1037/apl0000221

bjourne 9y ago

Maybe I'm just dumb. But I read tfa twice now, and I can't find a hint of an explanation. If I read an article is titled "Why People Dislike Really Smart Leaders" I expect to read about why people dislike really smart leaders. I feel that perhaps this article is just clickbait.

sagebird 9y ago

There is a simpler explanation. It is the Peter principle. A person is promoted until failure. All else being equal, if two people are leaders, leader A will be on average as good as leader B. If one were significantly better, they would be promoted to the next level - eg a retired philanthropist billionaire or enlightened monk or what have you. If P and Q are qualities correlated with leadership, if P and Q are independently randomly distributed, then a leader with higher P is expected to have a lower Q. An analogy: farmers who grew 2 truck loads of bananas meet up to compare farms. On average the farms are 4 square miles. If farmer Joe tells you his farm is half a mile wide, you might guess it is 8 miles high, because the area is expected to be average. There was no causation at work — having a half mile wide plot did not cause the plot to be 8 miles tall. Why should we assume that there is a causal link between high iq and being disliked, when it could be chalked up to correlation between factors of an equivalence relation? High iq allows non-charasmatics to function higher than they normally would, just as charisma may make up for a lack of brains.

ACow_Adonis 9y ago
That's um... neither how stats nor reasoning works :(
- floriferous 9y ago
  Can you elaborate on what’s wrong with his comment? The Peter principle looks like it has some legs (after a couple minutes of searching), and the analogy sounds reasonable to me.
  - carlmr 9y ago
    On the second part I can kind of follow your argument. But what has this got to do with the Peter Principle? I didn't see the argument being tied back to people being promoted until incompetence, which is not even what the article suggests. But the P and Q argument does make sense. IQ is helpful, charisma is helpful. If you have a lot of charisma you need less IQ to get there. I find that part of the argument statistically sound.
  - 9y ago

doctorstupid 9y ago

It's simple. People are selfish so they like those which are like themselves and they want their self-images to be successful.

evolighting 9y ago

Maybe the "Really Smart Leaders" not the real smart one?

godelmachine 9y ago

Trump these days is bragging how smart and genius he is, and well, we all know how disliked he is !! :)

ksec 9y ago

I think there is "Smart", and there is "Wise". I have been thinking "Smart", as intellectually, is little over rated. Wise, I dont quite know how to describe it yet, but is a combination of many many things.