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Being generous, thoughtful, and kind is a sign of high intelligence
- ranger_danger 2y agoClearly most I̶R̶C̶ ̶u̶s̶e̶r̶s̶ people have never made this connection. /s
- jackcosgrove 2y agoYour Spidey sense should tingle whenever you read about a psychology result in a popular medium. Especially if that result flatters you in some way.
- CosmicShadow 2y agoYep, pretty much just need to see (inc.com) and then ignore it.
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]
- throwaway48476 2y agoIn order to empathize it requires a mental model of how someone else thinks/feels.
- GrantMoyer 2y agoProbably most social species have this capability.
- throwaway48476 2y agoThat is not the case at all. There's a guy on yt with a 'pet' coyote and it's fascinating how different it behaves to his dogs and how they interact.
- svnt 2y agoFurther to being a social species dogs are domesticated, which introduces more layers.
- throwaway48476 2y agoCoyotes are a social species.
- svnt 2y agoYes, but not a domesticated species, and so any comparisons with dogs are limited.
- tourmalinetaco 2y agoBeing a “social species” does not mean you are social with every other social species, just that you follow a social system within your species.
- GrantMoyer 2y agoWhat do you suppose compels social animals to cooperate socially? I can imagine a few possibilities: 1. Maximizing self interest using an understanding of social contract theory 2. A complex system of instincts that depends on others behavior, but doesn't manifest as intuition about the reasons for those behaviors 3. Like 2, but it manifests as an intuitive undestanding of how others may feel I admit, 1 seems unlikely, even for humans. 2 and 3 sound more plausible, but 3 seems like the simpler explanation to me. We have an example case of it in humans (of course humans may additionally reason about others intent), and I'd expect similar tendencies to have similar mechanisms. Plus, grouping behaviors into intents reduces the number of rules needed for the observed behavior -> response mapping at the cost of some pattern recognition ability. It's possible there's another explanation, including why similar tendencies aren't explained by similar mechanisms, despite the availability of similar "hardware". If there is, I'm not clever enough to have thought of it.
- svnt 2y agoIt is typically called theory of mind.
- I_complete_me 2y agoJust yesterday I came across this site [1] with lots of articles around ToM. Very well written IMHO. [1] https://neurolaunch.com/theory-of-mind-and-empathy/ https://neurolaunch.com/theory-of-mind-and-empathy/
- andoando 2y agoSame is true with being manipulative though.
- Sammi 2y agoYes, but being manipulative will be discovered and punished in the long term. It's not a stable strategy, as it get riskier and riskier the more you do it. So you are naturally disincentivized from being manipulative. On the other hand, being generous will be recognized and rewarded in the long term. In the short term you carry some risk if you are generous with people you don't know. This is where having good social skills to develop relationships comes in. It's also the difference between playing zero-sum and positive-sum games. Manipulation is zero-sum. Positive-sum games have more reward all-in-all in the long term.
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]
- dartos 2y agoOr you’re so smart that your manipulation is disguised as altruism until long after you die.
- svnt 2y agoI did a quick investigation into the three papers linked in the article. In the first, the correlation is between either spouse having donated “$500 or more to a religious or other non-profit” so it potentially loses a lot of smaller donors, but the biggest issue is their definition of a measure of cognitive ability is probably not what you think: > cognitive ability was measured in a variety of ways (Ofstedal et al., 2001). These measurements included immediate word recall, delayed word recall, serial 7’s, recog- nition tasks, backwards counting tasks, and a 35-point scale combining each of the previous elements. None of those are what I would consider difficult (serial 7s is starting at 100 and subtracting 7 over and over). It is entirely possible that given the methodology (survey) that what they are actually measuring is altruism (effort put into helping the surveyor) and that there is also some selection bias because someone who was intelligent but not giving probably would decline/avoid the survey in the first place. In the second, the hypothesis is that altruism is a “costly signal” of intelligence and the study was done in a hunter-gatherer community where members were providing food for a feast. The third link sends the reader to a tweet that cites these two and two additional studies, but the further two are studies linking general intelligence to negotiation ability, which seems at best indirectly related to being generous and kind to me. If there is a potential truth here, I think it might be that being more intelligent could be linked with a greater understanding of the benefits of altruism and a tendency to behave that way, or that being altruistic leads to higher intelligence through vicarious learning, but neither of these hypotheses are being evaluated in these papers.
- withinboredom 2y ago> None of those are what I would consider difficult (serial 7s is starting at 100 and subtracting 7 over and over). I worked with a guy who used to brag about having an IQ of 60. Dude wasn't much smarter than a rock, but he could follow directions really well. Pretty sure he could pass these tests too.
- dartos 2y agoSo an IQ of 100 is the average IQ. “Passing” the test would probably mean you’re within a standard deviation of that (or above, ofc) Most everyone can pass an IQ test.
- EVa5I7bHFq9mnYK 2y agoyou read about a psychology result.
- mgh2 2y agoMaybe EQ, not IQ
- smiley1437 2y agoWhat about highly intelligent psychopaths? https://www.spring.org.uk/2022/12/high-functioning-psychopaths.php https://www.spring.org.uk/2022/12/high-functioning-psychopat... Maybe some of those highly intelligent people are good at pretending to be generous, thoughtful, and kind because it helps achieve their goals.
- stonethrowaway 2y agoI think in the coming years we’ll agree that the notion of a psychopath as described/defined by pop science was completely off base and made up mostly to discredit opponents in one way or another. First, however, we have to find a valid substitution so we can swing to the next branch before the plebs catch on that we were making shit up. Like most of pop psych.
- mjfl 2y agoSome of it is probably real, like repeat offenders of predatory crime. If you've done multiple violent robberies there's probably something in your brain off that allows you to do all that. There's a predatory ecological niche in every society. Very common in nature too. Altruism is less common than predation in nature, it seems. Though in the workspace, you may be onto something.
- stonethrowaway 2y agoUsed to be fashionable to accuse people of lacking empathy, or better yet, to describe yourself as an “empath” - because clearly everyone else isn’t. Hopefully that bullshit virtue signalling went away.
- theGnuMe 2y ago"to accuse people of lacking empathy" is basic projection. If you actually had empathy you'd feel for someone lacking in empathy.
- Teever 2y ago
- WD-42 2y agoSimple when you think about it. It's so much easier to be the opposite of those things.
- richrichie 2y ago[flagged]
- astura 2y agoMy mother is both mean and dumb. After a lot of conversation with her I've noticed one of the reasons why she's so mean is she doesn't seem to have the cognitive ability to think about the consequences of what she says or does before she says it or does it. She operates entirely on instinct and thinking through words/actions beforehand is a totally foreign concept to her.
- andrewflnr 2y agoI really think that's a training issue, though? Not that training is ever easy to separate from "intelligence", but "dumb" people can learn to think before they speak... Anyway, I'm so sorry, growing up with her must have been rough.
- theGnuMe 2y agoI'm sorry you are experiencing that. Raising kids is very hard and my guess is she has unmet emotional needs that she never received and doesn't know she needs. You're a step ahead though being curious as to why she is the way she is.
- throwaway48476 2y agoThe most common cognitive bias people have is assuming everyone else thinks/operates like them. It's reinforced with the widespread cultural belief that everyone is basically the same.
- js8 2y agoOn average, it's actually a good heuristic, because people are mostly clones. You correct for that bias by understanding yourself and others better, but it takes time and effort.
- ergonaught 2y agoReaching and publishing "conclusions" like this is not.
- systemstops 2y agoI'm highly sceptical of this claim. Life is easier for smart people, and that is perhaps why they can be more generous. However, some of the kindest people I've met aren't very intelligent and some of the most devious people I've met have high IQs. Much of the advantage of being smart might be wiped out when everyone has a high IQ personal assistant inside their phone, thanks to AI.
- fragmede 2y agounless you're interacting with people through your phone in person, how do you gain that advantage? we don't have ar glasses that can help with that yet so the smartphone augment has the problem of input and output. casinos are one place where, if you were an impossibly smart human, you could make money. hence, there are some fascinating cheat devices for use at casinos. there's a reason they don't let you use your phone while playing in case you were gonna cheat at cards.
- jarule 2y ago[dead]
- intothebeans 2y agoI'm always skeptical of anything that tries to measure intelligence objectively, as the study of IQ is mired in eugenics and racism. I could see, however, that this behavior can be an indicator of high emotional intelligence and social awareness.
- motohagiography 2y agoit's easy to be altruistic when you can see others as different and not a threat or competition, when their success does not come at a cost to yours. the blunted emotional engagement of many savants may have protected them from internalizing attempts to discourage them and given them the extra focus to learn things. most of what we call intelligence is the downstream effect of attitude to learning imo. personally I find malice too stupid to take personally, but am not smart enough to orchestrate deceptions the way I've seen smarter and more successful people operate. just comfortably mid. also, intelligence above a certain level, like wealth, is best kept a secret. it is often observed that mine is hidden quite cunningly.
- rpmisms 2y agoThe smartest people I have ever met are usually generous, but often not kind.
- wtcactus 2y agoCan wet please stop this nonsense of calling psychology a science, and starting these kind of articles with “science says”? This is really eroding public trust on real science.
- kbrkbr 2y agoWhat would you like to call psychology instead?
- downvotetruth 2y agoPsychology is literally the study of the soul and life, but has been more recently understood to be of the mind and behavior. The closest science may be behavioral as "mind science" seems undiscussed, but topics named science refer to themselves as a science not that they are practicing as such, but so as to avoid through an appeal to the language authority the possible argument that they lack it. If a Greek derivative was desired for the study of the mind, then it might be dianoialogy.
- satisfice 2y agoAll I know is that Adam Grant makes a whole lot of shallow, trite posts on LinkedIn.
- hot_gril 2y agoThey're usually about "pure emotional intelligence"
- downvotetruth 2y agoA generous, thoughtful and kind individual sounds like just the person to buy this bridge I have for sale in New York for the low price of ...
- ShepherdKing 2y agoCompassion is supposed to be the key reason for mankind becoming the dominant species on our planet, and with intelligence being key to survival, it would follow that compassion would be a key marker for intelligence. A lot of scientists generally fit this characterization, a classical example being Einstein. As a counter-example, a lot of people regarded as poor leaders would probably also rank low for perceived compassion.
- krzat 2y agoCompassion towards enemies is especially interesting, it takes a lot of mental effort to go against the gut feeling.
- euroderf 2y agoBeing smart might give you enough slack in your life to be able to emotionally afford those qualities of personality
- known 2y ago[dead]
- Log_out_ 2y agoattaching good attributes generously is a sign of nothing but a willingness to produce hot air from calories over abandunt in a non exhausted environment. its easy being noble if you are rich in a still rich world .
- EasyMark 2y agoI have my doubts on this. It’s probably better to split it into emotional intelligence and cognitive intelligence being fuzzily orthogonal with perhaps a bit of dependency.