A common bias among the smart is to overestimate how smart everyone else is. This was certainly my experience in moving from top rank universities as a student to a mid rank university as a teacher. A better intuition for common abilities can be found by browsing the US National Assesment of Adult Literacy sample questions.
For example, in 1992 out of a random sample of US adults, 7% could not do item SCOR300, which is to find the expiration date on a driver’s license. 26% could not do item AB60303, which is to check the “Please Call” box on a phone message slip when they’ve been told:
James Davidson phones and asks to speak with Ann Jones, who is at a meeting. He needs to know if the contracts he sent are satisfactory and requests that she call before 2:00 p.m. His number is 259-3860. Fill in the message slip below.
Only 52% could do item AB30901, which is to look at a table on page 118 of the 1980 World Almanac and answer:
According to the chart, did U.S. exports of oil (petroleum) increase or decrease between 1976 and 1978?
Only 16% could do item N010301, which is to answer “What is the purpose of the Se Habla Espanol expo?” after reading a short newspaper article called “Se Habla Espanol Hits Chicago; September 25,26,27 are three days that will change your marketing.” The article includes this quote:
It’s Mr. Martinez’s job—his mission in life—to make sure companies learn how they can serve and sell to America’s Hispanics. He has been marketing to the community for many years, working with the best in the business, including Coca-Cola and the advertising firm of Castor GS&B. Now his staff is organizing the largest annual Hispanic market trade show in the business—Se Habla Español.
Acceptable answers include statement such as:
To enable people to better serve and sell to the Hispanic community; to improve marketing strategies to the Hispanic community; and to enable people to establish contacts to serve the Hispanic community.
Only 11% could do Item N100701, which asks:
Using the information in the table, write a brief paragraph summarizing the extent to which parents and teachers agreed or disagreed on the statements about issues pertaining to parental involvement at their school.
I think an acceptable answer is to note that parents tend to have lower opinions than teachers of school performance.
Hat tip to Linda Gottfredson.
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[...] to move, y’all. I mean, I plan on packing house down under, mates. Or something like that. A common bias among the smart is to overestimate how smart everyone else is. I know I do this. I always I assume I am the floor of any given set of intellects. This backfires [...]
31 Comments
I’m surprised.
But there will always be stratification in any group. For the last 5 months I’ve played the physics game Fantastic Contraption. My guess is that most everyone who gets hooked on it enough to fork over 10 bucks and visit the forums has an IQ at least one standard deviation above average.
But there are definite tiers there. (and plenty of status jockeying). Interesting to see how important these perceived differences are, even when people are virtually anonymous.
I wonder: How smart does someone have to be to overestimate the intelligence of average people, and does it have more to do with growing up in a closed environment than IQ per se?
And: Do the very smart tend to overestimate the intelligence of the moderately smart? (Experience and a few conversations suggests the answer is yes.)
Working in an industry supposedly populated by smart people, I have repeatedly had the following experience:
industry person A: X is one of the smartest people I’ve ever worked with!
i.p. B: X is brilliant!
i.p. C: I’ve rarely met people in X’s class intellectually!
Then I and several peers meet X and find X not that bright.
(And I have met several people smarter than I am!)
Not to nitpick, but N100701 is quite poorly written. I had to read it 3 times.
Consider:
Using the information in the table, write a brief paragraph summarizing the how much parents and teachers agreed or disagreed on the questions in the table.
Vs:
Using the information in the table, write a brief paragraph summarizing the extent to which parents and teachers agreed or disagreed on the statements about issues pertaining to parental involvement at their school.
“Consider:
Using the information in the table, write a brief paragraph summarizing the how much parents and teachers agreed or disagreed on the questions in the table.
Vs:
Using the information in the table, write a brief paragraph summarizing the extent to which parents and teachers agreed or disagreed on the statements about issues pertaining to parental involvement at their school.”
This could be an aspect of the literacy exam as well- the ability to parse that question properly the way that you have done. I also read it twice to be sure I knew what the question was, but that’s part of the test isn’t it?
I sometimes get accused of overestimating how smart people are, but my reply is that people are probably smart enough when it matters to them. I mean what were the parameters of the test, did they get prizes for getting the right answers. Or did they just get paid for showing up no matter what answers they were given. It probably matters. They may be pretty dumb, but they might be just smart enough to ration their cognitive talents and save them for when it counts.
Do you really think that smart people are only motivated to use their intelligence if there’s a prize? Or that they otherwise do a cost/benefit analysis every time their “cognitive talents” are called upon, no matter how mundane the task before them? I don’t know any people who I consider intelligent who function that way. And I would go even further and say that the fantasy of people functioning purely on the basis of rationality is a tiny bit autistic.
see, i know there should have been question marks in the comment above, but didn’t feel like spending the time for proofreading.
Secondary teachers seem to have the opposite bias, often perceiving students to be of lower ability and intelligence than they in fact are. Presumably, college educated teachers would be above the median in intelligence, so perhaps the difference is constant exposure to a truly average population. While teachers may have incentives to keep expectations low, the general underestimate of intelligence seems genuine.
Also, similar to Scott, I wonder whether participants were unable to answer these questions or simply could not be bothered to exert sufficient effort to do so in this setting.
It’s tricky without a rigorous definition of “intelligence,” but I think it’s fair to say that most of these pertain to the ability to pay attention rather than intelligence per se. I wouldn’t be surprised if making the questions more difficult/complicated at some margin also made them more interesting, less likely to be blown off, and more likely to be answered correctly.
This is a good mix of “real-life” tasks and “book-learning.” I think that the key point that surprises smart people is that reading a chart is a lot more difficult than filling out a phone message slip, which is a lot more difficult than reading a driver’s license. (ignoring the possibility people are more willing to do “real-life” tasks)
The place where this mix is lacking is inference, where the implication of Robin’s examples is that most people can’t do inference. I’d like to know what kinds they can do. The sample question search turns up two “inferential” questions that most people answer correctly. I wouldn’t describe AB71001 as inferential; it looks like an “application” question. I’m surprised that 2/3 of people can infer the meaning of the poem in AB41001. I’m also surprised that 2/3 of people process the graph in AB21501, which I’d call inference.
So people can do some inference, but I don’t see the pattern of what kinds they can do.
On AB21501, a pretty wide range of points was marked as correct. They had to mark the same or lower than WInder ‘84 to be marked wrong.
I admit I’m surprised by how stupid people are several times per week. I sometimes wonder why it’s so hard to change expectations enough instead of being continually surprised, and can think of two reasons:
1) People model others on themselves with imagined differences. I seem pretty silly from the inside – I can’t easily imagine a huge array of even greater stupidity below, so it’s hard to fix my intuitive model.
2) Smart people are comforting in the same way god is. The world seems dangerous, and the stupider people are the less I can trust others’ info and decisions. This scares me and makes me feel responsible, neither of which is welcome.
I’ve noticed that my reactions to stupidity tend to be more visceral when I’m exposed to it directly. I do find the above results somewhat surprising, but they don’t “hurt” like watching a video of their performance would.
Perhaps something like mirror neurons are involved? If it’s “painful” for someone to realize they’ve been or are being stupid, perhaps this same mechanism is triggered when attempting to model another’s cognitive processes. A built-in aversion to accurately modeling poor cognition certainly seems like it would produce biased expectations.
Some reasons why so many smart people think they’re the dumbest person in the room
..depends upon your definition of “stupid”.
Many of those “stupid” may just be illiterate, or merely illiterate in english ?
Does illiteracy = Stupidity (??)
According to the more recent 2003 U.S. NAAL (National Assessment of Adult Literacy) survey:
– 14% of U.S. residents are legally illiterate
– Another 29% have only rudimentary reading comprehension/skills… like being able to find a program in a TV guide
…. so, not the least bit surprising that a random sample of U.S. adults would have trouble with reading comprehension — since nearly half can’t really read.
Of course, the basic problem is the horror story of government {public} schools, especially for lower socio-economic groups. More than half of poor blacks/latinos can’t read by 4th Grade… with little or no improvement by 8th Grade.
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How do you infer that it is government schools that are to blame? As far as I know randomized studies in which disadvantaged children receive vouchers to be used toward private schools show no improvement.
In reply to Matthew C, I believe that what you refer to as “Machiavellian social intelligence” also draws on g. As one wag said “Life is an IQ test”. The standardized tests taken with pencil and paper are used because they do a good job of predicting how people will do in the larger test of life. Linda Gottfredson has studied the relevance of IQ to a wide variety of jobs and a similar relation always holds (although I think the correlation goes up for more cognitively demanding jobs).
It’s been my observation that people both underestimate and overestimate the intelligence/capabilities of those around them.
The standardized test examples are not really representative … one would have to be mentally retarded to lack the ability to perform the logical calculations required to answer correctly — so the deficit probably lies in the reading comprehension aspect.
Also, human intelligence falters significantly outside of the areas where it is regularly used .. even the brightest people (in their area of interest) can make some embarrassing logical errors when thinking about other things.
I do not find this at all astounding. First, I think many (most?) people overestimate others’ intelligence/competence because they overestimate their own intelligence/competence. I see no reason why “smart” people should be immune from this narcissistic overestimation of self. Second, there are many forms of “literacy,” of which the examples shown are a severely limited sample. For my part, I am constantly astounded and amused by the extent of financial illiteracy, which is limited to no particular social, economic, or intellectual demographic. I feel safe in asserting that many (most?) PhDs would struggle to balance their checkbooks, much less understand a financial derivative. By the same token, I am reliably assured that I myself am woefully ignorant of basic solid state physics. To each his or her own, n’est-ce pas?
People in academia, and people who read academics blogs, are people who have done very well in school and on certain kinds of tests. And they call doing well in school and on tests, “intelligence”.
If the “test” were to get a good looking woman in a bar to give them their phone number, I bet most of those “smart people” would do significantly worse than average.
This is only an anecdote, but I use my own experience as a possible illumination. When I was a young child under 8, I went to a public elementary school and did mediocre work. Between the ages of 9 and 12, I began to spend more time with a significantly overachieving peer group, and became much more interested in academic success. I started to read “Games” magazine, determined to figure out and beat the puzzles in it. My ability to solve math and logic problems and my grades in those classes soared. I started writing computer programs in BASIC (albeit mostly video games). By the time I went to college, my test scores were well beyond the 99th percentile.
I credit most of my ability to a desire to succeed in academic endeavours because of the example of one particular extremely bright friend. I could not countenance the idea of this friend being “smarter than me”, so I engaged fully with academic pursuits in order to make myself feel like a smart person. And so I became one, far beyond my own beliefs of what I could.
As an undergraduate, I became very close to the faculty in the department of my major (geology). Being close to them led me to learn, first hand, how the academic sausage is made.
It became indubitably clear that “intelligence” is not even a very important factor in success in academia (unless you mean by that a Machievellian social intelligence), and that primate coalitions were far more important to getting tenure. I would even say that IQ-intelligence is less important in academia than in the business world — the difference, of course, between being paid ultimately for meeting the bottom line vs. being paid by extracting taxpayer funds. . . In any event, I decided that since academia was about who you knew, who knew you and liked you, rather than how smart and correct your ideas are (and God help you if your ideas are before their time!), that I wanted nothing more to do with it. So I finished my bachelor’s degree and left it forever. . .
So I do not read about test results like this and say, smugly and self-congratulatingly to myself, “my, how brilliant I am, and how stupid are most everyone else”. After all, my “stupider” peers were getting laid all the time in high school and college, while I was getting laughed at. And they knew all the latest bands and artists, while I knew books like “Godel Escher Bach” and “The Panda’s Thumb”.
Just because someone is not interested in the same things you and I are, does not make them “stupid”.
Thanks for following up on reader demand!
Your link to the questions crashed my browser, but this works.
I have read that most people overestimate the physical fitness of other people, too, such as how many people are able to stand up from a seated position on the floor. Don’t know where to find hard data on that.
It’s hard to believe it really matters, though. I work in a low-to-medium-low IQ factory, having had standardized test scores in the 99th percentile all my life. The only way I can see people being stupid is when they do obviously inefficient things, like taking five separate trips instead of making five sets at once. But even then you can explain it as “she likes to keep a steady pace.”
Every once in a while someone will tell me something revealing like “Don’t tell them it’s 4-5/8 inches — say 4-3/4, it’s easier.” But as far as superior job performance, or grasping the concepts, or figuring out how management is lying to us, it’s hard to see any lack of intelligence at all.
I guess what I’m saying is if sorting is efficient, people can end up “just smart enough” and how they would do on an assessment of skills they don’t need doesn’t really matter.
The closer (in a life-focused way, not spatially) one gets to Washington DC, the dumber one becomes.
I wonder if that random sample of adults actually took the time to read the questions. I wouldn’t have; I’d have chosen random answers and then gone on with my day. It’s a matter of opportunity cost.
You are evil.
i like to think i’m smarter than the average bear (not the yankees’ berra – the hanna barbera bear) – and when you couple that with optimism as i am forever finding myself – then, you’re in for the occasional disappointment.
in the end, the most important aspect of communicating with anyone is that they understand you and vice versa – if you have done your best and someone has not understood your point or request – you are allowed to feel guilty for your own shortcomings or blame the other for their shortcomings.
…or start over and communicate. the cutoff point varies from individual to individual.
I find that smart people have had ample experience of the stupidity of others and have usually been rather isolated in early life when they had little control of who their associates were.
Smart people think of things that would work for them in terms of solutions to problems, explanations, what is interesting, what is an effective argument or stimulus to desirable outcomes and so on. There model of necessity begins with introspection.
Perhaps one other factor is that the world is a bit more frightening if you imagine most people are significantly more limited. While I am certainly not at the nosebleed peak of IQ my IQ is high enough that I was quite saddened to learn of it. I had rather hoped there were a lot more people smarter than I to carry the load that I felt so inadequate to handle.
When something comes very easily to you, it’s natural to assume it comes easily to others until you see hard proof to the contrary. Wouldn’t a person with perfect pitch imagine that others had it, until he confronted the surprising lack in a companion? And how often are our interactions precise enough to make this kind of discrepancy obvious?
I’d imagine that people who have to train others for a living pretty quickly figure this out, though, unless they’re given a pool to train that is very homogeneous and very similar in intelligence to themselves. If you take a bright person and ask him to train ten random assorted people in a task that seems fairly straightforward to him, he’ll notice that one of them gets it right away, some of the rest seem to be struggling surprisingly hard, and one can’t seem to grasp it no matter how hard he struggles to make it plain.
Presumably, college educated teachers would be above the median in intelligence
an unwarranted presumption. and education degree is what one gets if one is too stupid to get a degree in basket-weaving.
Interesting topic.
Another (slightly different) manifestation of this can be found in academic seminars, at least in my field (economics). Presenters often include very complicated maths in their slides, assuming that the audience can follow this. In my experience, even very smart people can usually not follow though.
The best presenters simplify their stuff as much as possible and give the audience a simple take-away message.
I attended two of the most famous and respected universities in the US – the sort of places that produce Nobel Prize winners on a regular basis. Now, as a professor at a B or C grade university, I am stunned by the low quality of my students.
However… although, sure, there may be a less “raw intelligence” in the student population, even the top students seem to lack curiosity and certainly lack ambition.
I wonder if ambition (as in, ambition to learn new things, master a field, make an intellectual contribution) is really the key difference.
Mark:
I went to a grade B undergradudate school. Many of the students there were miserable. Then I got an MBA at the University of Chicago. What a difference in student bodies. Welcome to the real world. I await your saying a large proportion of your students do not belong in college at all.