How your sense of humour, what time you go to bed and your curiosity reveal your intelligence.
Being curious, staying up late and having a dark sense of humour are all signs of a high IQ, psychological research finds.
People who are curious ask lots of questions, look for surprises, seek out sensations and make time to search out new ideas, a study finds.
Intelligence, along with curiosity and some personality factors, predicts successful performance in many areas.
Night owl
Being a night owl, meanwhile, is linked to stronger reasoning and better analytical and conceptual thinking.
Night owls prefer to stay up late at night and rise later in the morning.
Around one-third of the population are night owls, with one-quarter preferring to rise early.
The remainder fall somewhere in between, being neither early risers nor late sleepers.
Dark humour
Liking dark humour is a sign of higher intelligence, research finds.
Dark humour, the study’s authors write, is:
“…a kind of humour that treats sinister subjects like death, disease, deformity, handicap or warfare with bitter amusement and presents such tragic, distressing or morbid topics in humorous terms.
Black humour, often called grotesque, morbid, gallows or sick humour, is used to express the absurdity, insensitivity, paradox and cruelty of the modern world.
Characters or situations are usually exaggerated far beyond the limits of normal satire or irony, potentially requiring increased cognitive efforts to get the joke.”
Surprisingly, though, people who like dark humour feel the least aggressive towards others.
In other words, it is not aggressive people who like sick jokes.
Dark humour, it seems, is more difficult to enjoy without higher intelligence.
The study was published in the journals Perspectives on Psychological Science, Personality and Individual Differences & Cognitive Processing (Díaz-Morales & Escribano, 2013; von Stumm et al., 2011; Willinger et al., 2017).
