Category: Intelligence

Could one life choice hold the secret to lasting intelligence gains?

Each extra year in school gives a person between 1 and 5 extra IQ points.

The effects of extra schooling are so strong, they are still measurable when people are in their 70s and 80s.

It is well-known that intelligence and education are linked.

However, it has been difficult to prove that education causes higher intelligence.

The alternative is that more intelligent people just tend to stay in education longer.

Dr Stuart J. Ritchie, the study’s first author, said:

“Our analyses provide the strongest evidence yet that education raises intelligence test scores.

We looked at 42 datasets using several different research designs and found that, overall, adding an extra year of schooling in this way improved people’s IQ scores by between 1 and 5 points.”

The research took advantage of ‘natural’ experiments to reach the conclusion that education does cause higher intelligence.

For example, in the 1960s Norway increased the amount of compulsory education by two years.

The researchers then compared people either side of the cut-off to see how it affected their IQ.

Dr Ritchie said:

“The most surprising thing was how long-lasting the effects seemed to be, appearing even for people who completed intelligence tests in their 70s and 80s.

Something about that educational boost seemed to be beneficial right across the lifespan.”

Many other different types of studies were included in the meta-analysis, which contained over half a million participants from 42 data sets.

Dr Ritchie said:

“A crucial next step will be to uncover the mechanisms of these educational effects on intelligence in order to inform educational policy and practice.”

The study was published in the journal Psychological Science (Ritchie et al., 2018).

People with high IQs tend to share this quality.

More intelligent people tend to follow rules and be less aggressive and better behaved.

People with higher IQs are also less likely to cheat and steal.

Young people with lower IQs, though, are more likely to take part in antisocial behaviour, such as harassing or alarming others.

Boys who are antisocial have an average IQ 10 points lower than their more social counterparts.

For antisocial girls, the IQ gap is 5 points lower than their more social peers.

The conclusions come from a study of more than 1,000 young people in the UK.

All were given tests of IQ and externalising behaviour.

For psychologists, externalising behaviour refers to physical aggression, flouting rules, stealing and cheating.

The results showed that fewer externalising behaviours were linked to higher IQ.

In contrast, those with lower IQs were at greater risk of antisocial behaviour.

The study’s authors write:

“Low IQ is a consistent risk factor for emergence and continuity of antisocial behavior across the life course in both prospective and cross-sectional studies, even when other relevant risk factors are statistically controlled.”

Genetic factors are likely important in the link, as well as situational factors, the authors write:

“…cognitive deficits might promote antisocial behavior if children with low IQs misunderstand rules, find it too difficult to negotiate conflict with words, find school frustrating, or become tracked with antisocial peers.”

The study was published in the Journal of Abnormal Psychology (Koenen et al., 2008).

The behaviour is linked to more white matter, the brain’s ‘superhighway’.

People who take calculated risks are likely to be smarter than average.

People making quick decisions and taking chances have more white matter in their brains.

White matter is sometimes called the ‘superhighway’ of the brain: it transmits signals and regulates communication.

The researchers were surprised by the result as they expected the exact opposite: that smarter people would spend more time evaluating the situation before making a decision.

Dr Dagfinn Moe, study co-author, explained:

“We expected to find that young men who spend time considering what they are going to do in a given risk situation would have more highly developed neural networks in their brains than those who make quick decisions and take chances.

This has been well documented in a series of studies, but our project revealed the complete opposite.”

The research involved young men playing a driving game.

The results showed that high-risk takers did not hesitate as long during the game.

Dr Moe thinks that the ability to take risks is under-appreciated by society at large:

“Daring and risk-willingness activate and challenge the brain’s capacity and contribute towards learning, coping strategies and development.

They can stimulate behaviour in the direction of higher levels of risk-taking in people already predisposed to adapt to cope optimally in such situations.

We must stop regarding daring and risk-willingness simply as undesirable and uncontrolled behaviour patterns.”

Seeking out challenges helps to stimulate the brain, which may be why risk-takers have more white matter.

Dr Moe said:

“All the positive brain chemicals respond under such conditions, promoting growth factors that contribute to the development of the robust neural networks that form the basis of our physical and mental skills.

The point here is that if you’re going to take risks, you have to have the required skills.

And these have to be learned.

Sadly, many fail during this learning process — with tragic consequences.

So this is why we’re wording our findings with a Darwinian slant — it takes brains to take risks.”

The study was published in the journal PLOS ONE (Vorobyev et al., 2015).

People with these two traits had higher crystallised intelligence.

Being open to new experiences and more extraverted are both linked to higher intelligence, research finds.

People who are open to experience tend to have a more active imagination, higher sensitivity to beauty and more intellectual curiosity, among other things.

Open people tend to retain general information better and they are also better at storing memories in the short term.

The results come from a survey of 381 people aged 19- to 89-years-old.

They were split into different groups depending on their cognitive performance.

The type of intelligence measured in the study is known as ‘crystallised’.

This refers to the ability to use learned information and is often tested through general knowledge and vocabulary.

In a twist to the findings, though, it turned out that some adults over 60 performed as well as younger people.

Among these people, it was being disagreeable that was linked to higher IQ.

Other research has also found that people who are highly intelligent tend to be independent and aloof.

The study’s authors conclude:

“The results also suggests that there are differences in personality–intelligence relationships between those who retain a normal level of overall cognitive ability in old age and those older adults who are cognitively superior.”

The study was published in the journal Personality and individual Differences (Baker & Bichsel, 2006).

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).

The common drink is linked to a higher level of education.

Smarter people are more likely to drink alcohol daily, research finds.

Better educated people are also more likely to have a drinking problem.

Higher grades in school at the age of just 5-years-old predict greater intake of alcohol many decades later.

Among women, there is an especially strong link between alcohol consumption and being highly educated.

The reason may be that middle-class lifestyles — accessible through education — are linked to more alcohol consumption.

It could also be because intelligent people often value novel things and are at a greater risk of getting bored.

The study’s authors write:

“The more educated women are, the more likely they are to drink alcohol on most days and to report having problems due to their drinking patterns

The better-educated appear to be the ones who engage the most in problematic patterns of alcohol consumption.”

The results come from a study that followed everyone born in the UK in one week in 1970.

Women with degrees were 86% more likely to drink on most days than those with less education, the study found.

Highly-educated women were 1.7 times more likely to have a drinking problem than the less well-educated.

The authors write:

“Both males and females who achieved high-level performance in test scores administered at ages five and 10 are significantly more likely to abuse alcohol than individuals who performed poorly on those tests.”

The link between alcohol consumption and education could come down to a range of factors, the authors write:

“Reasons for the positive association of education and drinking behaviours may include: a more intensive social life that encourages alcohol intake; a greater engagement into traditionally male spheres of life, a greater social acceptability of alcohol use and abuse; more exposure to alcohol use during formative years; and greater postponement of childbearing and its responsibilities among the better educated.”

The study was published in the journal Social Science and Medicine (Huerta & Borgonovi, 2010).