EVERY SPOKEN WORD
150 min read · 30,371 words- 0:00 – 3:25
The Intelligence Test
- CWChris Williamson
What was this study you did on intelligence?
- SGSpencer Greenberg
Yeah. So some people say that IQ is a pseudoscientific swindle and other people think it fully captures everything about your intelligence and says who you are as a person fundamentally. And y- as you probably know, there was a big replication crisis in social science where many studies failed to replicate and so we thought, "Hey, we can do our part by trying to replicate a lot of claims about IQ and intelligence." So we recruited over 3,000 people. We implemented 62 distinct intelligence tasks, which includes everything from, like, memorization, puzzle solving, math problems, spelling, reaction time, sort of everything you could possibly think about that you could do online automatically. And then, uh, we tested about 40 different claims that are made about intelligence and we checked if they held up.
- CWChris Williamson
Right. Yeah, the, it is... Intelligence is kind of like the barbell chalk and cheese. It's the, uh, how would you say? It's like the cognitive Rorschach test.
- SGSpencer Greenberg
(laughs)
- CWChris Williamson
It's like what do you... What... How you see it kind of tells me probably quite a lot about your priors coming into it. You're right. It's either the fundamental underpinning that explains all of the outcomes that you're going to get in life or it is a Nazi-ish policy that n- n- never had any basis in science and should be totally disbanded.
- SGSpencer Greenberg
Yeah. It's, it's pretty wild. And so the question is like, yeah, what's really true about it? To what extent does academia write about it? To what extent do the lay public write about it? And so we explored a bunch of those questions.
- CWChris Williamson
Why do you think... Even before we get into that, why do you think it's so contentious?
- SGSpencer Greenberg
Yeah. I think it's a few things. One, it does have a horrendous history. It was used, for example... Like, the idea of IQ or measuring intelligence was used for forced sterilization, so that's pretty horrible. I mean, the Nazis got into really s- some evil stuff around, you know, thinking about how intelligent people are and, and murdering people on that basis. Um, so I think that's part of it. I think another thing is, you know, everyone kind of thinks... It's like, yeah, it's good to be organized, but if someone says you're disorganized, it doesn't feel like it cuts to the bone, like, of who you are as a human or it doesn't make you subhuman, but I think some people feel this about intelligence. If you're told you're unintelligent, then it sort of, like, says you're bad in a kind of a fundamental way or you're lesser-
- CWChris Williamson
You're less of a person. Yeah.
- SGSpencer Greenberg
Exactly. And I think that's... You know. And I think, um... So I think it, it feels different.
- CWChris Williamson
That's interesting. Intelligence is very close to our sense of self in a way that the cleanliness of our cupboards, uh, or, like, our obsessiveness or something isn't quite so much.
- SGSpencer Greenberg
Yeah. And it's really interesting because having run many different studies on human psychology, we find there are some things people can report accurately about themselves and there's some things they can't. Like, for example, if you ask people how organized they are, they're pretty accurate actually. But if you ask people, "Are you intelligent?" (laughs) , not so, not so accurate. Like, they don't... Like, it's hard for people to self-assess because sort of everyone has to believe that they're intelligent, right? Um, or if you ask people how rational they are, they... it's not something they can self-assess. And so actually, one, uh, one kind of just funny finding, we asked people to estimate their own IQ and then our study was ap- able to get an accurate estimate of their IQ. And guess how related those two things are.
- CWChris Williamson
Uh, were people 50% right?
- SGSpencer Greenberg
Yeah. They... That's... Yeah. It turns out not even, right? The correlation was about .23. So yeah, people don't have a very accurate assessment. It's better than total random guessing, but not a very accurate assessment of their own intelligences, at least as, as far as IQ
- 3:25 – 7:19
What is IQ?
- SGSpencer Greenberg
is concerned.
- CWChris Williamson
Okay. Let's get into the different claims about IQ. Which ones held up, which ones totally fell apart under scrutiny?
- SGSpencer Greenberg
Totally. Well, should we talk about what I- IQ is maybe just to-
- CWChris Williamson
Yeah. Yeah, yeah, yeah.
- SGSpencer Greenberg
... to people-
- CWChris Williamson
Let's explain that.
- SGSpencer Greenberg
Yeah. I, like, what i- what is this thing, IQ, right? Because, uh, you know, if you really... If you wanna, really wanna say, "Well, IQ is intelligence," well, is that really the case, like, theoretically? And so we, uh, implemented these 62 distinct intelligence tasks, so each one's totally different. And then one simple question we can ask is, suppose you do well at one of the tasks, does it make you more likely to do well at the others? And it turns out, it's almost always the case that being better at one makes you more likely at the others, almost throughout all of the different 62 intelligence tasks. And this is a, this is a very strange finding. Like, this was a finding that we replicated that was... occurred early on in the history of IQ and it's not obvious that it would be the case. Like, for example, you can imagine a world where d- being good at math, this says nothing about how good you are at, let's say, vocabulary or spelling, right? But that's not the world we live in. There's something funny that's going on about humans where being good at one task makes you more likely to be good at the other tasks. And then IQ is kind of built on this observation. The idea of IQ is it's a measurement of this thing they call G, which is, stands for general intelligence, which is essentially what intelligence tasks have in common. So it's kind of the common stuff, so that if you can measure G using IQ, then you have a sense of how well p- will people do on a intelligence tasks in general.
- CWChris Williamson
How much truth is there in saying that G or IQ might be able to predict your ability to complete other tasks that measure the same thing, but it is not predictive of anything as soon as you step outside of the classroom, so to speak?
- SGSpencer Greenberg
Yeah. So that's a really good question. That's part of why we wanted to develop a really wide range of intelligence tasks. Like, so we didn't take a strong view on, "Well, what is intelligence?" We said, "Let's just implement everything we can kind of measure that could be reasonably said to be related to intelligence that we could do quickly on a computer." And so we find that almost all of them are, to at least some extent, predicted by IQ, right? However, what about things like you go, uh, you go study a small-scale culture where they do hunt- hunter-gathering activities. You know, is, is tracking an animal or being really good at, like, planting and picking, you know, the best fruit, is that really the IQ? I think we don't really know, right? So I think when you get to that kind of stuff, it's far enough away from what we're measuring on a computer that it's hard to say. Or take a phenomenal dancer that just has an incredible sense of where their body is and they can position it in exactly the way they have in their mind. Is that related to Q- IQ? I don't know. It's hard to measure that in a laboratory. So I don't think we can say that, that IQ is measure... is connected to every single thing that you might say involves intelligence, but I would say it's connected to almost everything you can measure in a lab, that you can quickly measure in a lab that, that connects to intelligence.
- CWChris Williamson
I would imagine as well in a increasingly brain-based as opposed to a brawn-based economy-... um, more of our life outside of the lab is actually going to look like tests inside of the lab.
- SGSpencer Greenberg
Yeah, and I, and I think a, a lot of it depends on sort of what career trajectory you're on, right? If you're a white-collar worker, like, I think that's gonna be true. If, you know, if you work, you know, building infrastructure physically, then, you know, maybe it's not true. So, you know, that and that, that right there is actually, actually a key thing to note that IQ tends to predict ability at certain kinds of things, and those kinds of things are much more relevant for some people's lives than other people's lives.
- CWChris Williamson
Hmm. Yeah, so IQ is more predictive for certain people than it is for others.
- SGSpencer Greenberg
Yeah, and actually, you find that. If you look at, uh, so IQ predicts job performance across a wide range of jobs, but if you look at what jobs it predicts job performance better, it turns out it's these higher complexity, more analytical type jobs that does a better job of predicting, r- rather than sort of maybe more physical jobs or, uh, or, or jobs that involve less sort of analytical
- 7:19 – 12:35
The Main Claims Around IQ
- SGSpencer Greenberg
thinking.
- CWChris Williamson
Okay. What were the sort of tests that you did to, to, this wide-ranging g- set of assessments? W- what did that consist of?
- SGSpencer Greenberg
Yeah, so things like memorization, uh, solving puzzles, guessing the next symbol in a sequence, like Raven's Matrix is, is a famous one. Um, spelling, vocabulary, e- we even had one on reaction time where we lo- we had a green square and we said, "As soon as it turns red, click." And literally, IQ is, uh, somewhat predictive of how quickly you click, which is kind of nuts.
- CWChris Williamson
All right. Okay.
- SGSpencer Greenberg
Uh, but funnily enough, people, f- funnily enough, IQ had a negative predictive ability with how fast people thought they would be at clicking. So people, people actually with higher IQs thought they had lower reaction times, even though they had somewhat better reaction times. (laughs)
- CWChris Williamson
Oh, that's interesting. Uh, well, yeah, we can, I guess we can get into the implications of people's self-re- perceived expectation and then what actually happened. Um, talk to me about the, the main claims around IQ. What were the ones... I mean, even going in, you must have had an idea where you thought, "Ah, feel like this is probably gonna get replication crisis'd," or there was stuff that was more surprising?
- SGSpencer Greenberg
Yeah, so we weren't sure because, you know, in some areas of social science, there's been really bad replication crisis where maybe like 40% of the papers just don't hold up if you redo the experiment, and that's pretty bad. Other areas, it's more solid, like in cognitive psychology where they're like having you look at, like, lines on a screen and, like, measuring really low level brain function. That stuff tends to hold up better. So, you know, where is IQ on that range? I would say overall, just, uh, like taking a bird's eye view, we did replicate a lot of the academic findings but, uh, but not es- not necessarily every single one of them. Um, but I think one of the sort of key things that, that's really important to understand about IQ is that if you look at these 62 intelligence tests, IQ captured about 40% of the variation in people's ability. In other words, you could, you could guess about 40% of how people would do, loosely speaking, based on their IQ. But that leaves 60%, which is really interesting. And some of that 60% is just random noise, right? Like, you know, w- what side of the bed you woke up on that morning, or did you misread the question, right? There's random noise in there. But there is a big chunk that IQ is not explaining. The interesting thing about that big chunk it's not explaining is it's idiosyncratic. It really depends on which task you're doing. So d- so for example, it's often perceived that people who are good at math are not good at verbal stuff and vice versa. You know, there's like the journalist versus scientist dichotomy.
- CWChris Williamson
The shape rotator versus the word cell.
- SGSpencer Greenberg
Exactly, and they're kind of at odds with each other. It turns out being a word cell is actually positively correlated with being a shape rotator.
- CWChris Williamson
(laughs)
- SGSpencer Greenberg
Right? But interestingly enough, if you control for IQ, you take people with the same IQ, some of them are better at word stuff and some are better at math stuff, and that's part of what's in that missing 60%. And so the model, the mental model I like to use for this that I think is really helpful is to think about three things. There's IQ, which is your ability at the things that intelligence has to have in common. Then there's your, your idiosyncratic aptitudes, like you might be more of a math person or more of a word person even compared to people of your own IQ. And for me, for example, I did my PhD in math. Like, I'm definitely a math person. You give me a word scramble and I'm like, "I have no idea." I'll start moving letters one by one trying to, you know, it's just ridiculous. I'm terrible at word scrambles, right? Um, and then the third thing, and this is really, really important, is skills. And skills are things we develop by practice, and skills can also increase our intelligence in a meaningful sense. So take for example someone who has never played chess before, all they know is the rules, and they have 140 IQ, and pit them against someone with 100 IQ who's played 10,000 hours. I mean, who's gonna win that chess match? I mean, clearly the person with 100 IQ is, with 10,000 hours experience is gonna absolutely wipe the floor with the higher IQ p- person. It's not even a question. And that's 'cause they developed the skill. And so if you think about it, if you want to make a mental model of being good at stuff, you've got your IQ, you've got your idiosyncratic abilities, which are, you know, you might be better at certain things than other things, which is probably based on a combination of genetics and also maybe your early in childhood environment and things like that. And then you've got your skills that you can, you know, you can get g- good at anything you want. And the really crazy thing in the IQ literature is that we know lots of ways that people get their IQ lowered. You know, you take too many head blows, that will lower your IQ. You get lead poisoning as a child, you know, if you lived with, like, lead paint. Um, you get malnutrition as a child, that will lower your IQ. Nobody's really figured out a good way to raise your IQ, which is kind of shocking.
- CWChris Williamson
Do you think there is any?
- SGSpencer Greenberg
Well, here, I, I think that it's theoretically possible. I don't think we know any good ways to do it. But I think there's something that makes that much less depressing than it sounds, 'cause it s- sounds depressing, right? Like, oh, you can't raise your-
- CWChris Williamson
You, you start at a number and it can only be subtracted from.
- SGSpencer Greenberg
Yeah. But here's the, here's the really fascinating thing. So what would it mean to raise your IQ? Well, it would mean, like let's say on our, on our 62 intelligence tasks, it would mean that if you, let's say, practiced one of those tasks, you'd get better at a bunch of the others or all of the others, right? That would-
- CWChris Williamson
As opposed to getting better at the specific one, which would be skill based.
- SGSpencer Greenberg
Exactly. So the, here's the, here's the reality. Nobody really knows how to raise your IQ, but you can get good at anything you want. You can improve your skill. So in, in a weird way, it doesn't matter. If you wanna get good at something, go practice it, develop a training routine. You will get better at it.... okay, maybe it won't generalize everything else, and that could ... You know, it would be nice if we lived in that world where it generalized everything else. But you can get good at anything. And so I think that, that is sort of what saves it, makes it not so depressing.
- 12:35 – 17:50
How Important is IQ?
- SGSpencer Greenberg
- CWChris Williamson
Okay. So do you come to think of IQ as foundational or fundamental in some way? Does it create a window or a bracket within which people's capacities sort of sit? It certainly seems ... And yeah, I think both of us have to be diplomatic when talking about IQ given its fettered past. Um, but-
- SGSpencer Greenberg
Absolutely.
- CWChris Williamson
... the rubber's gonna meet the road eventually. Um, just how important is IQ, is, I guess is my question.
- SGSpencer Greenberg
Yeah. So I think there's a couple of ways to answer this. So one way is say, "Well, it explains about 40% of the variation in people's ability at tasks." Okay, 40%. That's a big chunk but it's far from everything, right? Skill and individual aptitudes are gonna also play a big role, right? Okay. So that's one thing to think about. Another thing you could ask is, to what extent does it predict outcomes? And this is one of our, this is one of our results that most surprised me, that I've never seen anywhere else, is we actually pitted IQ against personality and said, if you take into account someone's personality traits, their Big Five personality, uh, which is five traits, openness, conscientiousness, extroversion, agreeableness, and neuroticism. You take those five traits, you try to predict outcomes, and you also try to predict outcomes with AQ. Which actually wins? Which is more predictive? What, what would you guess?
- CWChris Williamson
I would guess IQ.
- SGSpencer Greenberg
Yeah. So, um, I actually recently launched a YouTube channel w- and we made a video about this, IQ Versus Personality. The shocking thing to me was actually personality won on almost every one of the predictions, or it tied IQ. I don't think it lost on a single one. So whether it's GPA or income or education level, your personality actually mattered more overall, which is pretty fascinating, I think.
- CWChris Williamson
Why? What's the mechanism by which personality is beating IQ?
- SGSpencer Greenberg
I think it's hard to say. I mean, you could think about it in individual cases, right? Like, take something like education. Well, clearly having a higher IQ is gonna make it easier for you to perform well in school. But you know what else is gonna make it, you perform well in school? Conscientiousness. If you're organized, you're perfe- you know, a little bit perfectionistic but not too perfectionistic, you know, you always go to your classes on time, et cetera, versus the really, you know, smart person who just loafs around and doesn't try, right? So conscientiousness matters a lot. Um, also neuroticism can be dis- uh, disabling, right? If you have, if you have really terrible anxiety or really terrible depression, it's gonna make it hard to study potentially, be distracting. So you know, I think when we take these five personality forces together, they actually account for quite a lot.
- CWChris Williamson
Does this not just pass the buck to another area that is relatively immalleable, uh, given that people are ... I, I don't know how much people can change their personalities. I had David Robson on talking about a book of his, which was How Much You Can Change Your Personality, and the answer was, like, a bit, but not exclusively. Um, so y- is this any more hope-inspiring or does it simply sort of hedge against IQ being all that matters?
- SGSpencer Greenberg
Well, you know, it's interesting. I think, um, there's a lot of random dice that get rolled (laughs) when you're born, and not just in your genetics, but also your, your early childhood experiences, things like that. And I think we have to accept that, you know, there's a lot of, a lot of dice that get rolled, and they can really affect your life in a lot of ways, right? Um, I think a- an interesting analogy is like with basketball. Like, could you be like a 5'10" basketball player? Like, the answer is yes, but it's gonna be a lot harder, right? (laughs) And you know, they exist, but if you're, you know, 6'5", that's gonna help you a lot, and I think it's like that. Like, IQ and personality, they don't, they don't fully determine what will happen to you, but they make some things harder and they make some things easier. Um, but on the topic of change in personality, there's actually, I think there's a lot of, of room to, to kind of move things there. Doesn't necessarily mean you're gonna change your sort of fundamental core nature, but you can change a lot of your behaviors that give you a lot of the benefits. Um, for example, think conscientiousness, right? So systems like getting things done, that can sometimes take someone who's like just terrible in this, at, at being organized, and give them a system. And as long as they follow the system, actually, they can behave like a person who's much more conscientious. (laughs)
- CWChris Williamson
Oh, yeah, that's interesting. Uh, I suppose, you know, somebody who's high in neuroticism but chooses to spend a lot of time in sunlight or around friends or contributing to a job that they mean- that, that's meaningful to them, well, that's really gonna counter a lot of your neuroticism. Somebody who is very low in neuroticism but spends all of their time on their own and not exercising and eating poorly is going to display the sort of traits that somebody who is higher in neuroticism wouldn't do.
- SGSpencer Greenberg
Absolutely. That's gonna be a huge factor. And for neuroticism in particular, we actually have a lot of techniques that work pretty well, right? Like cognitive behavioral therapy has really good evidence for helping people with depression and anxiety, and so that's a good place to start. Um, and, and it doesn't necessarily mean you're gonna, you know, go from being a highly anxious person your whole life to not an anxious person. But yeah, it can really, it can actually reduce the symptoms quite a bit. Um, but I think the behavioral thing is huge. I mean, there's even some interesting experiments where they get people who are introverted to say, "Just pretend to be extroverted and just be more social for a couple weeks," and often they get a pickup in their mood. It doesn't apply to all introverts. Like, I think some introverts just fundamentally don't have a desire for social activity, but I think some introverts, it's more around shyness or feeling socially awkward. And I think when it's more of that kind of stuff, just acting extroverted, you might get some of the boosts as though
- 17:50 – 19:52
More Claims Around IQ
- SGSpencer Greenberg
you were an extrovert.
- CWChris Williamson
Okay. Uh, what about some of the other claims, uh, around IQ? What were some of the ones that got decapitated and some of the ones that held up?
- SGSpencer Greenberg
Yeah. So one theory about, um, IQ is Howard Gardner's multiple intelligences theory, which says there are like eight distinct types of intelligence, uh, you know, things like, uh, mathematical, linguistic-... you know, uh, interpersonal, et cetera. And, um, our data did not support that view. We couldn't test all of his claims or anything like that, but I would say it's, it's not really consistent with that. We find that sort of almost everything is inter- correlated with almost everything else, right? Whereas his theory is sort of like there are these distinct brain regions that do these distinct things. And, you know, I don't think it's, I don't think it's so true. Um, so that's one. Uh, we also had some, we had some funny ones that, uh, we replicated. So there was an academi- academic paper that claimed that, uh, people with lower IQs tend to have more pathological celebrity attitudes. So like, they think that if you, like, meet your favorite celebrity, they're gonna, like, really enjoy talking to you, or, or like you're gonna find that you and your favorite celebrity have all these deep, hidden connections. And yeah, we (laughs) actually did find that lower IQ people do believe that stuff. So... (laughs)
- CWChris Williamson
(laughs) Oh, God, that's like, that's such a culturally, uh, unfortunate, like inconvenient thing to find out. Oh, the proletariat, no, they, they're working in the mines all day and then going home and dreaming about this person on reality TV that they're gonna spend the rest of their life talking to about interesting things. It's like a, it's, it's very cliché in a to- totally-
- SGSpencer Greenberg
It's-
- CWChris Williamson
... tragic sort of way.
- SGSpencer Greenberg
... cliché, yeah. Another, another kind of, like, fascinating one, so there was a paper that claimed if you make up nonsense, nonsense phrases, like, you know, "The destiny of darkness is everything," or whatever, that, um, uh, people with higher IQ will be like, "Those are bullshit," where people with lower IQ would be more likely to be like, "Oh, that's profound." And we actually replicated that. Indeed, um, people with lower IQ tend to find these nonsense statements more profound.
- CWChris Williamson
Oh, that's interesting. What,
- 19:52 – 22:25
Can a High IQ Be a Disadvantage?
- CWChris Williamson
what were some of the, or were there any disadvantages of higher IQ? Was it predictive in some way of things that were usually undesirable?
- SGSpencer Greenberg
You know what's funny about that? So I, I, uh, I ask a question of the week every week on my social media, like on Twitter. And one of my questions of the week was, "What do you think, uh, like more intelligent people, like, are worse at, or what, what, what disadvantages do they have?"
- CWChris Williamson
Mm-hmm.
- SGSpencer Greenberg
And people had, like, all kinds of theories, like, you know, so many different theories. And the reality is, like, almost none of them hold up. Like, it's just a weird, it's a weird thing. Like, the, I would say the best evidence of what is bad about having a high IQ is you might be more likely to be nearsighted, and that's probably because of, like, behavior stuff that people, you know, maybe from their face in a book, I don't know. (laughs) I don't know exactly what it... or used to staring at screens. Um, the other thing is that they may be more prone to loneliness, like especially as children. Uh, like I do think that there can be some sense of, like, you know, if you're m- much higher IQ than the people around you, it might be a little bit isolating when you're...
- CWChris Williamson
Mm-hmm.
- SGSpencer Greenberg
But I think when people become adults they, like, find people that they connect with. But-
- CWChris Williamson
You can broaden your pool of people that you can hang out with and also find other high IQ freaks.
- SGSpencer Greenberg
Yeah, e- e- exactly. And you know what's actually has made the, the field very confused for a long time? Like, there were a bunch of studies looking at Mensa and discovering all these negative things about having high IQ, but it turns out there seems to be, at least the evidence seems to suggest, there's some kind of negative self-selection. Like, if you identify yourself as a high IQ person, that's probably really (laughs) not a good sign. Like, he- (laughs) just having a high IQ is, is not a bad thing, but think, making that a major part of your identity, uh, probably not, not a healthy way to live.
- CWChris Williamson
I wonder whether that is, uh, negatively predictive of having a high IQ as well. What, w- what did, what, what did you find out there? What did you find out about peoples' ability to self-assess compared with what came up in the data?
- SGSpencer Greenberg
Yeah, so people, yeah, so we, we replicated a general finding that people with higher IQ do believe they have higher IQ, but not very much. Like, there's a very, very, very low correlations. Like a, I think it was about .23 in our study. So people didn't, were not very good at self-assessing, but they were better than random chance. But I think, you know, I, I do wanna just emphasize that IQ is very far from destiny, right? Like, you can develop any skills you want. You can keep getting better and better at them. IQ might make it harder. It's like the going back to basketball analogy, right?
- CWChris Williamson
Mm-hmm.
- SGSpencer Greenberg
It's like height in basketball. Like, it can make it harder based on your starting IQ. But you, if you lean into your, you know, idiosyncratic aptitudes, the things you tend to be better at, and you develop your skills, you build good training programs, you can get better at sort of pretty much anything. So just, yeah, I, I really do want people to keep that in mind.
- 22:25 – 35:20
Are IQ and Happiness Correlated?
- SGSpencer Greenberg
- CWChris Williamson
Let's say that there was a way to improve the IQ of everybody. Uh, would that be the sort of thing that, on average, is likely to improve life quality for all of the people who got it?
- SGSpencer Greenberg
Well, see this is really fascinating. What do you think the relationship between IQ is and happiness or life satisfaction?
- CWChris Williamson
Positive?
- SGSpencer Greenberg
You, i- i- you've gotta, it's gotta be positive, right? But it's not. This is, it's insane.
- CWChris Williamson
Oh, for fuck's sake.
- SGSpencer Greenberg
It's not. It's crazy. Like, and it's almost unbelievable, 'cause it's like, well surely IQ should at least give you more optionality, like, you know, open up more possibilities-
- CWChris Williamson
Mm-hmm.
- SGSpencer Greenberg
... help you do better in school. It's crazy. It's not, it's not correlated with life satisfaction or happiness, or moment-to-moment happiness. And this is our finding. It's also a finding of others. And it's a, it, honestly, I view it as, like, this incredible mystery I hope someone figures out. It sugge- uh, to me it suggests that there's something that higher IQ people are doing that, like, tend to make their life worse (laughs) , and I don't know what that thing is, whether it's like they're taking on more stress or whatever. I'll tell you another, like-
- CWChris Williamson
So is it-
- SGSpencer Greenberg
Yeah, go ahead.
- CWChris Williamson
Is it not, it's, it's not correlated, or it's-
- SGSpencer Greenberg
No correlation.
- CWChris Williamson
... negatively correlated?
- SGSpencer Greenberg
No, no corre- no correlation, zero correlation.
- CWChris Williamson
Right, okay. But if we assume that the objective life outcomes of somebody who's higher IQ is better, right? They're-
- SGSpencer Greenberg
Yeah, well, they tend to have higher income. They tend to have more
- CWChris Williamson
... yeah, socioeconomic, they're less li- less likely-
- SGSpencer Greenberg
Yeah.
- CWChris Williamson
... to go to jail. They're more likely to complete college. They're less likely to be a single parent. They're more likely to stay in a marriage. Um, I've, I've just made a ton of fucking predictions, m- many of which may be incorrect there, but sh- I, I read it once on the internet. Um, so w- even if it's not predictive at all in terms of life satisfaction and happiness, those things you would assume would be...... right? Income, uh, uh, poverty is associated with a lot of stresses that probably don't make people particularly happy, et cetera, et cetera.
- SGSpencer Greenberg
100%. Poverty is definitely associated with lower life satisfaction.
- CWChris Williamson
So, in order for it to be, uh, not correlated at all, you're having to compensate for some of these, uh, "better" life outcomes that are predicted by IQ, uh, so that actually kind of does suggest that there is some kind of break being applied, not just that you're coasting with it, not just that, that it's totally impartial, but that it is actually applying some sort of, um, negative multiplier to the life that you've got. Is that a fair way ... Am I talking bollocks here?
- SGSpencer Greenberg
Yeah. No, no, you're completely right. There's something ... And, and I, I say this is really a genuine mystery. Like I do not think we, as a society, know the answer to this because everything points to the fact that it should give you a h- higher life satisfaction, higher happiness, but it doesn't.
- CWChris Williamson
Mm-hmm.
- SGSpencer Greenberg
So there's some, some factor we're missing that kind of explains this. (laughs) And, uh, hopefully, one day, we'll, someone will figure it out. I'll tell you, like e- even more baffling thing we found. We asked people to what extent they had achieved their li- their, their like, their life goals, no correlation with IQ. Like so which, which ... And it's especially odd because we know that people with higher IQs are like-
- CWChris Williamson
Achievement.
- SGSpencer Greenberg
... better at achieving certain kinds of goals, right? And so it, it suggests that people's view of like what is a good life or what are the goals that they have are-
- CWChris Williamson
Mm-hmm.
- SGSpencer Greenberg
... you know, must, it must change based on-
- CWChris Williamson
Expectation?
- 35:20 – 36:31
What Does the Future of IQ Research Look Like?
- SGSpencer Greenberg
- CWChris Williamson
What do you think the future of IQ research, IQ discussion looks like?
- SGSpencer Greenberg
It's a good question. Um, I mean, I do think there are a lot of things that are on solid footing. Like, I was... It was nice to see that because we, we've replicated studies in other areas where we see really big problems, right? We have a project called Transparent Replications where when new papers come out in top psychology journals, we'll use a random number generator to pick some of them. We go take the study, we redo it from scratch, rerun it on a new population and see if it holds up and analyze it carefully and release a report. Um, and we find a bunch of really serious problems. So, at least it's good to see that science is, like, largely functioning properly.
- CWChris Williamson
Mm-hmm.
- SGSpencer Greenberg
You know, we got... A lot of the stuff did, did seem to hold up. Um, I would love to see more research on, uh, can you raise IQ 'cause that would be really, really cool-
- CWChris Williamson
Mm-hmm.
- SGSpencer Greenberg
... if we could test lots and lots of different methods. Like, I'd love to see a study that, like, you know, gets 25 different researchers to come up with ideas of how you might...... train at something that helps you with everything, right? It improves your skill at everything.
- CWChris Williamson
Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm.
- SGSpencer Greenberg
And, and like, just test them all, you know? 'Cause there's been some efforts in this and they haven't gone well, but it doesn't mean there's not some way to do it that we just haven't figured out yet.
- CWChris Williamson
Fascinating
- 36:31 – 55:07
Deep Dive into Imposter Syndrome
- CWChris Williamson
stuff. All right, what have you learned about impostor syndrome?
- SGSpencer Greenberg
Yeah. Oh, just one more last thing about, um, IQ and intelligence. If you're interested in this topic, we released a giant report with all of our findings, all the 40 different claims we tested. It's on our website, clearerthinking.org. Um, so you can check that out.
- CWChris Williamson
Dude, everyone-
- SGSpencer Greenberg
And also-
- CWChris Williamson
Everyone needs to check out-
- SGSpencer Greenberg
Go ahead.
- CWChris Williamson
... all of the shit that you're doing. I, I love, I love the podcast.
- SGSpencer Greenberg
Um-
- CWChris Williamson
I love the blog. I love your articles as well. Um, everything.
- SGSpencer Greenberg
Oh, thank you.
- CWChris Williamson
It'll get linked.
- SGSpencer Greenberg
Thank you so much. Yeah, I appreciate that. Yeah, so the podcast is Clearer Thinking with Spencer Greenberg. Every week I invite on someone I think is brilliant to discuss four ideas. So yeah, I'd love for you to check that out. Cool. So yes, impostor syndrome. Uh, so this is something that we deep dived in. We, what we did is, this is kind of the style of our work a lot of times, we took all the different scales to measure impostor syndrome, we put them together, we ran a big study testing them all simultaneously, and then we analyzed it to figure out sort of what are the core components of impostor syndrome and what is it related to? And so for those who don't know, impostor syndrome is basically when you're someone who's skilled but you believe that all your success, it was just lucky and that you're somehow secretly a fraud and that you don't really have the skills that people think. And, um, and so we found... So in analyzing all these different ways of, you know, kind of measuring impostor syndrome, two of the, the questions that were most predictive of it were, "When I achieve results that are praised, I worry that I might not be able to fulfill that person's expectations in the future." So if that's something that you resonate with-
- CWChris Williamson
Mm-hmm.
- SGSpencer Greenberg
... you might have impostor syndrome.
- CWChris Williamson
Mm-hmm.
- SGSpencer Greenberg
And another one was, "I'm afraid others will discover to the extent to which I lack knowledge or ability." Um, so you feel like you're keeping this secret of the, your incapability.
- CWChris Williamson
So both of these, both of these are, uh, in relation to others?
- SGSpencer Greenberg
Yeah, 'cause a lot of it is, is feeling like people's beliefs about you don't match the reality. Like, "Oh, people think I'm really successful, but like if they only knew," or-
- CWChris Williamson
Mm-hmm.
- SGSpencer Greenberg
... you know, "People think I'm talented, but if they only knew." There's a, there's an amazing quote from Tom Hanks. Uh, he said... Let, let me just read this 'cause it's so good. "No matter what we've done, there comes a point where you think, 'How did I get here? When are they gonna discover that I am in fact a fraud and take everything away from me?'" I mean, that's Tom Hanks, right?
- CWChris Williamson
(laughs) Yeah, Woody. Um, so it's an interesting question around the higher someone's praise, the, the, this sense that that is now an obligation to meet it again in future. And I have to assume that that's because if you feel like your successes are, um, by chance and that you don't have quite as much control or agency over the outcomes at this kind of a level, that every new success is not a cause for celebration, it's simply a higher bar to fall from next time. And-
- SGSpencer Greenberg
Yeah, 'cause if you, if you go below that, oh, now you're, you know, you're in decline.
- CWChris Williamson
... oh, they're gonna find out. And that plays into your, precisely the concern that you have. So that's very interesting, this sort of... And I, I imagine that that's, it's gonna be tied in with status. Did you see, was this at all, um, like intrasexual competition, intersexual competition, status anxiety? Was it related to that at all?
- SGSpencer Greenberg
Well, interestingly enough, early on in the research, people believed that it was mostly women that had impostor syndrome, but then they discovered (laughs) actually men have a ton of it too. So now it's the thought that actually it's like maybe about equal in genders. Maybe slightly more women, but, but like roughly equal. And like it's, it's hard to say who exactly has impostor syndrome for two reasons. One, because it depends on where you draw the line, right? Like at what... You have to pick some point of the line where you say that person has impostor syndrome, but the person just below them doesn't. So it's arbitrary. And the, the other thing is, there obviously can be people who genuinely just lack skill and people think they're skilled and they're not, right?
- CWChris Williamson
(laughs) Yeah. Maybe you have impostor syndrome or maybe you're just shit at your job.
- SGSpencer Greenberg
Well, and the problem is that the people with impostor syndrome think that they're that person. They're like, "No, that's me. You're talking about me. Those other people have impostor syndrome. I just suck," right? (laughs)
- CWChris Williamson
Fuck, that's interesting. Okay, so how common is impostor syndrome?
- SGSpencer Greenberg
Yeah. So you get a wide range of estimates. Typically, the estimates are 20% to 60%. I know that's an enormous range-
- CWChris Williamson
Yep.
- SGSpencer Greenberg
... but it depends on these factors like where do we draw the line and like how do we know who really, who really has it. But yeah, it's, it's extremely common. It's like ridiculously common.
- 55:07 – 1:02:22
Re-examining the Dunning-Kruger Effect
- CWChris Williamson
You reexamined the Dunning-Kruger effect as well. Like, we're just-
- SGSpencer Greenberg
Wow.
- CWChris Williamson
... going through and decapitating all of the-
- SGSpencer Greenberg
(laughs)
- CWChris Williamson
... sort of, uh, interesting psychological insights over the last few decades.
- SGSpencer Greenberg
Yeah, the Dunning-Kruger one is, it's a little hard to explain, but I think it's really fascinating. So just for those who are not as familiar, the basic Dunning-Kruger effect is the idea that people who have low performance or low skill or low intelligence tend to overestimate their abilities. And the original explanation is that it's because they, they know so little that they don't even know how to evaluate, right? They're so, they're so unskilled they can't even evaluate skill, so they think they're better than they are, right? So that's the basic idea. Sometimes in modern usage people also mean the opposite, that people who are high skill tend to underestimate their ability-
- CWChris Williamson
Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm.
- SGSpencer Greenberg
... so you could also think about a Dunning-Kruger-like effect, right?
- CWChris Williamson
Mm-hmm.
- SGSpencer Greenberg
So we've got those two things to explain. And if you look at the original research, the way that they essentially prove, proved the Dunning-Kruger effect is they'll make these plots of people's actual skill versus their perceived skill, and they'll show that there's a gap where people who are lower in skill are over- overshooting their, their predictions about themselves, and people who are higher in skill are undershooting it, believe they're not as good as they really are, right? And they say, "Look, there's an effect." And so we set about to replicate this, but also we ran a bunch of simulations to try to really understand, like, what produces those plots.
- CWChris Williamson
Hmm.
- SGSpencer Greenberg
And we found two really crazy things. The first crazy thing is that it turns out you can get those plots that look exactly the same as, like, the original Dunning-Kruger studies with nothing to do with human psychology. It turns out if you u- if you're- you've gotta measure skill using something, right? You give people a test or something, right? If you measure skill with something that has a decent amount of noise or error, right? 'Cause you, you know, you v- you give people a vocab test, well, you know there's some noise in it, right? It's not a perfect measure of someone's vocabulary, right? You- there's some choice of what questions to ask. And so it, so it's somewhat noisy, right? So you have this imperfect measure, you get a Dunning-Kruger plot. The, the noise actually causes that effect, uh, where people who have low- who you s- you think have lower ability tend to overestimate their ability.
- CWChris Williamson
Okay.
- SGSpencer Greenberg
And the reason it... Yeah, it's a little bit subtle, but the reason is because ... So you don't know someone's true ability, right? Like, how would you know? All you know is someone's measured ability. But measured ability is true ability plus noise. So think about someone who was unlucky on the test. Like, they performed worse than their true ability.
- CWChris Williamson
Oh.
- SGSpencer Greenberg
So they're gonna overestimate, they're gonna appear- look like they overestimated their ability.
- CWChris Williamson
Right.
- SGSpencer Greenberg
But actually they were just unlucky.
- CWChris Williamson
Oh. Wow, that's so interesting. Holy shit. Yeah, so both groups are maybe accurately perceiving their what should have been their expected level of output, but due to noise or luck or chance or a good night's sleep or a bad night's sleep or a crying baby or whatever, they didn't show up as themselves, and that resulted in a disparity between what should have happened that they predicted and what did happen that they didn't predict.
- SGSpencer Greenberg
Exactly. And if anyone wants to deep dive on this, on my YouTube channel, Spencer Greenberg, we've got a video that, like, breaks this down. But yeah, exa- exactly. And so in order to really say there's a Dunning-Kruger effect, you actually have to have a test with incredibly little noise, as like a really, really accurate measure-
- CWChris Williamson
Hmm.
- SGSpencer Greenberg
... to protect against this. And that's really hard to do, right? It's, like, hard to build such a good test of almost anything. So, so that's the first problem. It's like, well, we can't, it's hard to even show that it's not just a mathematical artifact. But here's a potentially even bigger problem. Turns out perfectly rational agents also get a Dunning-Kruger effect.
- CWChris Williamson
Okay. Explain that to me.
- SGSpencer Greenberg
Yeah. So it seems weird, right? Okay. So suppose you're doing a new skill you've never done before. You've, like, you've no idea how good you are, and you're competing against people who've also never done it before. What would you estimate your percentile to be?
- CWChris Williamson
Uh, fuck knows. I d- I guess it would depend on th- g- analogous other things that I'd done that were kind of similar to it in the past, and I'd try and predict that.
- SGSpencer Greenberg
Yeah. So if you had analogous things, exactly, you'd try to predict it based on that. But let's say you had nothing analogous, right? You're like, "Well, what percentile?"
- CWChris Williamson
I- I v- (laughs) have no idea. I have no idea.
- SGSpencer Greenberg
Well, let's say, would you put your, like, would you put yourself at 99th percentile?
- CWChris Williamson
No. Absolut- absolutely not.
- SGSpencer Greenberg
Right. Would you put yourself at 1st?
- 1:02:22 – 1:06:14
Deciding Your Own Attractiveness Level
- SGSpencer Greenberg
- CWChris Williamson
With the attractiveness thing, I get the sense, as opposed to something that's more skill-based, uh, I think there is a, there's gonna be a huge amount of sort of white-coat syndrome or whatever the equivalent is of like, "Oh, God," like, who says it about themselves that they're an 8 out of 10? I- I'd better say a 7.
- SGSpencer Greenberg
True, but even that, these are anonymous surveys. So yeah, I agree. Like, definitely, definitely if you're being interviewed, yeah, but most people would, like, they don't wanna seem arrogant. But even in-
- CWChris Williamson
Some social desirability bullshit going on. Yeah. I don't know.
- SGSpencer Greenberg
Yeah.
- CWChris Williamson
I- m- well, I mean, maybe that's just... I, I, I get the sense that maybe with things like self-rated attractiveness, um, it is so enmeshed socially that even if you do, it's anonymous, no one's ever gonna see, the metadata's been wiped, we don't know your IP address. Um, it, there's just (laughs) this sort of w- I, it feels like someone's watching you over your shoulder when you think about doing that.
- SGSpencer Greenberg
Well, you know what's so strange, is that people tend to self-assess by attractiveness. So they must (laughs) , on some implicit level-
- CWChris Williamson
Yep.
- SGSpencer Greenberg
... have a sense of their attractiveness, right? Like, I mean, like, how often when people date are they dating someone who's, like, pretty close to their attractiveness? Like, it's usually
- NANarrator
Mm-hmm.
- CWChris Williamson
It's almost always.
- SGSpencer Greenberg
'Cause it's, it's-
- CWChris Williamson
It's almost always. Even in, even in relationships that are w- supposedly looks-for-wealth trades, even when you've got the sugar daddy with the Playboy model, like, m- most of the time when you actually look at those relationships, they actually end up s- starting to match in terms of attractiveness. Cian Murphy did a, a, a great breakdown about this. It is Species podcast, he's great. And, um, yeah, it was, it, it, it's fascinating. It's really, really fascinating that y- people just seem... So I have a, I have a really, really spicy theory about this actually, which is, pff, um, one of the reasons that... There's many, many, many, many reasons about why people aren't coupling up. One of the spicier ones that I've got is that with increasing levels of obesity, with calorie-rich foods and hyper-palatable, hyper-processed stuff going everywhere, everybody is becoming a little bit bigger. And there has to be a line below which, even if you are also a three, a three just isn't that attractive to you. And I wonder whether there's kind of a lower-
- SGSpencer Greenberg
Hm.
- CWChris Williamson
... a lower bracket to attractiveness that people are just not prepared, or they're less prepared, let's say, uh, to, uh, to get into a relationship with, even if that's your level. Like, but then there's also this sort of a lagging indicator of where you know that you should be. "Well, that's not who I am underneath." Like, "I've gained weight a little bit recently, but they've really gained weight." And it's like, "No, dude. You've gained the same amount of weight that she has," or whatever. Um, but yeah, I, I, uh, I think it's fascinating to see what happens if you... And I guess body weight is probably one of the reliable ways that you could step in and adjust, uh, levels of desirability kind of population-wide. That's not to say that you can't have people that are bigger that aren't beautiful, but you know what I mean in terms of desirability. Uh, it's just, what are some of the things that have happened across the board? Like, I don't know, if the ozone layer, uh, above America got disintegrated and everybody had leathery skin or something like that. Like, what, what's something that's happening on a relatively sort of global, at least like population-wide level, that's impacting, um, a- appearance? And this is one of the, I guess, interventions, unfortunate, uh, experiments that's kind of being run.
- SGSpencer Greenberg
So it's like m- it's like decreasing baseline how attractive people are to each other. That's-
- CWChris Williamson
Across the board.
- SGSpencer Greenberg
... that's interesting. You know, um, Eila, the sex researcher, did a really interesting study, uh, where she found she could get people to more accurately indicate their own attractiveness level by having them compare themselves to people of their own gender. So she actually developed a scale of faces that were, like, people were, you know, faces where people rated them a- a one, on average, two, a three, a four. And then she said, "Where do you ra- rank, like, rank yourself against these faces?"
- CWChris Williamson
Mm-hmm.
- SGSpencer Greenberg
And then people were actually more accurate than when they had to put it on, like, an objective scale themselves.
- CWChris Williamson
Hmm.
- 1:06:14 – 1:16:56
Misunderstandings About Personality Disorders
- CWChris Williamson
Okay. What do people consistently get wrong about personality disorders? You mentioned earlier on about narcissism and BPD, stuff like that. Where, where do we not understand personality disorders very well?
- SGSpencer Greenberg
Yeah, great question. Um, so this is something I've been deep-diving a lot on recently. I actually did a series of interviews for my podcast with a narcissist, a sociopath, uh, someone with borderline. Um, so it, just search Clear Thinking on your podcast app if you wanna check that out. But, um, I think it's actually, like, a surprisingly important topic because almost certainly, unless you're, like, really kind of a hermit, you know people with personality disorders, right? So if we think about even just three personality disorders, we think narcissistic personality disorder, um-... antisocial personality disorder, also, like, known as sociopathy casually and, uh, borderline. Like, each of them is, is estimated to be more than 1% of the population. So, you know, you know 100 people. (laughs) You, you know, there's a good chance you know someone with one or more personality disorder. And I think they also... Well, they're... Absolutely, people with personality disorders are good people and not harmful. These, they tend to have, have an elevated risk of causing harm to others, like a very substantially elevated risk, especially if you end up in a romantic relationship or a business relationship or they're your best friend or that kind of thing, or family member. So, I think it is useful and important to understand these disorders. Um, I think the first, like, big misconception is that people confuse, like, traits with the disorders. You know, people think... You know, a lot of people will be like, "Oh, my ex-partner was a narcissist," or, "My boss is a narcissist," or, "My boss is a sociopath," or whatever. And I think it's important to understand that, like, these are, these are trait-based things, right? That narcissism is a trait, grandiosity is a trait, you know, manipulativeness is a trait. And so everyone kind of is somewhere on the spectrum of these traits. And most people who are, like, somewhat narcissistic or somewhat, you know, manipulative are not... They don't have the disorder. And I think that's... So, I think on the fir- on the one hand, they're, like, often overdiagnosed. Like, people are, like, accusing others of having them when they usually don't. On the other hand, the people that do have them often go overlooked, and, like, people actually don't realize that they have them, and that sometimes comes at incredible cost.
- CWChris Williamson
Hmm. So they're both being, uh, overdiagnosed and underdiagnosed at the same time.
- SGSpencer Greenberg
Exactly. Exactly. And, you know, I think, uh, one thing that contributes a little bit here, if you think about, let's say, someone with, uh, narcissistic personality disorder, if you really get to the core of, like, their underlying motivations, which is how I like to think about it, I think what they're really driving towards fundamentally is attention and admiration as sort of, like, their highest value or drive and, uh, and thinking of themselves as special and better than other people. And if you think about it that way, you realize that their behaviors are not necessarily what people would expect of a narcissist. Uh, so let me give you an example. Suppose that someone says, "Hey, Chris, uh, that's a really cool watch. Like, I really like it. Where did you get it," right? You might, you might think of that as sort of, like, a nice thing to say, right? An altruistic kind of thing to say. But what do you think is likely to happen after someone gives you... Let's suppose you, like, actually care about your watch, right? Like, what do you think is likely to happen after that?
- CWChris Williamson
Hmm. You care about your watch more. You tell them. Maybe they go and buy it as well.
- SGSpencer Greenberg
Yeah. So that's on your side, but also, like, you probably feel kind of good about that person, right? That's like a nice thing.
- CWChris Williamson
Oh, of course. Yeah. Pro-social, "What a lovely compliment. Thanks, Spencer. Yeah. I, I love this watch. I'm glad that you notice."
- SGSpencer Greenberg
And, and how do you think that affects the likelihood that you compliment them later?
- CWChris Williamson
Ah, yes. Yes, yes, yes. So it's this sort of reciprocal debt that you need to pay.
- SGSpencer Greenberg
Exactly. Because they love admiration and attention and feeling special. So, if they give-
- CWChris Williamson
So if they're flattering, even, even though that doesn't seem like the sort of thing that somebody who is a narcissist would do, flattery is a tool that they can use to reciprocally get that back.
- SGSpencer Greenberg
Yes. And I think it's useful to think of, like, obviously, people have different skill levels, but it's, it's useful to think of a lot of people with narcissistic personality disorder as experts in getting admiration and attention. So, they're not using... Like, some of them use really, like, crude methods or just brag, you know, really boldly and, you know, and obnoxiously, but they're experts in getting admiration and attention. So they do sly, subtle things. They give you really nice compliments that make you feel special and make you like them and then make you give them a compliment later, right? I'll give you, I'll give you another example. My friend was dating, um, a narcissist, and, uh, we were talking about him, and she's like, "You know, it's..." I mean, he was just textbook, like everything, you know, clearly a narcissist, but she was saying, "You know, the thing is that, like, I felt like he wasn't a narcissist because he would give away all this money anonymously to charity." And I was like, "That's really interesting. How did you know about that?" (laughs) So, he would literally constantly brag about his anonymous donations, so... But it worked.
Episode duration: 1:26:07
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