Your Spidey sense should tingle whenever you read about a psychology result in a popular medium. Especially if that result flatters you in some way.
I 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.
And even if a correlation was to be found on average, it doesn't really say anything about the individuals or median levels or many other nuances.
I think we can all agree on the base level that there are intelligent people who are kind, and there are intelligent people who are very not kind. And then there's intelligent people who are kind only for the reasons that it makes them succeed, not for pure altruistic reasons.
Not to mention if intelligent people are able to make more income and therefore have the capability to share a portion of it while less intelligent will try to get by and don't have time or resources to help others.
They claimed in the first study to control for income, but I wonder how effective that is when you are considering a household of people a majority of the time. The person who donates may not be the person with higher general intelligence or higher income; only someone in their household must have the characteristic.
> 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.
So 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.
The lowest score you can get is like 55 or something like that.
In order to empathize it requires a mental model of how someone else thinks/feels.
Same is true with being manipulative though.
Yes, 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.
Or you’re so smart that your manipulation is disguised as altruism until long after you die.
Probably most social species have this capability.
That 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.
What 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.
Further to being a social species dogs are domesticated, which introduces more layers.
Coyotes are a social species.
Yes, but not a domesticated species, and so any comparisons with dogs are limited.
Being a “social species” does not mean you are social with every other social species, just that you follow a social system within your species.
It is typically called theory of mind.
Just yesterday I came across this site [1] with lots of articles around ToM. Very well written IMHO.
Yep, pretty much just need to see (inc.com) and then ignore it.
you read about a psychology result.
I'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.
unless 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.
Compassion 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.
Compassion towards enemies is especially interesting, it takes a lot of mental effort to go against the gut feeling.
I'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.
Reaching and publishing "conclusions" like this is not.
it'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.
I 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.
Maybe EQ, not IQ
Being smart might give you enough slack in your life to be able to emotionally afford those qualities of personality
Simple when you think about it. It's so much easier to be the opposite of those things.
What about highly intelligent psychopaths?
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.
“Being X is a sign of Y” doesn’t imply “Being Y is a sign of X.”
exactly, (X => Y) <=> (!Y => !X) should be more known
Eh? (P(X|Y)>P(X) iff P(Y|X)>P(Y)) whenever all the relevant probabilities (P(X), P(Y), P(X and Y), etc.) are strictly positive and strictly less than 1.
Now, X might be much stronger evidence for Y than Y is for X, but if Y is evidence for X, then (assuming the previously mentioned assumption) then X is evidence for Y, even if only very weak.
Yes but the comment being responded to stated “but there are Y that are not X” which was categorical.
Sorry, I don’t understand this point. What’s the interpretation of your previous message (in light of that) which makes it true?
So if you are _not_ someone with an antisocial personality disorder and you go to therapy like couples therapy you basically learn that you need to be kind and thoughtful even if your partner is not and compliment them and it basically rubs off on them. It's also the way you make friends etc...
It's the basic psychological principle that you need to give to the world what you wish to receive. It is counterintuitive.
I'd guess that this would be the treatment program for APDs as well except that the APD may short circuit the reciprocal reward program.
And that's why a therapist will try to really make sure you are not in an abusive relationship as well.
I 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.
Some 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.
Why wouldn't there be psychopaths in the workplace?
The way I see it there's a selection bias at play here. The kind of psychopaths who are repeat offenders are the ones who get caught, so of course we notice them.
We don't notice the ones who don't get caught.
That doesn't mean that they're any less ruthless and destructive to society -- they're just lucky / more functional.
In my mind I view white collar crime to be the greatest evil in society because it is the thing that enables all of the petty/violent crime that we abhor. Part of the reason that it's so evil to me is for that very reason, and that the perpetrators of it are able to pass themselves off as functional individuals who participate in society like you and I do, and are able to use the system against itself to perpetuate their crimes.
The mark of the actual master is that almost no one can identify them, and the people who can are so rare as to probabilistically not appear in smaller companies. They “run” the company without the appearance of doing so.
If someone does appear who can identify them, they are quickly exited from the company via various means depending on the individual: pair them with a particularly distasteful partner/manager, make their job impossible via passive means, or enable them to humiliate themselves.
The only real symptom is that there is no one around them that competes with them in their self-perceived core competency, and they never seem to put a foot wrong. Once the are in a high position, anyone who complains about their behavior is said to be attempting to climb.
Used 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.
"to accuse people of lacking empathy" is basic projection. If you actually had empathy you'd feel for someone lacking in empathy.
If you've ever met a psychopath and seen their true colors, you will undoubtedly be convinced it's a real phenomenon. I have had the unfortunate experience of dealing with one myself. He showed all the hallmark signs. He urinated the bed frequently. He harmed animals when he was young. Specifically, he swung his pet gerbil around by the tail until the tail was severed. He threw a baby rabbit against a stop sign and killed it while his poor younger brother watched. He has grown up to be incredibly sadistic to the point where everyone I know has completely cut him off. I hope you never run into one. When you are talking to someone you believe to be decent, and you eventually realize what they are, what you're dealing with, it is a truly chilling experience.
What does urinating the bed have to do with it?
Not the GP, but it's debatably correlated, apparently.
> Although it remains an influential and widely taught hypothesis, subsequent research has generally not validated this line of thinking.[3][4]
Yes, that is why I wrote, "debatably."
This is not saying it is debatable, it is politely saying it is almost definitely wrong, but still popular.
It still seems like it could be correlated, but it shouldn't be used as a diagnostic measure or taken as a sign of something. It's more likely to be a sign of abusive parenting, but abusive parenting is also correlated with the psychopath behavior so it all ends up being correlated with each other.
Well there are is neurogenic bladder and congenital causes.
Not proven ≠ Wrong
It's true, a direct link hasn't been proven, and I was debating even mentioning that. Obviously that specific tendency alone isn't indicative of a homicidal individual. But I would speculate that it has something to do with dysfunction/dysregulation of the autonomic nervous system.
Yes, but that is the absence of evidence, commonly called on when the science hasn't been done.
If a theory/hypothesis remains not proven once the science has been repeatedly done in numerous attempts to prove it, very often it does mean it is wrong.
It doesn’t.
Yes, that is dated and hasn’t been supported by more recent science.
Recent psychology has been suffering from the replication crisis.
The replication crisis was recently discovered; this does not mean older science does not have the same challenges. Generally the problems that led to the replication crisis are worse the further back you go in time
The smartest people I have ever met are usually generous, but often not kind.
You mean constructive criticism isn’t kind ?
Not at all. I mean they're all not neurotypical enough to care.
All I know is that Adam Grant makes a whole lot of shallow, trite posts on LinkedIn.
They're usually about "pure emotional intelligence"
A 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 ...
My 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.
I 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.
The 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.
On 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.
I'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.
attaching 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 .
Can 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.
What would you like to call psychology instead?
Psychology 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.
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Clearly most I̶R̶C̶ ̶u̶s̶e̶r̶s̶ people have never made this connection. /s
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