Why People With High IQs Don't Go Around Bragging About Their High IQs

I have been struck time and again by the number of trolls who claim to be intellectually superior to anyone they are likely to meet in their profiles and handles. One claimed in his profile to have a "top IQ," and insisted that "you won't find anyone who knows more about life than me." Another, less subtle, incorporated the word "genius" into her handle.

Anyone who has spent time among actual "high IQ" people would recognize these people as fakes instantly, simply for their having done so--as people who actually have high IQs do not go around telling people they have a high IQ.

I think one reason is that they know how little IQ really means. By that I do not necessarily mean that they think the test is meaningless (even if they are likely to realize that a test administered on a single occasion which attempts to offer a general estimate of the extremely complex phenomenon that is intelligence is apt to offer a result more precise than accurate), but that they know how little it counts for in real life. I recall, for example, that when his reported IQ of 170 came up in an interview, Herbert Stempel remarked that that "and two dollars can get you on the subway."

It is a reminder that in real life, however much addicts of the propaganda for meritocracy insist upon it, society is not ruled by the smartest, nor inclined to lavish its rewards upon them. Picking your parents well, playing the dirty game of getting ahead, stands one in far, far better stead there.

They know how little it means even where purely intellectual life is concerned. I doubt a high IQ has completely saved anyone from the painful experiences of working harder than they should for longer than they should, making mistakes, getting frustrated, and outright failing. (Often high intelligence is an obstacle to getting good grades in a school system more concerned with students being able to take direction well than think for themselves; get good scores on standardized tests than acquire deeper capability.)

Even the highest intelligence ever possessed by a human being is not automatic, effortless omnicompetence, a free pass to a life of Faustian adventure in which one gets to do and to be everything. Quite the contrary, where the stupid have the Dunning-Kreuger effect to insulate their egos, they have a fairly good idea of the limits of their competence, even where they are competent--even when a narrow specialist, all too alert to how little they know about that, and how much less they know about the rest, the bar higher for them. In fact, that capacity for self-criticism, without which they would have accomplished little, can leave them underestimating themselves.

Because they have worked, they have known burn-out (and the deflation of confidence that goes with it). Because they have been recognized as something, they have wondered if they have not been impostors (the more so in the wake of those inevitable frustrations and failures). Because people have seen potential in them, they have wondered if they have lived up to it. (You have a high IQ, you say? Well, what did you do with it?)

This is also the more poignant as they are likely to have spent much of their life around other, similarly intelligent individuals, whose failings and insecurities are less visible to them than their own, who may seem the more formidable than they. They know there is always someone "better" out there. And they are smart enough to know that no one likes a braggart, not least because they, like everyone else, have had to endure someone else's bragging.

Indeed, in that particular milieu most closely identified with conspicuous intellectual demands and achievement, they are, far from the super-individualist so beloved of bad science fiction, all too aware that they "stand on the shoulders of giants," and manage that only with the help of others. (Never mind winning Nobel Prizes--publishing a run-of-the-mill paper is likely to be a highly collaborative effort.) Robert Merton put it well, the more so for how provocative the term sounds to the ears of the conventional--"communism" is a cornerstone of the ethos of the scientific enterprise.

Does this mean that the intelligent are incapable of arrogance, whether in their taking an exaggerated view of their powers, or their possession of a sense of superiority to others? Of course not. Indeed, one can picture all the sources of insecurity described here driving them overcompensating. But at the least it makes the IQ test score-flogging crudity of bad fiction and much inane real-life personal behavior by the fakers a rarity among "the real thing."