Smart people play nice
That’s the result from a new experimental study of 1,000 people attending truck driving school. The authors tested all of them with Raven’s Progressive Matrices, a real IQ test. They then put pairs of them through a prisoner’s dilemma game, and found:
[M]easures of cognitive skill [CS] predict social awareness and choices in a sequential Prisoner’s Dilemma game. Subjects with higher CS’s more accurately forecast others’ behavior….[S]ubjects with higher CS’s also cooperate more as first movers.
This set of genuine experiments improves on this older paper, which found that students at high-SAT schools cooperated more in prisoner’s dilemmas than students at low-SAT schools. Now we know it’s not just because posh, high-SAT schools facilitate a “culture of cooperation” or something like that. Smart individuals just figure it out on their own…..
Bottom line: More evidence that smarter groups are more likely to think win-win.
Labels: IQ
That’s certainly been my experience in life: there’s a positive correlation between intelligence and niceness.
The flip side of the trust games are those modified collective action games where people can pay to punish defectors.
An interesting question: Are the cognitive elites as likely to punish defectors and non-cooperators? Or is there a tendency to extend too much generalized trust even in the presence of sharks?
This recalls those earlier math simulations where cooperators and defectors are mixed up to see the evolution of populations over time. And of course, there are the classic PD games where Tit-for-Tat or variants do better than either Grim or Nice Strategies that favor either defection or cooperation unconditionally. The lesson being, Trust but Verify (or more accurately, Retaliate when necessary).
Implication for democracy to work-cooperation.
Implication for democracy
Is that democracy only works with intelligent people…
Quite ominous!
A cursory glance at human history makes this correlation seem rather low.
Interesting work.
On related note, there has been some work on the effect of spite (that is wanting to reduce others wellbeing and hence non-niceness) on economic development.
Ref:Fehr, Ernst & Hoff, Karla & Kshetramade, Mayuresh, 2008. “Spite and development,” Policy Research Working Paper Series 4619, The World Bank
“A cursory glance at human history makes this correlation seem rather low.”
If you want me to elaborate, one can look to rampant civil strife and war among nations and ethnic groups that are considered among the “HBD” crowd to be oh so intelligent now. IE, the middle east, ancient greece and china, etc.
This really comes to mind when the OP is citing trash like Lynn’s work.
please do not post as ‘anonymous.’ pick a handle.
Implication for democracy
Is that democracy only works with intelligent people…
Quite ominous!
Which is another way of saying that democracy does not work, period, because a large and increasing number of people in the U.S. and Europe are not too bright. I mean, look at all the poor people in L.A. who voted for a higher sales tax! There is a reason the Founding Fathers, while they were rightfully suspicious of the aristocratic elements of society, also did not believe in handing power to the masses.
Today U.S. and European countries are the Founding Fathers’ worst nightmare: control by a combination of mostly dumb voters and aristocratic elites who pour millions into our political system. The U.S. is numerically dominated by dumb people and financially dominated by an aristocratic elite. Worse yet, even a large number of relatively high IQ people (say 115-130) are pretty politically ignorant. East Asians, South Asians, and Jews correctly fear poor whites but are so focused on white gentile racism that they can’t (or won’t) see the dangers of an enormous Mestizo or Muslim underclass. And if you want to talk to a real political ignoramus, look for the most beautiful Asian female you can find…founts of political wisdom, indeed.*
The Republicans have increasingly become the party of the corporate aristocracy and sub-100 IQ whites, while the Dems are the party of government aristocrats and sub-100 IQ non-whites. Thus Turd Sandwhiches like McCain and Bush, and Giant Douches like Gore, Kerry, and Obama. (See the South Park episode “Douche and Turd.”)
*Why do attractive women seem so damn politically retarded? Many politically oriented men seem to share this POV. Perhaps my novel observation here is that attractive Asian females are at least as bad as the others when it comes to political ignorance/stupidity. Then again, many politically oriented men are bookworms/geeks who spend way too much time reading political material, and perhaps need a reason to feel equal or superior to the women they so desire.
I don’t think a Mussolini, Hitler, Stalin, Tojo, or Mao would last 2 seconds in a well-educated society with a 120+ average IQ. The stupidity and ignorance of the masses allows the most corrupt, dishonest, and brutal of the cognitive elites to gain power. Stalin, Hitler, etc are no more representative of the cognitive elite than any high-IQ serial killer.
In a society of all or mostly cognitive elites such corrupt individuals would be kept in check because people would see through their demagoguery and BS.
society of all or mostly cognitive elites such corrupt individuals would be kept in check
More to do with the willingness of individuals to take risks or make sacrifices for the common good. Plenty of people knew Stalin and Hitler were up to no good, but fear kept most of them in check.
More interesting than who initially cooperates is who scores the highest. Are smarter people better able to implement winning strategies? The article seems to suggest so.
This has fascinating implications for razib’s previous thoughts regarding the relationship between economic development and genetic traits.
That’s certainly been my experience in life: there’s a positive correlation between intelligence and niceness.
Just to play devil’s advocate, it could be that the smart people aren’t nicer, but just better at logic — correctly doing the backward induction to arrive at the highest-paying first move.
agreeableness doesn’t correlate with IQ, right? so how could one claim that smarties are nicer?
another explanation here would be that smart people have nicer interactions with other smart people than with dumb people, on average.
Academic politics aren’t noted for being all sweetness and polite behavior. The web descriptions of the high IQ societies also describes their infighting and squabbling. There will always be a portion of any group of people who are nasty. In an extremely smart group extremely smart + nasty = extremely nasty.
Steve may be onto something in that smart people are more able to see long-term and at least act nice.
Alternatively, maybe they see Steve’s smart and like other smart people. Who knows?
Diversity can help shift you from a cooperative/altruistic equilibrium to a non-cooperative one. Some CEO’s want that so they can loot the company.
The investment bank CEO’s who testified to Congress seemed more like looters compared to the hedge fund CEO’s who seemed more loyal to their employees and their investors. The hedge fund CEO’s were much smarter than the investment bank CEO’s.
Bernanke may be too nice with his 2 trillion.
http://www.vdare.com/letters/tl_111108.htm
AIG had a high H-1B contingent, which helped push it to non-cooperative.
As someone noted, smart + nasty = extremely nasty.
Novels and movies galore explore stories of nasty, high IQ people.
I think “civil” or perhaps “polite”, or even the Britishism, “public spirited” are what is really meant here. However, “nice” does evoke the emotion that especially civil, polite people arouse in other.
This reminds of the third season of “The Apprentice,” which pitted those with a high school degree but no college degree against people who have at least a college degree.
Among the high school degreed people, there were a couple of people with nasty tempers, who would scream and swear and generally behave awfully when problems and disagreements arose. What struck me is that the nice high school people had to scream and swear too in order not to be run over by the nasty people. The nice people’s behavior was corrupted by the badly behaved.
Then there was an instance in which a high school degreed person threatened a college degreed person in the midst of an argument. The college guy complained to the Trump people about it.
I wouldn’t say that the college degreed people were “nice” necessarily (some of them seemed catty, whiny, snipy, etc), but they were much more civil in their interactions with each other, and this makes a huge difference.
It’s hard to work with someone who has screamed at you horribly. It seems the college people understood this.
(The college degreed people were smarter than the high school degreed people).
Could this perhaps be partially explained by the fact that those who perform better in IQ tests are more likely to be economically successful than those who perform poorly. For those at the bottom, economic activity appears much more like a zero sum game than for those higher up. Therefore, they are conditioned to think win-lose more than win-win. Is there anything in that?
ben g said: agreeableness doesn’t correlate with IQ, right? so how could one claim that smarties are nicer?
One can claim it because it’s in the paper: High IQ truck driving students play nicer than low IQ truck driving students. If other studies fail to replicate, then we can go back to thinking that smarties aren’t nicer.
Also, note that “nicer” here is a specific form of niceness: It’s trusting someone in a two-period game. The “nice” players are saying, in the immortal words of ABBA, “Take a chance on me….”
It’s not pure altruism as much as a risky investment in relationship-building…..
James Schneider said:
Could this perhaps be partially explained by the fact that those who perform better in IQ tests are more likely to be economically successful than those who perform poorly.
These are all folks at truck-driving school, so the range of past incomes is probably lower than usual. They’re not the worst (otherwise they couldn’t afford school) and not the best (otherwise they’d be in college or nursing school or electrician school instead).
Also, they asked the participants how much they thought they could earn in a another job–a measure of “economically successful”–this income measure was statistically insignificant and didn’t hurt IQ’s statistical significance.
Herrick,
I think we actually agree here. It’s just a question of how we define “nice.” People can “play nice” without being nice, in my opinion.