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