More (#3) from Better Angels of Our Nature:

let’s have a look at political discourse, which most people believe has been getting dumb and dumber. There’s no such thing as the IQ of a speech, but Tetlock and other political psychologists have identified a variable called integrative complexity that captures a sense of intellectual balance, nuance, and sophistication. A passage that is low in integrative complexity stakes out an opinion and relentlessly hammers it home, without nuance or qualification. Its minimal complexity can be quantified by counting words like absolutely, always, certainly, definitively, entirely, forever, indisputable, irrefutable, undoubtedly, and unquestionably. A passage gets credit for some degree of integrative complexity if it shows a touch of subtlety with words like usually, almost, but, however, and maybe. It is rated higher if it acknowledges two points of view, higher still if it discusses connections, tradeoffs, or compromises between them, and highest of all if it explains these relationships by reference to a higher principle or system. The integrative complexity of a passage is not the same as the intelligence of the person who wrote it, but the two are correlated, especially, according to Simonton, among American presidents.

Integrative complexity is related to violence. People whose language is less integratively complex, on average, are more likely to react to frustration with violence and are more likely to go to war in war games. Working with the psychologist Peter Suedfeld, Tetlock tracked the integrative complexity of the speeches of national leaders in a number of political crises of the 20th century that ended peacefully (such as the Berlin blockade in 1948 and the Cuban Missile Crisis) or in war (such as World War I and the Korean War), and found that when the complexity of the leaders’ speeches declined, war followed. In particular, they found a linkage between rhetorical simple-mindedness and military confrontations in speeches by Arabs and Israelis, and by the Americans and Soviets during the Cold War. We don’t know exactly what the correlations mean: whether mule-headed antagonists cannot think their way to an agreement, or bellicose antagonists simplify their rhetoric to stake out an implacable bargaining position. Reviewing both laboratory and real-world studies, Tetlock suggests that both dynamics are in play.

More (#4) from Better Angels of Our Nature:

Unless two adversaries are locked in a fight to the death, aggression is not zero-sum but negative-sum; they are collectively better off not doing it, despite the advantage to the victor. The advantage to a conqueror in gaining a bit more land is swamped by the disadvantage to the family he kills in stealing it, and the few moments of drive reduction experienced by a rapist are obscenely out of proportion to the suffering he causes his victim. The asymmetry is ultimately a consequence of the law of entropy: an infinitesimal fraction of the states of the universe are orderly enough to support life and happiness, so it’s easier to destroy and cause misery than to cultivate and cause happiness. All of this means that even the most steely-eyed utilitarian calculus, in which a disinterested observer tots up the total happiness and unhappiness, will deem violence undesirable, because it creates more unhappiness in its victims than happiness in its perpetrators, and lowers the aggregate amount of happiness in the world.

More (#2) from Better Angels of Our Nature:

we can consider the purest model of how abstract reasoning might undermine the temptations of violence, the Prisoner’s Dilemma. In his popular Scientific American column, the computer scientist Douglas Hofstadter once agonized over the fact that the seemingly rational response in a one-shot Prisoner’s Dilemma was to defect. You cannot trust the other player to cooperate, because he has no grounds for trusting you, and cooperating while he defects will bring you the worst outcome. Hofstadter’s agony came from the observation that if both sides looked down on their dilemma from a single Olympian vantage point, stepping out of their parochial stations, they should both deduce that the best outcome is for both to cooperate. If each has confidence that the other realizes that, and that the other realizes that he or she realizes it, ad infinitum, both should cooperate and reap the benefits. Hofstadter envisioned a "superrationality" in which both sides were certain of the other’s rationality, and certain that the other was certain of theirs, and so on, though he wistfully acknowledged that it was not easy to see how to get people to be superrational.

Can higher intelligence at least nudge people in the direction of superrationality? That is, are better reasoners likely to reflect on the fact that mutual cooperation leads to the best joint outcome, assume that the other guy is reflecting on it as well, and profit from the resulting simultaneous leap of trust? No one has given people of different levels of intelligence a true one-shot Prisoner’s Dilemma, but a recent study came close by using a sequential one-shot Prisoner’s Dilemma, in which the second player acts only after seeing the first player’s move. The economist Stephen Burks and his collaborators gave a thousand trainee truck drivers a Matrices IQ test and a Prisoner’s Dilemma, using money for the offers and payoffs. The smarter truckers were more likely to cooperate on the first move, even after controlling for age, race, gender, schooling, and income. The investigators also looked at the response of the second player to the first player’s move. This response has nothing to do with superrationality, but it does reflect a willingness to cooperate in response to the other player’s cooperation in such a way that both players would benefit if the game were iterated. Smarter truckers, it turned out, were more likely to respond to cooperation with cooperation, and to defection with defection.

The economist Garrett Jones connected intelligence to the Prisoner’s Dilemma by a different route. He scoured the literature for all the Iterated Prisoner’s Dilemma experiments that had been conducted in colleges and universities from 1959 to 2003. Across thirty-six experiments involving thousands of participants, he found that the higher a school’s mean SAT score (which is strongly correlated with mean IQ), the more its students cooperated. Two very different studies, then, agree that intelligence enhances mutual cooperation in the quintessential situation in which its benefits can be foreseen. A society that gets smarter, then, may be a society that becomes more cooperative.

More (#1) from Better Angels of Our Nature:

Measuring the psychological traits of public figures, to be sure, has a sketchy history, but the psychologist Dean Simonton has developed several historiometric measures that are reliable and valid (in the psychometrician’s technical sense) and politically nonpartisan. He analyzed a dataset of 42 presidents from GW to GWB and found that both raw intelligence and openness to new ideas and values are significantly correlated with presidential performance as it has been assessed by nonpartisan historians. Though Bush himself is well above the average of the population in intelligence, he is third-lowest among the presidents, and comes in dead last in openness to experience, with a rock-bottom score of 0.0 on the 0–100 scale. Simonton published his work in 2006, while Bush was still in office, but the three historians’ surveys conducted since then bear out the correlation: Bush was ranked 37th, 36th, and 39th among the 42 presidents.

As for Vietnam, the implication that the United States would have avoided the war if only the advisors of Kennedy and Johnson had been less intelligent seems unlikely in light of the fact that after they left the scene, the war was ferociously prosecuted by Richard Nixon, who was neither the best nor the brightest. The relationship between presidential intelligence and war may also be quantified. Between 1946 (when the PRIO dataset begins) and 2008, a president’s IQ is negatively correlated with the number of battle deaths in wars involving the United States during his presidency, with a coefficient of -0.45. One could say that for every presidential IQ point, 13,440 fewer people die in battle, though it’s more accurate to say that the three smartest postwar presidents, Kennedy, Carter, and Clinton, kept the country out of destructive wars.