In her latest post, Sarah Constantin writes:
Whatever ability IQ tests and math tests measure, I believe that lacking that ability doesn’t have any effect on one’s ability to make a good social impression or even to “seem smart” in conversation.
I remember that I made the opposite prediction a few months ago, while I was studying psychometrics more actively. In particular, I had the sense that because of the positive manifold (i.e. almost all positive mental attributes quite strongly correlate), it seems like judging someone's IQ should be relatively easy, and also quite valuable in assessing a large number of other positive qualities, which should make it quite evolutionarily advantageous to be able to assess it.
Two concrete experiments I've thought about:
1. Take a group of people whose IQ you now, then just take pictures of their faces (or short videos of them saying something), and then have a group of participants rate them on their intelligence (probably in order). See how strong they correlate.
2. Throw a bunch of participants into a group, have them talk to each other, then afterwards ask them about the relative judgement of the intelligence of the other members of the group, see how predictive they are.
These seem like very straightforward experiments, that I can imagine someone having already run, and where I would be pretty interested in the results. If only so that I can be better calibrated on how much to trust my gut judgement of someone's intelligence.
Does anyone know of any similar experiments that have been run?
Research on how humans attribute intelligence to each other suggests that most people attribute higher intelligence to efficient agents, i.e., agents whose actions most resemble what we believe is the best course of action in an uncertain situation. A minority attributes intelligence to agents based on the outcome of their actions.
People attribute intelligence to efficiency in proportion to their own ability to plan. Less competent planners attribute intelligence to outcome. To elaborate, a competent planner would evaluate the behavior of an agent and understand whether it acted rationally, regardless of its success. On the other hand, a bad planner cannot infer the reasoning of an agent; since he himself cannot foresee the best course of action, he would not understand why an agent made a particular decision, and would likely attribute high intelligence to an irrational but lucky agent since its behavior would result in a good outcome.
My interpretation of these results is that intelligent people are better at evaluating the intelligence of others. I believe that given enough time (and thus enough information to evaluate) an intelligent person can adequately estimate a peer's intelligence. It could be argued that "seeming" smart requires a sufficient degree of awareness and intelligence, although of a different kind; perhaps IQ tests do not have a wide enough scope to accurately measure different intelligence in its different forms.
Source:
Kryven, Marta. "Attributed Intelligence." (2018).