In the first, the correlation is between either spouse having donated “$500 or more to a religious or other non-profit” so it potentially loses a lot of smaller donors, but the biggest issue is their definition of a measure of cognitive ability is probably not what you think:
> cognitive ability was measured in a variety of ways (Ofstedal et al., 2001). These measurements included immediate word recall, delayed word recall, serial 7’s, recog- nition tasks, backwards counting tasks, and a 35-point scale combining each of the previous elements.
None of those are what I would consider difficult (serial 7s is starting at 100 and subtracting 7 over and over). It is entirely possible that given the methodology (survey) that what they are actually measuring is altruism (effort put into helping the surveyor) and that there is also some selection bias because someone who was intelligent but not giving probably would decline/avoid the survey in the first place.
In the second, the hypothesis is that altruism is a “costly signal” of intelligence and the study was done in a hunter-gatherer community where members were providing food for a feast.
The third link sends the reader to a tweet that cites these two and two additional studies, but the further two are studies linking general intelligence to negotiation ability, which seems at best indirectly related to being generous and kind to me.
If there is a potential truth here, I think it might be that being more intelligent could be linked with a greater understanding of the benefits of altruism and a tendency to behave that way, or that being altruistic leads to higher intelligence through vicarious learning, but neither of these hypotheses are being evaluated in these papers.
I think we can all agree on the base level that there are intelligent people who are kind, and there are intelligent people who are very not kind. And then there's intelligent people who are kind only for the reasons that it makes them succeed, not for pure altruistic reasons.
Not to mention if intelligent people are able to make more income and therefore have the capability to share a portion of it while less intelligent will try to get by and don't have time or resources to help others.
I worked with a guy who used to brag about having an IQ of 60. Dude wasn't much smarter than a rock, but he could follow directions really well. Pretty sure he could pass these tests too.
Much of the advantage of being smart might be wiped out when everyone has a high IQ personal assistant inside their phone, thanks to AI.
casinos are one place where, if you were an impossibly smart human, you could make money. hence, there are some fascinating cheat devices for use at casinos. there's a reason they don't let you use your phone while playing in case you were gonna cheat at cards.
personally I find malice too stupid to take personally, but am not smart enough to orchestrate deceptions the way I've seen smarter and more successful people operate. just comfortably mid. also, intelligence above a certain level, like wealth, is best kept a secret. it is often observed that mine is hidden quite cunningly.
After a lot of conversation with her I've noticed one of the reasons why she's so mean is she doesn't seem to have the cognitive ability to think about the consequences of what she says or does before she says it or does it. She operates entirely on instinct and thinking through words/actions beforehand is a totally foreign concept to her.
You're a step ahead though being curious as to why she is the way she is.
https://www.spring.org.uk/2022/12/high-functioning-psychopat...
Maybe some of those highly intelligent people are good at pretending to be generous, thoughtful, and kind because it helps achieve their goals.
This is really eroding public trust on real science.
It's the basic psychological principle that you need to give to the world what you wish to receive. It is counterintuitive.
I'd guess that this would be the treatment program for APDs as well except that the APD may short circuit the reciprocal reward program.
Now, X might be much stronger evidence for Y than Y is for X, but if Y is evidence for X, then (assuming the previously mentioned assumption) then X is evidence for Y, even if only very weak.
Like most of pop psych.
There's a predatory ecological niche in every society. Very common in nature too. Altruism is less common than predation in nature, it seems.
Though in the workspace, you may be onto something.
On the other hand, being generous will be recognized and rewarded in the long term. In the short term you carry some risk if you are generous with people you don't know. This is where having good social skills to develop relationships comes in.
It's also the difference between playing zero-sum and positive-sum games. Manipulation is zero-sum. Positive-sum games have more reward all-in-all in the long term.
“Passing” the test would probably mean you’re within a standard deviation of that (or above, ofc)
Most everyone can pass an IQ test.
The way I see it there's a selection bias at play here. The kind of psychopaths who are repeat offenders are the ones who get caught, so of course we notice them.
We don't notice the ones who don't get caught.
That doesn't mean that they're any less ruthless and destructive to society -- they're just lucky / more functional.
In my mind I view white collar crime to be the greatest evil in society because it is the thing that enables all of the petty/violent crime that we abhor. Part of the reason that it's so evil to me is for that very reason, and that the perpetrators of it are able to pass themselves off as functional individuals who participate in society like you and I do, and are able to use the system against itself to perpetuate their crimes.
If someone does appear who can identify them, they are quickly exited from the company via various means depending on the individual: pair them with a particularly distasteful partner/manager, make their job impossible via passive means, or enable them to humiliate themselves.
The only real symptom is that there is no one around them that competes with them in their self-perceived core competency, and they never seem to put a foot wrong. Once the are in a high position, anyone who complains about their behavior is said to be attempting to climb.
Hopefully that bullshit virtue signalling went away.
1. Maximizing self interest using an understanding of social contract theory
2. A complex system of instincts that depends on others behavior, but doesn't manifest as intuition about the reasons for those behaviors
3. Like 2, but it manifests as an intuitive undestanding of how others may feel
I admit, 1 seems unlikely, even for humans. 2 and 3 sound more plausible, but 3 seems like the simpler explanation to me. We have an example case of it in humans (of course humans may additionally reason about others intent), and I'd expect similar tendencies to have similar mechanisms. Plus, grouping behaviors into intents reduces the number of rules needed for the observed behavior -> response mapping at the cost of some pattern recognition ability.
It's possible there's another explanation, including why similar tendencies aren't explained by similar mechanisms, despite the availability of similar "hardware". If there is, I'm not clever enough to have thought of it.
It's true, a direct link hasn't been proven, and I was debating even mentioning that. Obviously that specific tendency alone isn't indicative of a homicidal individual. But I would speculate that it has something to do with dysfunction/dysregulation of the autonomic nervous system.
If a theory/hypothesis remains not proven once the science has been repeatedly done in numerous attempts to prove it, very often it does mean it is wrong.