‘Intelligent people are more likely to trust others’ | Hacker News Reader

‘Intelligent people are more likely to trust others’

ox.ac.uk

57 pointsnreece45 comments

I don't still have the link, but this reminds me of a conversation I read where people were speculating that intelligent people are more likely to take strange ideas seriously and sometimes believe them, because they're good enough at telling good ideas from bad ideas that they have less need for a blanket policy against weird ideas. (Examples: transhumanism, cryptocurrency) If this holds, then intelligent people trusting others more is a specific case of intelligent people trusting their own judgement more.

Of course, conspiracy theories also fall under "strange ideas", and I don't think being a conspiracy theorist correlates with high intelligence (but I may be wrong).

Not sure if being a conspiracy theorist correlates with high intelligence, but Bobby Fischer is a good example of someone who was a highly intelligent conspiracy theorist.

I don't have a word for it, but I have a mental category for "stupid ideas you have to be educated to believe". Education expands the realm of things you can think, but it doesn't always come with the wisdom to discern the truth. Consequently, it can be as dangerous as it is helpful.

For example, only an educated person can think that the quadratic equation is -b+/-SqRt(c^2-4ac)/2c ... an uneducated person can't make that mistake, because they can't even conceive of the problem in the first place.-

(Once you start looking for this, you see it everywhere.... it's the reason why the further an academic discipline is from hard, verifiable truth, the more suspect you should consider it.)

Yep, intelligent people tend to measure higher on openness to experience, one of the Big Five personality traits.

I reckon there's probably a correlation between the people who are obsessed by cryptocurrency (in its current incarnation as BTC) that are also conspiracy theorists though...

Ooh, point.

Causality might go the other way though - if you are able to trust others growing up WITHOUT being hurt by it, devoting less brain power to suspicion and verifications may allow one to grow more intelligent.

Observational studies are never a recipe for action - just food for thought.

Not necessarily that they "grow more intelligent", but I think you have a good overall point.

Another way of saying it is "Intelligent people are able to take bigger risks".

What I was saying is "People who have been able to successfully take bigger risks (and still do) become more intelligent" is a possible explanation: This is the converse of what you are saying. Well, I was limiting the "risks" to trusting others, but if I were to use your words, that would be my statement.

Exactly so.

High trust societies are much more efficient because we don't all have to (metaphorically) squat in the dirt guarding our meat. This frees humans up to divide labor efficiently, spend time on higher order problems, etc.

What it is that leads to high trust societies (cultural homogeneity, common religious convictions) however, is an unpopular area of studies.

What exactly is "intelligent people" again? It just sums up to an IQ score?

It's naive to treat "intelligence" as a simple number. There are SO MANY skills related to 'human intelligence' and yet these studies fail to give a more closer look of what they mean with "intelligence" and how this affect the outcome.

I hate when, in those studies, they promote a set people as "intelligent" and start to research how these special category performs in simple aspects of everyday life, things like "trust others", "live longer"[1] or "use more drugs"[2].

[1] http://www.scientificamerican.com/article/old-and-wise/ [2] http://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/the-scientific-fundament...

It looks like intelligence was evaluated solely through two items: size of English vocabulary(?), and the subjective opinion of the interviewer.

Pretty much garbage, really.

"Our first measure of intelligence is a 10-word vocabulary test in which the respondent is asked to identify which of five phrases supplies the correct definition of a given word [24]. Despite its brevity, the test has a correlation of 0.71 with the Army General Classification Test, an IQ exam developed by the U.S. Military [25]. In addition, there is abundant psychometric evidence that individuals with higher IQs have larger vocabularies [26], [27]. Prior to taking the vocabulary test, the respondent is told the following by the interviewer [24]: “We would like to know something about how people go about guessing words they do not know. On this card are listed some words–you may know some of them, and you may not know quite a few of them. On each line the first word is in capital letters–like BEAST. Then there are five other words. Tell me the number of the word that comes closest to the meaning of the word in capital letters. For example, if the word in capital letters is BEAST, you would say “4” since “animal” come closer to BEAST than any of the other words. If you wish, I will read the words to you. These words are difficult for almost everyone–just give me your best guess if you are not sure of the answer.” The respondent is assigned a score between 0 and 10, corresponding to the number of words she defined correctly.

"Our second measure of intelligence is an assessment by the interviewer of how well the respondent understood the survey questions. The interviewer notes down whether the respondent’s understanding of the survey questions was “good”, “fair” or “poor” [24]. We refer to our first measure as ‘verbal ability’ and our second measure as ‘question comprehension’. The Pearson correlation between these two variables is 0.37 (p<0.001), meaning that they are moderately positively correlated. The strength of their correlation is depicted in Table 1, a simple cross-tabulation. It indicates that 98% of those scoring 10 out of 10 in the vocabulary test have a good understanding of the survey questions, yet only 36% of those scoring 0 out of 10 have a good understanding of them."

WORDSUM has a 70% correlation with real, designed by psychometricians IQ tests. Garbage it is not.

The correlation between adult IQ and WORDSUM = 0.71. The source for this number is a 1980 paper, The Enduring Effects of Education on Verbal Skills.

http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/gnxp/2010/05/wordsum-iq/#....

This kind of makes sense, to me at least.

In terms of evolution, brains build out from the center 'older' parts, outward. Newer parts of the brain can override behaviors of older parts.

Reptilian brain (Trust nothing) -> Mammalian brain (Trust family) -> Primate brain (Trust clan) -> Human brain (Trust all those who may help) ->

Trusting is probably a very computationally demanding system of the brain. However, if one is able to trust wisely, one may also expand one's fitness.

Though it has some issues, it's an interesting concept. Essentially, not having to worry about other people screwing you over let's you focus on other things.

That'd be similar to how those with financial troubles (i.e. the poor) seem to show less effective IQ in some studies. Worrying about money, how to make the rent, how to pay for X or Y, sucks brainpower from other activities. This is interesting, particularly in our community because some startups attribute their success to financial pressure. Maybe the effects are different depending on duration. Or maybe it's because the startups believe their situation is a matter of choice (they joined a startup) and they have the power to change while those who are in a perpetual state of poverty have fallen into some state of learned helplessness and thus feel powerless in changing their situation.

Though not completely accurate, a simple way to think about is in the context of Maslow's hierarchy of needs.

At the very least, it's fun to think about.

This study is worthless unless it controls for class. We already know that educated people are more likely to be supportive of the status quo and credulous towards claims from established authorities. We also know that they tend to be healthier and happier, due to the financial rewards resulting from the former behavior.

They claim to take into account marital status, education and income.

> due to the financial rewards resulting from the former behavior.

I agree, but not with your cause and effect.

Educated/wealthy people benefit and have benefited (hugely) from the status quo. Therefore they have a positive interest in preserving the status quo.

It is not surprising that people without access to education and wealth have less trust and support for the establishment - this is a purely rational response.

My cause and effect was definitely editorial, but I think the process of becoming educated is a process of assimilating into the status quo, and thereby the middle class. As such, I think it's largely selecting people who do what they're told.

Educated people are not necessarily benefiting at all from the status quo before they become educated. They may have worked their way through all kinds of adversity to achieve that education. That they now benefit from the status quo (that they invested in) would be why those people would want to preserve it, not because they always benefited from it.

I agree with you that it's totally rational.

> Educated people are not necessarily benefiting at all from the status quo before they become educated.

We're disagreeing here only because I believe that social status/education is largely a function of your parents' status, and their influence, rather than of your grit.

You benefit from the status quo if your parents benefit from the status quo.

Another link on this topic: http://lesswrong.com/lw/18b/reason_as_memetic_immune_disorde...

Essentially, the hypothesis goes that the smarter you are, the less you trust your intuition--even when it's right.

An entry in a database that powers a website aiming relaxed, 'trustworthy' (it's "voted" up by your "peers" in a "democratic" way!) content at a certain segment of the population who create sophisticated tools that manipulate both first world and to a lesser extent global society en-masse suggested passively that its readers were intelligent and that their trust in their environment, notably including their employers and investors, was well placed.

Meanwhile, Dr. Evil atop the US megaplex looked on, powered by mass-psychology and post-WWII Nazi science, snickering at the simple fools stupid enough to buy his cut-rate strategically Monday-launched commercial PR company output, all the while expanding his coffers and political influence.

Well, what degree of back-slapping do you require?

"Ricardo's Difficult Idea"[1] (comparative advantage is available to all countries with free trade) is an example of an idea that sounds stupid on its face that must (on reflection and examination of the evidence) be true. Only a minority even of educated people believe in comparative advantage, but it is indeed an idea that can be the basis of expanded social trust.

[1] http://web.mit.edu/krugman/www/ricardo.htm

> an idea that sounds stupid on its face

It still sounds stupid on its face. As I recall, Ricardo said England produced textiles, and Portugal produced wine, and both countries were each economically better off for their own specialization.

Joan Robinson revisited this idea a century later and asked, how did that turn out economically for Portugal, which remained a backward, agriculturally based nation while England began an industrialization program, partly based around the industrialization of its textile industry?

The late Joan Robinson produced some interesting writings[1] but there are few economists indeed who credit her with proving Ricardo wrong about comparative advantage. That's because in fact her writings about Ricardo's ideas focused on different issues, and Ricardo was and is right that each party in free trade enjoys comparative advantage in trade with the other party. Economic growth through free trade has been the path to prosperity for Taiwan (where I have lived), Hong Kong (where I have visited more than once), and quite a few other countries all around the world. Portugal's economy during the years she studied was not characterized by following Ricardo's advice.

[1] http://www.econlib.org/library/Enc/bios/Robinson.html

I was hoping to see something along the lines of "Intelligent people take time in stereotyping or judging people until sufficient data is collected. Hence initially they trust what people say at face value. This obviously depends on what sort of information they are dealing with. If its something that logically sounds ridiculous at face value itself(which less intelligent people cannot calculate so quickly), they dont believe the person even if its an initial conversation. But if its some trivial gossip/anecdote which doesn't hugely affect their choices in future, then they go ahead trusting the person." Personal example, if I hear some gossip about 3rd person, the conclusions drawn from that gossip about the character of that person doesnt affect my future interaction with him. I need to collect more data than few gossips to stereotype someone. On the other hand, in this case I am NOT trusting gossips because I am aware of their nature and people producing them.

Research says that intelligent people instinctively know whom to trust or not which I am not so sure about. I have seen people who are extremely bad at thinking about problems like maths, physics or algorithms in general but brilliant at analyzing people. So we need more evidence on this I guess.

In essence, they vaguely measure communication skills (the title summarizes this as "intelligence"):

"Our first measure of intelligence is a 10-word vocabulary test in which the respondent is asked to identify which of five phrases supplies the correct definition of a given word (...) Our second measure of intelligence is an assessment by the interviewer of how well the respondent understood the survey questions (...)"

And they measure trust based on the anwer to:

“Generally speaking, would you say that most people can be trusted or that you can’t be too careful in dealing with people?”

I can't say I'm amazed with the results they get. People who can't communicate well probably misinterpret or misunderstand situations more often, and this affects their trust standards.

No matter what the control for, these studies are very limited.

If they say that intelligence is correlated with X, if we like X we will say that this proves X is a good thing, and if we don't like X we will say that this proves intelligent people are not so "intelligent" after all. Put another way, it's so hard to do proper Bayesian updating on such loaded statements, they probably make people worse informed on average.

I'll end with a quote from Mohammad Ali being interviewed by Michael Parkinson:

Ali: [Animals don't race-mix so human's shouldn't either]

Parkinson: But we have intelligence

Ali: They don't have intelligence, but yet they stay together [with their own species], we should have more intelligence than them, right?

The causal arrow may go B=>A on this one: A childhood environment which causes low IQ--malnutrition, toxins, other things that correlate with poor socioeconomic conditions--probably also teach children to mistrust others.

The movie "Nebraska" played with this notion quite a bit, although it might have been inverted in the case of the main character. The most straightforward take was the behavior of Dave's cousins (who were portrayed as being dumb as hell). Despite being told numerous times in very plausible fashion that the prize wasn't real, they didn't believe that until they had committed crimes motivated by its presumed reality. Very entertaining!

Intelligence seems orthogonal to the separate Big 5 factor of neuroticism, ie, prototypical security-industry hacker may not trust most people a priori (it seems it's usually very trusting || very untrusting). Perhaps they are a minority in aggregate, but being played for a fool seems like a deselectable vulnerability. Then again it's a soft science paper.

Don't know how smart I am... but I often find that the pain of getting screwed over is worth the knowledge of whom to trust.

Perhaps they're more confident that if they're betrayed by another party, they'll find a way to reverse or compensate for the consequences of whatever the other party did?

Trust is required for a complex economy. Think if you had to verify everything each and every time you exchanged something. You simply wouldn't get anywhere.

So by extension, it's probably fair to say intelligent people are more inclined to trust other people, because they understand distrust is intrinsically costly.

So Albert Einstein was stupid for questioning Isaac Newton's theory of gravitation. Wow, an interesting studying from UK.

Either that or he was intelligent for trusting the works of Plank, Maxwell, Lorentz, etc. that demonstrated Newtonian physics was seriously lacking.

I don't trust you. ;)

Proof that you're stupid? :)

In the words of discrete mathematics intelligence implies trusting behaviour.

Alternate explanation coming from a person whose high intelligence is at the level that is, arguably, a curse.

There's trust in competence and trust in character. They're different (highly intelligent and competent people can have rotten ethical character) but people tend to conflate them, especially in the business world. We have a hard time believing that visibly competent or "credible" people might be liars.

Highly intelligent people are constantly being underestimated because they live in a world that's not really designed for them. There are all sorts of permissions systems and rules and rate-limits on career progress designed for people much slower and less capable than they are. The conclusion is that those systems and the prevailing distrust they represent is useless and counterproductive.

Knowing that they don't belong in the harnesses designed for "the slow kids", highly intelligent people tend to assume that everyone deserves more trust than they are given by society. It isn't just a personal problem ("I'm too smart to be treated like a child") but a general one ("Who needs rules? Who needs management at all?") This biases them toward premature trust of others.

"Those who score lower on measure of intelligence."

We know how well those work, don't we?

I know that unless I trust someone (say, my team) I won't get anything done, and that's enough of a reason to find people to trust.

But the implication of this study that this is directly the result of my intelligence, is actually insulting to my intelligence.

Are people who fall for scams highly intelligent? I'm not saying they're necessarily stupid, but people who fall for scams definitely "trust others" a bit too much.

I'm more likely to act as if I trust others, which is behaviorally very similar to trusting others. I don't, though.

Maybe so original poster nreece... and maybe your father IS the king of a small African country that can get me a fantastic deal on a timeshare that will make my penis 4x larger, but you still can't have my banking information.

I trust that the researchers of this study are too distrusting of all evidence to the contrary.

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