High IQ Myths: What 100+ Years of Data Really Shows
Separating envy-driven folklore from reality.
Envy + status competition + media tropes generate lazy stereotypes about high-IQ people.
Tall-poppy syndrome = the impulse to cut down those above you.
It combines with folk psychology and memorable but wildly unrepresentative anecdotes to warp public understanding.
The “evil genius.” The “awkward nerd.” The “lonely incel.” The “cold-blooded manipulator.” The “sociopathic” sadist.
These narratives persist because they’re comforting to the median and flattering to the insecure.
They offer a fake moral accounting:
“Yeah, you’re smarter… but you pay for it.”
Most people argue from anecdotes:
“I knew a smart guy who was awkward,” or “a genius got arrested.”
That proves nothing.
How often does it happen per person in each group?
2007 Adult Psychiatric Morbidity Survey (IQ estimated via NART):
Self‑reported violence perpetration in the past 5 years was 16.3% among people with IQ 70–79 vs. 2.9% among people with IQ 120–129; even after adjustment, the lowest bracket had ~2.25× higher odds (Jacob et al., 2019). That’s roughly 1,630 vs 290 per 10,000 people or about a 5–6× difference in base rates.
Note: Violence in this study was defined as “fight/hit in the past 5 years.
And meta‑analytic evidence still finds a consistent negative association between IQ and reactive violence overall (Romero‑Martínez et al., 2026).
Yes, high-IQ violent offenders exist.
But the rate is much higher in the low-IQ group.
That’s what “distribution/per-capita” means:
Not “does it ever happen?” but “how common is it per person?”
What’s the reality?
High intelligence is a broad net advantage in most major life domains we can measure, and the negative traits attributed to the gifted are either fabricated, reversed in sign, or vanishingly rare edge cases blown up by availability bias.
I. What IQ Research Actually Measures
IQ (g, general intelligence) is not a “test-taking trick” or a cultural artifact.
What it predicts: Academic performance, job training, job performance, income, health, longevity, and law-abiding behavior.
What matters here: Nobody is arguing “IQ = worth.” We’re arguing predictive power and per-person rates.
It’s robustly measured, powerfully predictive, and substantially heritable.
Heritability estimates rise with age: roughly ~20% in infancy, ~40% in childhood, ~55% in adolescence, and ~65% by young adulthood, with some studies reporting estimates approaching ~80% in later adulthood before declining in very old age (Plomin & Deary, 2015; Haworth et al., 2009).
Massive longitudinal datasets—the NLSY, Add Health, SMPY, the UK Biobank, military AFQT records, Scandinavian conscription data, national crime registries—reveal its predictive power not through isolated anecdotes but through population-level base rates across millions of people.
The Governing Principle: Ignore stories/anecdotes; follow per-person rates. Individual exceptions exist in every group. But policy, social narratives, and accurate understanding should focus on what’s typical per capita, not on cherry-picked outliers that confirm pre-existing myths.
II. The Core Myths vs. The Data
1. “High-IQ People Are Arrogant and Elitist”
Myth: Intelligence breeds arrogance, condescension, and inability to respect others.
Data: The opposite is closer to the truth. Metacognitive accuracy—the ability to realistically assess one’s own knowledge and limitations—increases with cognitive ability. The Dunning-Kruger effect, where individuals overestimate their competence, is strongest among the least skilled (Kruger & Dunning, 1999).
Narcissism isn’t “high IQ.” It’s self-enhancement.
In fact, narcissism correlates more consistently with self-assessed intelligence than with objective test performance — meaning the loudest “I’m the smartest guy in the room” energy is often ego signaling, not g (Zajenkowski & Czarna, 2015).
What observers interpret as “arrogance” in high-IQ individuals is typically one of three things: (1) accurate self-assessment mistaken for boasting, (2) directness mistaken for condescension, or (3) impatience with repeated error mistaken for contempt. The perception of arrogance is projection—those who cannot match the performance feel condescended to by the mere existence of the discrepancy.
Note: Yes, some high IQ individuals may brag about IQ score and/or fixate their identity on having a high IQ… but this is extremely rare as a % of the high IQ population. This says less about IQ and more about trait narcissism.
2. “Geniuses Lack Empathy and Emotional Understanding”
Myth: High intelligence comes at the cost of emotional attunement—the “unfeeling robot” who can’t relate to people.
Data: Cognitive empathy—the ability to accurately model and infer others’ mental states—correlates positively with general intelligence in typical populations (Baker et al., 2014). This makes intuitive sense: understanding what another person is thinking or feeling is a cognitively demanding task. Performance on the “Reading the Mind in the Eyes” test, a standard measure of mental state inference, rises with IQ.
Affective empathy isn’t a built‑in IQ tax.
When people picture the cold robot genius, they’re usually confusing (1) intelligence with (2) autism traits.
Autism spectrum disorder (ASD) (including what used to be called Asperger syndrome) is defined by social‑communication differences and often involves difficulty with cognitive empathy / theory‑of‑mind—but it spans the IQ range.
In CDC surveillance, a substantial faction of autistic children have co‑occurring intellectual disability (low IQ), while some are average or above-average. Plus in large adult samples without intellectual disability, ASD is still associated with lower cognitive empathy on average.
Bottom line: ASD ≠ high IQ, and it is not representative of high‑IQ people as a group. A small subset of high IQ individuals have ASD and difficulty with cognitive empathy downstream of that condition — not the IQ.
3. “Smart People Are Criminal, Psychopathic, or Evil”
Myth: Intelligence enables sophisticated exploitation. The “mastermind criminal,” the “genius psychopath,” the Hannibal Lecter archetype.
Data: This is perhaps the most thoroughly demolished myth in differential psychology. The relationship between IQ and criminal behavior is strongly, consistently, and overwhelmingly negative.
Ttofi et al. (2016) (meta-analysis) noted delinquents score ~8 IQ points lower than non-delinquents on average.
Herrnstein & Murray (1994) documented that incarceration risk drops precipitously as IQ rises: individuals in the bottom decile are 10-20x more likely to be incarcerated than those in the top decile.
Beaver et al. (2013) find the IQ-crime link holds across race/gender sub-gropus and persists even after controls for “self-control” with data from the Add Health study.
Frisell et al. (2012) noted (via large Swedish registry work) general cognitive ability is inversely associated with violent crime convictions.
The mean IQ of incarcerated populations hovers 0.5-1+ standard deviations below the population mean.
Prospective cohort work finds the IQ–delinquency link persists even when socioeconomic background is accounted for (Moffitt et al., 1981).
Violent and chronic criminality is not a ‘genius’ phenomenon—it concentrates where impulse control, planning ability, and long-run consequence tracking are weakest.
IQ vs. psychopathy
Meta-analytic work suggests psychopathy shows no strong positive relationship with intelligence (often near-zero to slightly negative), which is the opposite of the ‘evil genius psychopath’ trope (O’Boyle et al., 2013).
What about sociopathy?
Sociopathy is a general label for chronic antisocial behavior (ASPD). Low IQ is associated with higher antisocial behavior with small-to-medium effect sizes (often ~.20–.30), and antisocial groups average about ~8 IQ points lower than controls.
This pattern has been replicated across cohorts and is not easily dismissed as mere SES, detection, or “poor effort” artifacts.
The “genius psychopath” or “sociopath” is often a fiction writer’s invention, not an empirical category.
What about white-collar crime?
This is the one area critics reach for — fraud, embezzlement, corporate malfeasance.
Context matters:
White collar crime is nonviolent in the direct physical sense (nobody is stabbed, shot, raped, maimed, etc.)
It represents a tiny fraction of arrests
It doesn’t fill prisons
It’s an access crime: you can’t embezzle money you’re never trusted to touch
The “white-collar crime” objection is a desperate reach to salvage a false equivalence.
Yes, white-collar crime can be massively harmful. But it doesn’t come close to matching the volume of violent/property offending and the criminal-justice burden that concentrates at the low end.
Many high-dollar white-collar crimes require credentials, institutional access, and sustained planning ability—so they skew toward the strata that occupy those roles. That’s a selection effect, not a moral symmetry claim.
This is why people get the sense “white collar crimes” are more prominent among higher-IQ individuals… they can be, proportionally, because opportunity and role-gating filter who can even commit them.
On an absolute level/per-capita level, most high IQ individuals are not involved in white-collar crimes.
4. “High-IQ Individuals Are Selfish and Uncharitable”
Myth: Smart people are self-interested, unhelpful, and disconnected from community.
Data: Cognitive ability is positively related to civic participation and engagement (Hauser, 2000). Research by Jones (2008) reported higher-IQ individuals are more cooperative in iterated prisoner’s dilemma and public goods games—precisely the lab settings designed to measure prosocial orientation under controlled conditions.
The mechanism is straightforward: intelligence enables understanding of long-term reciprocity, reputation effects, and the benefits of cooperation. Smarter people are better at seeing past immediate self-interest to sustainable mutual gains. They also have more economic surplus to donate. Either way, intelligence predicts more prosociality, not less.
5. “Book Smart but No Street Smarts”
Myth: There’s a tradeoff between academic intelligence and practical, real-world competence. Smart people can’t handle “real life.”
Data: The “multiple intelligences” framework has intuitive appeal and minimal-to-zero empirical support. Virtually all cognitive abilities positively intercorrelate—this is the entire basis of g, the general factor of intelligence (Carroll, 1993).
“Practical intelligence” as measured by Sternberg’s tacit knowledge tests correlates substantially with general intelligence (Gottfredson, 2003). The Hunter & Schmidt meta-analyses of job performance found that g predicts performance in every single occupational category ever studied—including jobs stereotyped as requiring “street smarts”: sales, skilled trades, service work, manual labor.
“Book smart vs. street smart” is a cope narrative for those lacking in the former. There is no hidden compensatory intelligence that emerges “in the real world” to level the playing field. The playing field isn’t level; it’s tilted toward the cognitively able.
6. “The Tortured Genius”—Madness, Depression, and Misery
Myth: High intelligence is a curse. Geniuses are more prone to mental illness, depression, and suicide.
Data: In the general population, the relationship between IQ and mental health is protective.
Gale et al. (2010) found that higher childhood IQ predicted lower risk of hospitalization for psychiatric conditions in adulthood.
Koenen et al. (2009) found lower childhood IQ correlated with most adult psychiatric disorders (schizophrenia-spectrum disorder, depression, anxiety).
The “mad genius” myth is sustained by availability bias—Bobby Fischer, Howard Hughes, and various “tortured artists” are memorable precisely because they’re unusual. The thousands of high-IQ professionals living stable, productive, satisfied lives don’t make headlines or movies.
What about the extreme right tail?
Karpinski et al. (2018) found elevated self-reported anxiety among Mensa members. But this study has critical limitations: self-selection bias (who joins Mensa?), self-report measures, no matched controls, and conflation of correlation with causation.
The elevated anxiety, where it exists, likely reflects social mismatch costs (difficulty finding intellectual peers when you’re 3+ standard deviations from the mean) not some inherent toxicity of intelligence itself.
Across large cohorts, premorbid/childhood IQ is generally inversely related to severe mental illness (e.g., schizophrenia), though associations vary by disorder.
7. “Smart People Are Ugly, Weak, or Physically Inferior”
Myth: Intelligence trades off against physical development. The stereotypical frail, unattractive nerd.
Data: Intelligence has small positive correlations with physical attractiveness, height, symmetry, and general health. The idea that smart = ugly/weak is not based on any actual data.
Markers of developmental stability like facial symmetry show small positive associations with intelligence (Banks et al., 2010).
On rated attractiveness specifically, published work reports a positive association in large samples (Kanazawa, 2011).
Height-IQ correlations are documented across multiple populations (Silventoinen et al., 2006). The UK Biobank, Wisconsin Longitudinal Study, and other large datasets replicate these patterns.
The correlations are generally small-to-modest, but the sign is consistently non-negative in large samples.
The underlying mechanisms involve developmental stability (general biological fitness affecting both brain and body), assortative mating (smart people marrying other smart, healthy, attractive people), and shared genetic architecture.
The nerd-as-weakling stereotype isn’t just wrong—it’s reversed in the data.
8. “High-IQ People Have Poor Self-Care and Life Management”
Myth: The “absent-minded professor” who can’t manage basic life tasks—disheveled, disorganized, poor hygiene.
Data: Higher IQ predicts better health behaviors: lower rates of smoking, less obesity, lower substance abuse, more exercise, better medication adherence (Batty et al., 2007; Gottfredson & Deary, 2004). Self-regulation and executive function correlate positively with cognitive ability (Duckworth & Seligman, 2005).
The “absent-minded professor” is a handful of memorable eccentrics, not a population pattern. At scale, intelligent people take better care of themselves by virtually every metric.
9. “Intelligence Is Just Memorization; Smart People Lack Creativity”
Myth: IQ measures rote learning. Real creativity is separate from or opposed to measured intelligence.
Data: Creativity and intelligence are positively correlated throughout the range. Kim (2005) meta-analyzed the relationship and found consistent positive correlations. The “threshold hypothesis”—that IQ and creativity decouple above ~120—has weak and inconsistent support; even above threshold, correlations remain positive, just weaker.
Almost all exceptionally creative individuals in every domain—science, art, literature, music, entrepreneurship, invention—are substantially above average in measured intelligence. There is no population of dumb-but-creative geniuses. The rare “idiot savant” cases involve isolated procedural skills (calendar calculation, rote musical reproduction), not generative creativity.
10. “Geniuses Are Lonely, Friendless, or Romantically Unsuccessful”
Myth: High intelligence precludes social and romantic success. The “incel genius” doomed to die alone.
Data: The Terman longitudinal study (Terman & Oden, 1959) followed high-IQ children across their entire lifespans: above-average marriage rates, lower divorce rates, satisfactory social networks, and successful careers. The Study of Mathematically Precocious Youth (SMPY) has replicated these patterns in modern cohorts (Lubinski & Benbow, 2006).
What about the “smart kids have less sex” finding?
There’s nuance.
High-IQ adolescents delay sexual debut—this is delayed gratification, the same trait that predicts their later success. It’s not a mating penalty; it’s future orientation.
By adulthood, intelligence is generally rated as attractive—often read as competence and interestingness, not “threatening” or alien.
This pattern shows up in genetically-informed and population data: cognitive ability/achievement predicts later age at first sex (Harden, 2011), and Add Health analyses track cognitive ability alongside sexual experiences into adulthood (Kahn & Halpern, 2016).
High-IQ individuals marry later (more education, career establishment, selectivity) but divorce less. They report normal to above-average relationship satisfaction and social networks.
The “lonely genius” exists at the extreme right tail (IQ 160+, ~1 in 30,000 people) where finding intellectual peers becomes genuinely difficult—but this is a tiny fraction of the gifted population, not its representative profile.
11. “High-IQ People Are Indecisive—Paralysis by Analysis”
Myth: Overthinking leads to inability to act. Smart people can’t make decisions.
Data: Decision quality improves with intelligence. What appears as “indecision” is often more thorough analysis producing better outcomes. Frederick (2005) developed the Cognitive Reflection Test showing that higher-IQ individuals resist intuitive-but-incorrect responses and engage in more deliberative reasoning—this is a feature, not a bug.
Chronic indecisiveness is a personality trait (high neuroticism, low conscientiousness) orthogonal to cognitive ability. Smart people may take longer on genuinely complex decisions because they’re actually thinking. They don’t take longer on routine decisions or fail to act when action is required.
12. “Too Smart to Lead”—Intelligence as Leadership Liability
Myth: High intelligence alienates followers. The best leaders are “relatable,” not smart.
Data: Intelligence is one of the strongest predictors of leadership emergence and effectiveness. Judge, Colbert, & Ilies (2004) meta-analyzed the relationship: robust positive correlation (r ≈ 0.27) across contexts.
This also matches “implicit leadership” research: intelligence is part of the shared leader prototype across 10 of 11 leadership categories, and it’s the only trait that broadly generalizes across contexts (Lord et al., 1984; summarized in Judge et al. 2004).
A broader meta-analysis of leader effectiveness also finds cognitive ability is a consistent predictor — and for cognitive ability specifically, the relationship is stronger for objective effectiveness measures than for ratings-based ones (Hoffman et al., 2011).
A separate integrative meta-analysis that models leader traits → leader behaviors → outcomes also treats intelligence as a meaningful leader trait predictor across criteria (DeRue et al., 2011).
In a ~17,000-person longitudinal cohort, adjusted models show 37.3% of high cognitive ability children (+1 SD) later occupied leadership roles vs. 25.4% of low cognitive ability children (−1 SD); a ~12-percentage-point gap (Daly, Egan, & O’Reilly, 2015).
Swedish registry data linking mandatory conscription testing at age 18 to later CEO appointments shows heavy selection: the median large-company CEO is above ~83% of the population in cognitive ability (≈ top 17%) and above ~92% in non-cognitive ability; and the median is in the top ~5% on a combined index (cognitive + non-cognitive + height). In the paper’s multivariate models, the implied selection weights are ~58% non-cognitive, ~31% cognitive, and ~12% height (and cognitive matters more for larger firms). Translation: CEO selection is brains + execution, not “relatable mediocrity,” so the “too smart to lead” trope is backwards (Adams, Keloharju & Knüpfer, 2018).
Antonakis et al. (2017) directly tested a “communication gap” model: perceived leadership peaks when the leader is ~1.2 SD above the group’s mean IQ (one SD smarter than the room in their sample… probably ~120 IQ); the drop-off is about being too far above followers to be perceived as effective—not a claim that low-IQ leaders outperform.
13. “High-IQ People Are Disloyal or ‘Rootless Cosmopolitans’”
Myth: Smart people lack loyalty to their communities or nations. They’re “globalist” elites with no roots.
Data: Openness to experience increases with IQ, and high-IQ individuals are more likely to travel, speak multiple languages, and hold universalist moral frameworks. But there is zero evidence this translates to disloyalty or failure to contribute.
High-IQ individuals are overrepresented in military officer corps, government service, and community leadership. They pay vastly more in taxes, commit far less crime, and contribute disproportionately to civic institutions. The “rootless cosmopolitan” accusation is populist resentment dressed up as social criticism.
III. Where Dysfunction Actually Concentrates
Perhaps the most important—and most suppressed—finding in intelligence research is the nonlinear concentration of social dysfunction at the low end of the IQ distribution.
Herrnstein & Murray (1994) documented this in detail: Individuals in the bottom IQ quintile are dramatically overrepresented in chronic welfare dependence, out-of-wedlock births, poverty, incarceration, and long-term unemployment—not by small margins, but by factors of 5x, 10x, or more compared to the top quintiles. These differentials persist after controlling for parental socioeconomic status.
Gottfredson (1997), in “Why g Matters: The Complexity of Everyday Life,” demonstrated that modern society increasingly requires cognitive skills that those below IQ 85 struggle to acquire:
Below IQ 85: Difficulty with complex job training, elevated error rates
Below IQ 80: Routine tasks become challenging; military rejected these recruits for decades
Below IQ 70: Independent functioning in complex environments significantly impaired
Compression at the bottom is severe. Moving from IQ 70 to IQ 85 produces larger improvements in life outcomes than moving from IQ 115 to IQ 130.
The damage concentrates where cognitive resources are scarcest.
Project 100,000: The Natural Experiment
During the Vietnam era, Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara’s “Project 100,000” deliberately recruited ~354,000 low-IQ men who would normally be rejected from military service.
The goal was egalitarian… later retrospective reporting and analysis argues the outcomes were grim:
Higher casualty rates in combat
More disciplinary problems across all roles
Less trainability even for simple tasks
Worse unit performance wherever they were assigned
The experiment was quietly abandoned. The military has since maintained strict cognitive standards, and the AFQT literature—based on millions of service members—confirms that IQ predicts trainability, performance, and lower disciplinary problems across every Military Occupational Specialty.
IV. Time Preference: The Master Mechanism
One of the most powerful mediators of the IQ-outcome relationship is time preference—the degree to which individuals discount future rewards in favor of immediate gratification.
Shamosh & Gray (2008) meta-analyzed the relationship between intelligence and delay discounting: robust negative correlation.
Higher IQ → greater willingness to wait for larger future rewards.
This single variable helps explain why high-IQ individuals:
Save and invest more
Pursue longer education
Avoid addiction and substance abuse
Maintain healthier behaviors
Build more stable relationships
Commit less crime (crime is impulsive; consequences are delayed)
Smart people aren’t just better at solving problems—they’re better at not creating them in the first place.
V. The Innovation Dividend: What High-IQ People Actually Build
The longitudinal cohort studies don’t just track what high-IQ people avoid—they track what they produce.
SMPY and Terman: The Output Data
The Study of Mathematically Precocious Youth (SMPY) and Terman’s Genetic Studies of Genius followed gifted populations across decades.
The findings:
The top 1% in cognitive ability generates a disproportionate share of patents, peer-reviewed scientific publications, and technological innovations
Math-tilted high-IQ individuals concentrate in STEM fields and drive technical innovation
Verbally tilted high-IQ individuals produce literary, legal, and cultural output
These patterns show up repeatedly in longitudinal gifted cohorts (e.g., Terman & Oden, 1959; Lubinski & Benbow, 2006).
The Civilization Footprint
Most of the tools, systems, institutions, and ideas that modern society runs on were built by people substantially above average in cognitive ability.
The electrical grid, the legal system, medical advances, the internet, financial infrastructure, scientific method itself—none of this emerged from the median.
High-IQ populations don’t just avoid dysfunction; they build everything else.
VI. The “EQ” Pseudoscientific Swindle
No discussion of IQ mythology is complete without addressing “Emotional Intelligence” (EQ/EI). The most successful rhetorical pseudoscientific crackpot counterpunch to intelligence research.
Many will hear about someone with high IQ and say:
“Yeah but what’s his/her EQ though? I bet they have a low EQ!”
This is borderline comedic when much of the evidence points toward individuals with “high IQ” having “high EQ” (a bullshit term) too!
Sadly the masses aren’t aware that EQ is a scam. They may be erroneously thinking of a high IQ outlier with autism spectrum/asperger traits (a minority of the high IQ population) or poorer communication with “average Joes” from high IQs… both of these are distinct from EQ.
In many ways, “EQ” just means where you stand on the social totem pole… and is a proxy for social savvy and/or dominance.
The Origin of “EQ”
The concept was popularized by Daniel Goleman’s 1995 bestseller, which made extraordinary claims:
EQ allegedly predicted success better than IQ and could compensate for cognitive deficits.
These claims were NOT SUPPORTED by the research he cited and have NOT BEEN VALIDATED. Goleman was a science journalist, not a researcher.
The Psychometrics
Of the 2 psychometric tests — one correlates strongly with “IQ” and the other is just measuring personality traits (extroversion, emotional regulation, and agreeableness). If you have that… congrats you have “high EQ.”
Ability-based EI (MSCEIT): Treats emotional intelligence as a cognitive ability. Has reasonable psychometric properties but correlates substantially with g (r ≈ 0.3-0.4). It’s not independent of general intelligence—it’s substantially predicted by it (MacCann et al., 2014).
Self-report/Trait EI (EQ-i and similar): Essentially personality inventories relabeled. Measures extraversion, emotional stability, agreeableness—traits already captured by the Big Five. Adds negligible incremental prediction beyond existing measures (Harms & Credé, 2010).
The Verdict
EQ is a pseudoscientific swindle parroted by those who want to feel good about their social savvy, personality traits, and/or social dominance — and may be envious and/or jealous of individuals with high IQ.
It’s mostly an HR-driven marketing phenomenon and not a legitimate scientific construct. Ironically, most people with high IQ score above-average on certain “EQ” tests.
The ability-based versions of “EQ” are moderately valid but correlate with IQ, not alternatives to it. The self-report versions are personality traits renamed.
The cultural function of EQ discourse is transparent.
It provides a flattering alternative credential for those who cannot compete cognitively. “EQ” is the academic equivalent of “street smarts”—a consolation prize dressed up as an equivalent or superior achievement.
VII. Myth vs. Reality: The Complete Ledger
1. Social & Emotional Intelligence
Arrogance & Elitism
Myth: High-IQ individuals are inherently arrogant or elitist.
Reality: Intelligence is linked to accurate self-assessment. The Dunning-Kruger Effect suggests that people with lower competence are more prone to overestimating status (and this can be heavily amplified by trait narcissism).
Empathy
Myth: “No EQ” or a lack of empathy.
Reality: Cognitive empathy (the ability to understand another’s mental state) generally rises in tandem with IQ. It can be impaired in autism (ASD), which is a separate neurodevelopmental dimension that spans the IQ range.
“EQ” as a Construct
Myth: Emotional Intelligence is a separate, compensatory skill for those lacking traditional IQ.
Reality: “EQ” is largely a marketing construct; scientifically, it is viewed as a mix of General Intelligence (g) and personality traits. This is mostly just nonsense from educational and corporate marketing materials.
2. Character & Ethics
Criminality
Myth: The “Evil Genius” or psychopathic mastermind.
Reality: There is a strong negative correlation between IQ and crime. Criminals are more likely to be lower IQ (85-90).
Altruism
Myth: Highly intelligent people are selfish or antisocial.
Reality: Cognitive ability is positively related to civic engagement and cooperation.
Loyalty
Myth: The “Rootless” or disloyal intellectual.
Reality: High-IQ individuals are statistically overrepresented in civic and national service. This myth is usually a byproduct of populist resentment.
3. Competence & Performance
“Street Smarts”
Myth: High IQ equals “book smarts” but no practical “street smarts.”
Reality: g (General Intelligence) is the most reliable predictor of performance across all job types, from manual labor to executive roles. This is a “cope” narrative used to devalue measurable intelligence.
Leadership
Myth: Intelligent people are “nerds” who cannot lead.
Reality: IQ is one of the strongest predictors of leadership emergence and effectiveness. This survives from populist myths and media tropes.
Decision-Making
Myth: Indecisiveness due to “analysis paralysis.”
Reality: High IQ is associated with better decision quality and significantly faster information processing. This is a personality trait (likely high Neuroticism), not an IQ trait.
4. Health & Physicality
Mental Health
Myth: The “Mad Genius”—intelligence leads to depression or mental illness.
Reality: IQ is generally protective against mental illness. Severe mental illness and cognitive decline are more concentrated at lower IQ levels.
Physicality
Myth: The weak, “ugly,” or frail intellectual.
Reality: There are slight positive correlations between IQ and health, height, and perceived attractiveness. This is a reversed stereotype; data shows the opposite.
Lifestyle & Self-Care
Myth: Poor self-care or being “lost in the clouds.”
Reality: High IQ correlates with better health behaviors and a longer life expectancy. This is more associated with low IQ and poor self-regulation.
5. Creativity & Romance
Creativity
Myth: High IQ people are “calculators”—uncreative and rigid.
Reality: Creativity generally rises with IQ up to a certain threshold. This is a persistent cultural myth.
Romance
Myth: Lonely, unsuccessful, or “incel” archetypes.
Reality: High-IQ individuals generally have normal to above-average social and romantic outcomes. Only in the extreme “Communication Gap” tail (IQ 160+) is this potentially relevant.
Inverse Reality: High IQ People
The mythology about high-IQ people isn’t just inaccurate — it’s inverted.
The traits erroneously attributed to the intelligent are, in the aggregate, far more characteristic of the unintelligent.
Prisons aren’t filled with criminal masterminds; they’re filled with impulsive, low-ability offenders. Dysfunction doesn’t concentrate among the gifted; it concentrates among those lacking cognitive resources.
This has implications:
Policy: Interventions that raise the low tail of the distribution would yield the largest social returns. The discourse about “too smart” leaders or “EQ over IQ” actively misdirects attention from where problems actually concentrate.
Culture: The myths exist to comfort those without cognitive advantages—not to describe reality. Recognizing this allows honest conversation about ability, merit, and inequality.
Individual Understanding: If you’re high-IQ, the data says you’re statistically likely to be healthier, more prosocial, more successful, and more satisfied than average—not cursed, not tormented, not doomed to loneliness.
Intelligence is not usually a curse, a tradeoff, or a moral failing.
It’s the single best general-purpose asset humans can possess—predictive of success, health, prosociality, and satisfaction across virtually every domain ever measured.
The mythology claiming otherwise exists to comfort those without it, not to describe reality.