Personality Traits Linked with Intelligence, 2

The second study reported in the Journal of Research in Personality concluded that those who possess a dispositional tendency to value joint benefits more than their own, scored higher on an intelligence test. Researchers studied 301 people who played games that involved either donating to others or keeping things for themselves. They found that those who were more egotistical and who kept more for themselves tended to be less intelligent. While those who were more generous to others tended to be more intelligent (e.g., individuals with higher IQs were more concerned with the public good.) Comments by the authors concluded that the evidence presented supports the possibility that unconditional altruism may serve as a costly signal of general intelligence because altruism is costly and is reliably linked to the quality ‘general intelligence’. They also found that children’s intelligence predicts later socio-economic success better than attributes of their parents’ attributes, concluding that intelligence is an indicator of future resources. A person with high cognitive skills may be able to donate more in advance than someone with lower skills and perhaps can afford to be more generous because they have more to give.