Kaja Perina on the Dark Triad: Narcissism, Machiavellianism, and Psychopathy - Manifold Podcast #36

Kaja Perina is the Editor in Chief of Psychology Today. Kaja, Steve, and Corey discuss so-called Dark Triad personality traits: Narcissism, Machiavellianism, and Psychopathy. Do these traits manifest more often in super successful people? What is the difference between Sociopathy and Psychopathy? Are CEOs often "warm sociopaths"? Can too much empathy be a liability? Corey laments Sociopathy in academic Philosophy. Kaja explains the operation of Psychology Today. Steve reveals his Hypomania diagnoses.

2:33 - Psychopathology and the Dark Triad
11:34 - Do these traits manifest more often in super successful people?
17:52 - Can too much empathy be a liability?
35:16 - Corey laments Sociopathy in academic Philosophy
50:32 - Kaja explains the operation of Psychology Today
1:01:06 - Steve reveals his Hypomania diagnoses

Transcript

Kaja Perina (Psychology Today)

Related: Nice Guys Finish Last (2012 post), more Hypomania


man·i·fold /ˈmanəˌfōld/ many and various.

In mathematics, a manifold is a topological space that locally resembles Euclidean space near each point.

Steve Hsu and Corey Washington have been friends for almost 30 years, and between them hold PhDs in Neuroscience, Philosophy, and Theoretical Physics. Join them for wide ranging and unfiltered conversations with leading writers, scientists, technologists, academics, entrepreneurs, investors, and more.

Steve Hsu is VP for Research and Professor of Theoretical Physics at Michigan State University. He is also a researcher in computational genomics and founder of several Silicon Valley startups, ranging from information security to biotech. Educated at Caltech and Berkeley, he was a Harvard Junior Fellow and held faculty positions at Yale and the University of Oregon before joining MSU.

Corey Washington is Director of Analytics in the Office of Research and Innovation at Michigan State University. He was educated at Amherst College and MIT before receiving a PhD in Philosophy from Stanford and a PhD in a Neuroscience from Columbia. He held faculty positions at the University Washington and the University of Maryland. Prior to MSU, Corey worked as a biotech consultant and is founder of a medical diagnostics startup.

Arnold: The Will to Power

I don't know whether Arnold ever read Nietzsche, but he certainly developed the Will to Power early in life. I quite like the video above -- I even made my kids watch it :-)

When I was in high school I came across his book Arnold: The Education of a Bodybuilder, a combination autobiography and training manual published in 1977. I found a copy in the remainder section of the book store and bought it for a few dollars. The most interesting part of the book is the description of his early life in Austria and his introduction to weightlifting and bodybuilding. I highly recommend it to anyone interested in golden age bodybuilding, the early development of physical training, or the psychology of human drive and high achievement. Young Arnold displays a kind of unbridled and unironic egoism that can no longer be expressed without shame in today's feminized society.

Chapter 2: Before long, people began looking at me as a special person. Partly this was the result of my own changing attitude about myself. I was growing, getting bigger, gaining confidence. I was given consideration I had never received before; it was as though I were the son of a millionaire. I'd walk into a room at school and my classmates would offer me food or ask if they could help me with my homework. Even my teachers treated me differently. Especially after I started winning trophies in the weight-lifting contests I entered.

This strange new attitude toward me had an incredible effect on my ego. It supplied me with something I had been craving. I'm not sure why I had this need for special attention. Perhaps it was because I had an older brother who'd received more than his share of attention from our father. Whatever the reason, I had a strong desire to be noticed, to be praised. I basked in this new flood of attention. I turned even negative responses to my own satisfaction.

I'm convinced most of the people I knew didn't really understand what I was doing at all. They looked at me as a novelty, a freak. ...

"Why did you have to pick the least-favorite sport in Austria?" they always asked. It was true. We had only twenty or thirty bodybuilders in the entire country. I couldn't come up with an answer. I didn't know. It had been instinctive. I had just fallen in love with it. I loved the feeling of the gym, of working out, of having muscles all over.

Now, looking back, I can analyze it more clearly. My total involvement had a lot to do with the discipline, the individualism, and the utter integrity of bodybuilding. But at the time it was a mystery even to me. Bodybuilding did have its rewards, but they were relatively small. I wasn't competing yet, so my gratification had to come from other areas. In the summer at the lake I could surprise everyone by showing up with a different body. They'd say, "Jesus, Arnold, you grew again. When are you going to stop?"

"Never," I'd tell them. We'd all laugh. They thought it amusing. But I meant it.

...

The strangest thing was how my new body struck girls. There were a certain number of girls who were knocked out by it and a certain number who found it repulsive. There was absolutely no in-between. It seemed cut and dried. I'd hear their comments in the hallway at lunchtime, on the street, or at the lake. "I don't like it. He's weird—all those muscles give me the creeps." Or, "I love the way Arnold looks—so big and powerful. It's like sculpture. That's how a man should look."

These reactions gave me added motivation to continue building my body. I wanted to get bigger so I could really impress the girls who liked it and upset the others even more. Not that girls were my main reason for training. Far from it. But they added incentive and I figured as long as I was getting this attention from them I might as well use it. I had fun. I could tell if a girl was repelled by my size. And when I'd catch her looking at me in disbelief, I would casually raise my arm, flex my bicep, and watch her cringe. It was always good for a laugh. ...

Arnold, age 17 or 18:

Life impacts of personality and intelligence

Here are two nice figures I came across recently.

The first, based on SMPY data, displays odds ratios for various accomplishments (doctorate degree, STEM publication, patent, high income, tenure) as a function of SAT-M score at age 13. The quartiles correspond roughly to 1 in 200 ability (Q1) to 1 in 10k ability (Q4). This data soundly refutes the "IQ above 120 doesn't matter" Malcolm Gladwell nonsense. See earlier post Horsepower matters; Psychometrics works.

In (imprecise) words: "Profoundly gifted children are 10+ times more likely than merely gifted children to, e.g., earn a patent or gain tenure at a top research university. They are at least several times more likely to earn exceptionally high incomes." (Note "merely gifted" is somewhat below the Q1 SMPY cut -- most school systems use top few percent vs top 0.5 percent.)

The second figure shows regression coefficients of income (at various ages) vs IQ and personality traits (standardized, so returns for each SD of trait). This was originally discussed in Earnings effects of personality, education and IQ for the gifted; see also this paper (Miriam Gensowski, Copenhagen). Note the IQ returns may be underestimated for average individuals since the data source is Terman and there is significant restriction of range (everyone tested at better than 1 in 200 or so on the Stanford-Binet). Nevertheless there are still positive returns to above average IQ within the Terman group (analogous to SMPY results above).

It pays to be Smart, Disciplined/Focused, Extraverted, and Mean! 8-(

Having it All: opt outs want back in

No, you can't actually have it all -- neither as a man nor as a woman. If you want to spend time with your kids (I highly recommend it), that will take time away from your startup, hedge fund, climb up the ladder, investigations into quantum decoherence. You just have to strike a balance that you can deal with.

Men are on average more driven by career success and money than women, and similarly women are more, well, maternal than men. It's best to think about this (as with all questions dealing with groups of people) in terms of distributions rather than strict categories. There are outlier women who are better corporate warriors than 95% of men (but perhaps they comprise less than 5% of the female population!), and there are outlier men who are great stay at home dads. At least at the moment, and perhaps for deep evolutionary reasons, the male and female distributions are shifted relative to each other along these dimensions. To me, feminism means fighting for the rights of outliers to do what they want, while still respecting the larger number of women who might be happier in more traditional roles. In my opinion, noticing properties of distributions is not in any way anti-feminist.

NYTimes: ... The culture of motherhood, post-recession, had altered considerably, too. The women of the opt-out revolution left the work force at a time when the prevailing ideas about motherhood idealized full-time, round-the-clock, child-centered devotion. In 2000, for example, with the economy strong and books like “Surrendering to Motherhood,” a memoir about the “liberation” of giving up work to stay home, setting the tone for the aspirational mothering style of the day, almost 40 percent of respondents to the General Social Survey told researchers they believed a mother’s working was harmful to her children (an increase of eight percentage points since 1994). But by 2010, with recovery from the “mancession” slow and a record 40 percent of mothers functioning as family breadwinners, fully 75 percent of Americans agreed with the statement that “a working mother can establish just as warm and secure a relationship with her children as a mother who does not work.” And after decades of well-publicized academic inquiry into the effects of maternal separation and the dangers of day care, a new generation of social scientists was publishing research on the negative effects of excessive mothering: more depression and worse general health among mothers, according to the American Psychological Association.

I wondered if these changes affected the women who opted out years ago. Had they found the “escape hatch” from the rat race that one of Belkin’s interviewees said she was after? Were they able, as a vast majority said they had planned, to transition back into the work force? Or had they, as the author Leslie Bennetts predicted in her 2007 book, “The Feminine Mistake,” come to see that, by making themselves financially dependent upon their men — particularly at a time when no man could depend upon his job — they had made a colossal error?

The 22 women I interviewed, for the most part, told me that the perils of leaving the work force were counterbalanced by the pleasures of being able to experience motherhood on their own terms. A certain number of these women — the superelite, you might say, the most well-off, with the highest-value name-brand educational credentials and powerful and well-connected social networks — found jobs easily after extended periods at home. These jobs generally paid less than their previous careers and were less prestigious. But the women found the work more interesting, socially conscious and family-friendly than their old high-powered positions.

Pamela Stone, a professor of sociology at Hunter College and the author of the 2007 book “Opting Out? Why Women Really Quit Careers and Head Home,” heard many similarly glowing stories. In the early 2000s, she spent considerable time interviewing 54 well-off married mothers drawn primarily from the alumnae networks of several highly selective colleges and universities “who had navigated elite environments with competitive entry requirements,” as she described them in her book. Now she’s updating her research and has reached about 60 percent of her interviewees, two-thirds of whom have returned to work — their decisions sometimes prompted by their husbands’ somewhat reduced earnings, post-recession. “What I heard repeatedly was ‘The job found me’ or ‘The job fell into my lap,’ ” she told me.

Among the women I spoke with, those who didn’t have the highest academic credentials or highest-powered social networks or who hadn’t been sufficiently “strategic” in their volunteering (fund-raising for a Manhattan private school could be a nice segue back into banking; running bake sales for the suburban swim team tended not to be a career-enhancer) or who had divorced, often struggled greatly.

Note, moms with elite pedigrees have a much easier time getting back into the workforce after opting out to raise young kids.

Hmm ... this might affect average hourly wages by gender ... but too complex to make its way into the social science discourse ...

At a time when having a “good” job means working 50-plus hours a week, in addition to weekends and tech-tethered evenings, it’s not surprising that, if both spouses work, it can often feel as if neither is ever truly home. And that desire to be emotionally present at home, Pamela Stone, the sociologist, told me, became more pressing over time for the women she interviewed, reshaping their ambitions when they decided to go back to work.

While two-thirds of the women she reinterviewed originally worked in male-dominated professions like banking or corporate law, now only a quarter are employed in traditionally masculine and hard-driving fields. The rest chose more female-dominated, and far less lucrative, “caring, nurturing occupations” like teaching or nonprofit work, Stone said. Only one of the women she interviewed had returned to her former employer (in a “vastly different capacity, much diminished,” she said); and all have scaled down their ambitions.

“The longer they’re home, the more they continue the trajectory toward something different,” Stone told me. “They have greater appreciation of some of the values of home and connectivity, which were somewhat alien to them in their high-flying professions.”

Nice guys finish last

Careful observation suggests it's mostly sociopaths at the top  ;-)

The negative correlation between agreeableness and earnings is also established here.

NY Magazine: ... T. Byram Karasu, a psychiatrist at Albert Einstein/Montefiore Medical Center who treats wealthy clients, believes all very successful people share certain fundamental character traits. They have above-average intelligence, street smarts, and a high tolerance for anxiety. “They are sexual and aggressive,” he says. “They are also competitive with anyone and have no fear of confrontations; in fact, they thrive on them. And in contrast to their image, they are not extroverted. They become charmingly engaging when needed, but in their private world, they are private people.” They are, in the parlance, all business. 

Earlier this year, researchers led by Timothy Judge at Notre Dame went some way toward proving Karasu’s observation when they published a study in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology titled “Do Nice Guys—And Gals—Really Finish Last? The Joint Effects of Sex and Agreeableness on Income.” The paper explored, in part, the financial penalties that women suffer in the workplace for being perceived as pushovers. But it also found a strong correlation, especially dramatic in men, between disagreeableness and income. Subjects were asked to assess whether they had a forgiving nature or found fault with others, whether they were trusting, cold, considerate, or cooperative. Then they were given an agreeableness score. Men with the lowest agreeableness earned $42,113 in a given year; those with the highest agreeableness earned $31,259. Disagreeableness was also correlated to job responsibility and recommendations for the management track. ... 

Piff’s most notorious research seemed to demonstrate the extent to which people with money behave as if the world revolves around them. Last year, he spent three months hanging out at the ­intersection of Interstate 80 and Lincoln Highway, near the Berkeley Marina. ... Piff and his research team would stake out the intersection at rush hour, crouching behind a bank of shrubs near the Sea Breeze Market and Deli, and catalogue the cars that came by, giving each vehicle a grade from one to five. (Five would be a new-model Mercedes, say, and one would be an old, battered Honda like the one Piff drives.) Then the researchers would observe the drivers’ behavior. A third of people who drove grade-five cars, Piff found, rolled into the intersection without first coming to a complete stop—a violation, he reminds readers in his PNAS study, of the ­California ­Vehicle Code. “Upper-class drivers were the most likely to cut off other vehicles even when controlling for time of day, driver’s perceived sex, and amount of traffic.” When Piff designed a similar experiment to test drivers’ regard for pedestrians, in which a researcher would enter a zebra crossing as a car approached it, the results were more staggering. ... fully half the grade-five cars cruised right into the crosswalk. “It’s like they didn’t even see them,” Piff told me. 

... Looking at the data from the heart monitors, Stellar found a direct, negative correlation in biological terms between class and compassion. “Lower-class individuals showed greater heart-rate deceleration in response to the suffering of others,” Stellar wrote. The heart rates of the upper-class subjects generally did not change. 

... The American Dream is really two dreams. There’s the Horatio Alger myth, in which a person with grit, ingenuity, and hard work succeeds and prospers. And there’s the firehouse dinner, the Fourth of July picnic, the common green, in which everyone gives a little so the group can get a lot. Markus’s work seems to suggest the emergence of a dream apartheid, wherein the upper class continues to chase a vision of personal success and everyone else lingers at a potluck complaining that the system is broken. (Research shows that the rich tend to blame individuals for their own failure and likewise credit themselves for their own success, whereas those in the lower classes find explanations for inequality in circumstances and events outside their control.)

Bobos and the brain

Look out -- it appears David Brooks is readying a cognitive science-influenced 21st century version of Bobos in Paradise :-)

New Yorker: ... A year or so after they were married, Harold and Erica spent a week with Harold’s parents at their house in Aspen. They went riding and rafting and they attended an ideas festival. They sat through panel discussions on green technology and on how to adopt a charter school, and they spent a few hours immersed in the “China: Friend or Foe?” debate. One morning, they attended a talk by a neuroscientist. He was a young man in black jeans and a leather jacket, and he came to the session carrying a motorcycle helmet, as if he’d just escaped from a Caltech revival of “Grease.” He greeted a Finnish TV crew that was making a documentary about his work, mounted the stage, and gave a slide presentation that started with a series of optical illusions, like two tabletops that seem totally different but are actually the same size.

Then he displayed a series of colorful brain-scan pictures and threw out some startling statistics: we have a hundred billion neurons in the brain; infants create as many as 1.8 million neural connections per second; a mere sixty neurons are capable of making ten to the eighty-first possible connections, which is a number ten times as large as the number of particles in the observable universe; the ability to distinguish between a “P” and a “B” sound involves as many as twenty-two sites across the brain; even something as simple as seeing a color in a painting involves a mind-bogglingly complex set of mental constructions. Our perceptions, the scientist said, are fantasies we construct that correlate with reality.

At first, Harold found the talk a little chilling: it seemed that the revolution the scientist was describing was bound to lead to cold, mechanistic conclusions. If everything could be reduced to genes, neural wiring, and brain chemistry, what happened to the major concepts of life—good and evil, sin and virtue, love and commitment? And what about the way Harold made sense of his life as he lived it, the everyday vocabulary of morals, moods, character, aspirations, temptations, values, ideals? The scientist described human beings as creatures driven by deep mechanisms, almost like puppets on strings, not as ensouled human beings capable of running their own lives.

During the question-and-answer period, though, a woman asked the neuroscientist how his studies had changed the way he lived. He paused for a second, and then starting talking about a group he had joined called the Russian-American Folk Dance Company. It was odd, given how hard and scientific he had sounded. “I guess I used to think of myself as a lone agent, who made certain choices and established certain alliances with colleagues and friends,” he said. “Now, though, I see things differently. I believe we inherit a great river of knowledge, a flow of patterns coming from many sources. The information that comes from deep in the evolutionary past we call genetics. The information passed along from hundreds of years ago we call culture. The information passed along from decades ago we call family, and the information offered months ago we call education. But it is all information that flows through us. The brain is adapted to the river of knowledge and exists only as a creature in that river. Our thoughts are profoundly molded by this long historic flow, and none of us exists, self-made, in isolation from it.

“And though history has made us self-conscious in order to enhance our survival prospects, we still have deep impulses to erase the skull lines in our head and become immersed directly in the river. I’ve come to think that flourishing consists of putting yourself in situations in which you lose self-consciousness and become fused with other people, experiences, or tasks. It happens sometimes when you are lost in a hard challenge, or when an artist or a craftsman becomes one with the brush or the tool. It happens sometimes while you’re playing sports, or listening to music or lost in a story, or to some people when they feel enveloped by God’s love. And it happens most when we connect with other people. I’ve come to think that happiness isn’t really produced by conscious accomplishments. Happiness is a measure of how thickly the unconscious parts of our minds are intertwined with other people and with activities. Happiness is determined by how much information and affection flows through us covertly every day and year.”

As the scientist went on to talk about the rush he got from riding his motorcycle in the mountains, Harold was gripped by the thought that, during his lifetime, the competition to succeed—to get into the right schools and land the right jobs—had grown stiffer. Society had responded by becoming more and more focussed. Yet somehow the things that didn’t lead to happiness and flourishing had been emphasized at the expense of the things that did. The gifts he was most grateful for had been passed along to him by teachers and parents inadvertently, whereas his official education was mostly forgotten or useless.

Moreover, Harold had the sense that he had been trained to react in all sorts of stupid ways. He had been trained, as a guy, to be self-contained and smart and rational, and to avoid sentimentality. Yet maybe sentiments were at the core of everything. He’d been taught to think vertically, moving ever upward, whereas maybe the most productive connections were horizontal, with peers. He’d been taught that intelligence was the most important trait. There weren’t even words for the traits that matter most—having a sense of the contours of reality, being aware of how things flow, having the ability to read situations the way a master seaman reads the rhythm of the ocean. Harold concluded that it might be time for a revolution in his own consciousness—time to take the proto-conversations that had been shoved to the periphery of life and put them back in the center. Maybe it was time to use this science to cultivate an entirely different viewpoint.

After the lecture, Harold joined his family and they went downtown to their favorite gelato shop, where Harold had his life-altering epiphany. He’d spent years struggling to dazzle his Mandarin tutors while excelling in obscure sports, trying (not too successfully) to impress admissions officers with S.A.T. prowess and water-purification work in Zambia, sweating to wow his bosses with not overlong PowerPoints. But maybe the real action was in this deeper layer. After all, the conscious mind chooses what we buy, but the unconscious mind chooses what we like. So resolved, he boldly surveyed the gelato selections before him and confidently chose the cloudberry.

Below Brooks describes the "soft skills" he feels are more critical to success than IQ. See earlier discussion of "soft" elite firms. I'll maintain my earlier claim that value creation (e.g., technological innovation) is tied more directly to g, whereas extraction of rents, skimming the cream, manipulation of other apes, etc. are more tied to soft skills ;-) Who is creating more value for human civilization in the excerpt above -- the neuroscientist (a high g maverick who comes up with original insights) or Harold (a relatively dull person who nevertheless, thanks to his soft skills, earns much more money)? The neuroscientist is a PhD and Harold is a prototypical HBS guy.

Throughout his life, Harold had a superior ability to feel what others were feeling. He didn’t dazzle his teachers with academic brilliance, but, even in kindergarten, he could tell you who in his class was friends with whom; he was aware of social networks. Scientists used to think that we understand each other by observing each other and building hypotheses from the accumulated data. Now it seems more likely that we are, essentially, method actors who understand others by simulating the responses we see in them. When Harold was in high school, he could walk around the cafeteria and fall in with the unique social patterns that prevailed in each clique. He could tell which clique tolerated drug use or country-music listening and which didn’t. He could tell how many guys a girl could hook up with and not be stigmatized. In some groups, the number was three; in others seven. Most people assume that the groups they don’t belong to are more homogeneous than the groups they do belong to. Harold could see groups from the inside. When he sat down with, say, the Model U.N. kids, he could guess which one of them wanted to migrate from the Geeks and join the Honors/Athletes. He could sense who was the leader of any group, who was the jester, who played the role of peacemaker, daredevil, organizer, or self-effacing audience member.

Compare with this description (comment) offered by a former physicist who now occupies a very senior position at an elite financial firm:

My experiences with HYPS grads from "wimpy majors", econ, history, etc... who ended up at tier I i-banks have been interesting. I am consistently shocked by their superb interpersonal skills. I hate to dilute serious discussion with politics, but think of Barry Obama - a man who can sell an entire country on a contentless refrain of "hope and change" off the back of his empty resume while taking on Mr. McCain - a man with a "power establishment" resume. The American system finds the Barack Obama's and promotes them. At the same time it finds the Mark Zuckerberg's. At a place like Goldman you will find both Obama's and Zuckerberg's - but only because both types figure out, in advance, that it was in their interest to go there to leverage the brand name. In the fullness of time, each are revealed for what they are.

More on psychometrics

I've had some email discussions elaborating on the psychometrics slides I posted earlier. The slides themselves don't convey a lot of the important points I made in the talks so I thought I'd share this message on the blog.

Hi Guys,

I'm very interested in exactly the question Henry is getting at.

I think our simple two factor model

Grades = ability + work ethic = IQ + W

is not too crazy. Note that once you fix the ability level (=SAT score) the remaining variance in GPA has about the same SD regardless of value of SAT score (vertical red lines in the big figure in the slides). That suggests that we can think of IQ and W as largely uncorrelated random variables -- so there are smart lazy people, hard working dumb people, etc. I can't really prove the residual variance after IQ is controlled for is due to work ethic, but my experience in the classroom suggests that it is. (Note work ethic here isn't necessary general work ethic as a personality factor, but how hard the kid worked in the specific course. However, in our data we average over many courses taken by many kids, so perhaps it does get at variation of personality factor(s) in the overall population.) Beyond work ethic, some people are just more "effective" -- they can get themselves organized, are disciplined, can adapt to new challenges, are emotionally robust -- and this is also absorbed in the W factor above.

Now, in some fields there seems to be a minimum cognitive threshold. I've known physics students who worked incredibly hard and just couldn't master the material. That is reflected in our data on pure math and physics majors at UO. For all majors there is a significant positive correlation between SAT and upper GPA (in the range .3-.5).

Whether IQ has a large impact on life outcomes depends on how you ask the question. I do believe that certain professions are almost off-limits for people below a certain IQ threshold. But for most jobs (even engineer or doctor), this threshold is surprisingly low IF the person has a strong work ethic. In other words a +1 SD IQ person can probably still be a doctor or engineer if they have +(2-3) SD work ethic. However, such people, if they are honest with themselves, understand that they have some cognitive disadvantages relative to their peers. I've chosen a profession in which, every so often, I am the dumbest guy in the room -- in fact I put myself in this situation by going to workshops and wanting to talk to the smartest guys I can find :-) For someone of *average* work ethic I think you can easily find jobs for which the IQ threshold is +2 SD or higher. The typical kid admitted to grad school in my middle-tier physics department is probably > +2 SD IQ and at least +1.5 SD in work ethic -- ditto for a top tier law or med school. That's probably also the case these days for any "academic admit" at a top Ivy.

For typical jobs I think the correlation between success/income and IQ isn't very high. Other factors come into play, like work ethic, interpersonal skills, affect, charisma, luck, etc. This may even be true in many "elite" professions once you are talking about a population where everyone is above the minimum IQ threshold -- if returns to IQ above threshold are not that large then the other factors dominate and determine level of success. What is interesting about the Roe and SMPY studies is that they suggest that in science the returns to IQ above the +2 SD threshold (for getting a PhD) are pretty high. ***

Henry is right that for ideological reasons many researchers are happy to present the data so as to minimize the utility of IQ or testing in making life predictions. They might even go so far as to claim that since we use g-loaded tests in admissions, the conclusion that some professions require high IQ is actually circular. The social scientist who walked out of my Sci Foo talk actually made that claim.

Finally, when it comes to *individual* success I think most analysts significantly underestimate the role of pure blind luck (i.e., what remains when all other reasonable, roughly measurable variables have been accounted for; of course this averages out of any large population study). Or perhaps I am just reassuring myself about my limited success in life :-)


Steve

PS In the actual talks I gave I made most of these points. The slides are kind of bare bones...


*** You would have difficulty finding a hard scientist who would disagree with the statement it is a big advantage in my field to be super smart. However, thanks to political correctness, social science indoctrination, or unfamiliarity with psychometrics, it IS common for scientists to deny that being super smart has anything to do with scores on IQ tests. I myself question the validity of IQ tests beyond +(3-4) SD -- I'm more impressed by success on the IMO, Putnam, or in other high level competitions. (Although I realize that training has a big impact on performance in these competitions I do think real talent is a necessary condition for success.)

Success vs ability

The figure above illustrates the correlation between two variables, let us say success and ability. Each point represents an individual whose level of success and ability are shown on the vertical and horizontal axes, respectively. In the figure, the correlation is high, but not 100%.

For example, in American football the ability axis might represent the quantities obsessively tracked by NFL scouts: sprinting speed (40 yard dash time), natural strength (bench press), etc., while the vertical axis represents actual output, like passes caught or rushing yards gained. In real life, output is never purely determined by a single, or even several, input ability or abilities. If nothing else, luck ensures that the correlation is imperfect. Sports fans know that the fastest wide receiver isn't necessarily the best, nor the tallest basketball center the most productive, even if being fast or tall confer specific advantages. In the figure, the most able individual is not the most successful. They are seldom the same individual unless the correlation is 100%

In science or academia, we might take the horizontal axis to represent raw intellectual ability. The graph tells us to expect that the smartest person is not necessarily the most successful. It also suggests a population of successful but insecure people (the upper right dots above the fit line -- they are dumber than peers of similar accomplishment) and a population of smart people who are bitter about their unrecognized genius (dots on far right below the fit line -- they are smarter than peers of similar accomplishment).