This Will Lower A Person’s IQ By 30%
The statement that massively reduces a
person’s IQ.
Being socially rejected massively reduces
a person’s effective IQ, research finds.
People told, “You will end up alone in
life” experienced drops in analytical reasoning skills of 30%.
Their IQs also dropped around 25%.
Not only does rejection lower IQ, it also
makes people more aggressive, other studies have shown.
The results suggest that intelligence may
have evolved primarily to facilitate social relations.
For the study, people took a personality
test and some were then told (falsely) that it indicated they would end up
alone in life.
Afterwards they were given an IQ test.
The study’s authors explain the results:
“In all three studies, people exhibited
significant cognitive decrements after they were told that they were likely to
end up alone in life. Thus, the prospect of social exclusion
reduced people’s capacity for intelligent thought. Moreover, the decrements in intelligent
performance qualified as large effects every time.”
The researchers think that people’s IQ drops because they are in distress:
“…we can best explain the pattern of
cognitive decrements by proposing that social exclusion constitutes a
threatening, aversive event but that people strive to suppress their emotional
distress, and the resulting drain on their executive function impairs their
controlled processes.”
In other words, being told they would end
up alone made it harder for them to concentrate, because they were trying to
suppress negative emotions.
There is an intimate link between
intelligence and social relations, the authors write:
“Our results are more consistent with the
view that
Intelligence evolved as a means to
support and facilitate social relations rather than to compensate for the
absence of their advantages. Our findings could even be taken to
suggest that people responded as if being excluded from social groups removed
the need for intelligent thought.”
The study was published in
the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology (Baumeister et al.,
2002).
Comments
Post a Comment