Plato argued that philosophers should be kings, based on the idea that ruling was best done by those with knowledge. While having the typical academic philosopher running the show would not be the best idea (but far from the worst), it does make sense to think intelligence would be an important trait for good leaders. After all, good leadership requires making good decisions and stupidity tends to be an impediment to success in this area.
As might be expected, the evidence does support this view: there is a strong correlation between perceived leadership effectiveness and intelligence. Interestingly, there is positive correlation up until the leader’s IQ is 120. Above that and the leader is perceived as less effective.
It is certainly tempting to embrace the stereotype of the bumbling and ineffective intellectual and think that these higher IQ leaders are simply bad at leading because of their intelligence. To use a fictional example, consider the Star Trek episode “The Galileo 7.” In this episode, Spock and several crewmembers from the Enterprise crash on a planet and are beset by hostile natives. In the course of the episode, Spock uses his logic and intelligence to make decisions—but fails as a leader until he takes a desperate gamble at the end to save everyone. The same, one might argue, can happen in the real world: a leader whose intelligence leads them astray when they try to lead. To use a real-world example, Jimmy Carter is sometimes seen in this light: clearly an intelligent (and compassionate) person, he was regarded as a poor leader in part because of overthinking things.
While this explanation has some appeal, especially in a political and social climate that is savagely anti-intellectual and anti-expert, it does not hold water. While there are obviously very intelligent leaders who are bad at leading, high IQ leaders are generally perceived as performing worse than their actual performance. As such, the problem is more one of perception of leadership than leadership.
It could be objected that this perception problem is a problem of leadership—that a good leader would be able to ensure that those they lead see their leadership effectiveness accurately. On the one hand, this objection does have appeal—a key part of leadership is getting people to follow and thus shaping their perceptions is important. On the other hand, it could be argued that the fault lies in the followers and the responsibility of learning how to perceive reality accurately lies on them.
In many ways, this challenge is analogous to that faced by educators. A very intelligent teacher who is presenting extremely difficult material to students who do not understand it might be perceived as foolish and mocked by the students. In contrast, a less intelligent teacher who presents basic material the students grasp might be seen as a very good teacher (especially if the students get good grades). In the education scenario, one could blame the students—they should put in more effort to understand the difficult material and in doing so would realize that the teacher they mocked knows their stuff. Of course, one could also blame the teacher: their job is not to show off their intelligence before uncaring students, but to teach them. As such, a good teacher must develop the skills needed to win the attention of students and the ability to guide them from ignorance to knowledge. In the history of education, the pendulum of responsibility tends to swing between these two points depending on the dominant educational theory and politics of the day.
A lazy approach is to take the middle-ground and argue that both intelligent leaders and their followers need to improve. That is, the followers should learn to assess leadership better and the high IQ leaders need to develop ways to connect to their followers and present themselves in a way that is not perceived as ineffective. This might, perhaps, involve dumbing things down.
Another approach is to put more of a burden on leaders or on the followers; which harkens back to the education analogy—the tendency is towards the extremes rather than the middle ground. This leads to interesting questions about the responsibilities of leaders and followers. Since the leader is in the position of authority and more should be expected of them, it does make sense to expect the leader to be responsible for ensuring that the followers perceive their leadership effectiveness accurately. But, going back to the teaching analogy, it certainly seems unfair to put all the burden on a teacher for making students learn and likewise for leaders. As such, the lazy middle-ground approach is perhaps the fairest: high IQ leaders, like high IQ teachers, need to ensure that they are understood. But, followers, like students, must also assume responsibility to make an effort to understand.
My feeling is that the smartest ones among us have little interest in telling others what to do and just want to be free to follow their ideas.
This is in accord with research showing that the smartest people tilt libertarian.
True; one may be a man who would not be king, but it seems wiser to be a man who would not be a subject.
Define “intelligent”. Let’s start there.
Here is a starting point:
Nicholas Mackintosh’s balanced summary of a wide range of research and opinion in the field reports “a consistent finding that IQ at one age predicts educational achievement” (and supports this US study in finding preparation or test taking skill is not the reason). Professor Robert Plomin of King’s College London has pointed out that the existence of inherent general intelligence (IQ) is one of the “core constructs” in behavioural genetics. Professor Peterson echoed him calling it “the most well-validated concept in the social sciences, bar none”. Questioning the validity of IQ tests or intelligence, says Stuart Ritchie of Edinburgh University, author of an excellent introduction to intelligence research, is akin to climate change denial or thinking vaccines cause autism. Vanderbilt University have undertaken a 50 year longitudinal study of 5,000 pupils that confirms the predictive power of standardised tests. It also supports the smart fraction theory showing the highest IQ people make a disproportionate (think Pareto distributed) creative contribution in fields like science, academia and the economy. Well validated personality traits, particularly conscientiousness, have also been proved to explain a significant amount of the variation in pupils’ performance.
https://medium.com/@jamieamartin1/inherent-intelligence-is-more-important-than-grit-97e963f3a7fd
Intelligence is like pornography – hard to define, but you know it when you see it.
Precisely. Many people have high IQ’s but are not the kind of people you necessarily want running things. Per the Thomas Sowell quote I posted a few days ago, stupid people can only do so much damage. To really screw things up you need someone with a high IQ. Nikola Tesla was a brilliant man, no doubt. Einstein was a brilliant man, no doubt. Yet Tesla refused to believe E=Mc2. They can’t both be right. Tesla could be both charming and yet not be able to get along with people. Can’t find the quote right now but someone rattled off all of his great accomplishments, then followed with all the crazy stuff he believed, and then posed the question, “Would you want him running your restaurant?”
In fact I would argue that people who are very high IQ are about the last people you want running the world. Fortunately that seems to be how things work out anyway as high IQ people tend to be loners who prefer to focus on their work, not running about telling other people what to do and getting frustrated with them because they don’t see the genius idea as they do. I see a similar thing in sports. The greatest athletes in a sport are very rarely successful as coaches, especially head coaches. It’s the guys who struggled that can relate to the broader range of players. And they are much better at communicating how to do things because they were not “naturals” thus they better understand the skills because they broke them down mentally. They know how to break down the parts and pieces better than the Ted Williamses, Magic Johnsons, Wayne Gretskys. Well, my observation anyway.
Start here:
Nicholas Mackintosh’s balanced summary of a wide range of research and opinion in the field reports “a consistent finding that IQ at one age predicts educational achievement” (and supports this US study in finding preparation or test taking skill is not the reason). Professor Robert Plomin of King’s College London has pointed out that the existence of inherent general intelligence (IQ) is one of the “core constructs” in behavioural genetics. Professor Peterson echoed him calling it “the most well-validated concept in the social sciences, bar none”. Questioning the validity of IQ tests or intelligence, says Stuart Ritchie of Edinburgh University, author of an excellent introduction to intelligence research, is akin to climate change denial or thinking vaccines cause autism. Vanderbilt University have undertaken a 50 year longitudinal study of 5,000 pupils that confirms the predictive power of standardised tests. It also supports the smart fraction theory showing the highest IQ people make a disproportionate (think Pareto distributed) creative contribution in fields like science, academia and the economy. Well validated personality traits, particularly conscientiousness, have also been proved to explain a significant amount of the variation in pupils’ performance.
https://medium.com/@jamieamartin1/inherent-intelligence-is-more-important-than-grit-97e963f3a7fd
In a project led by Ravi Iyer, we analyzed data from nearly twelve thousand self-described libertarians, and compared their responses to those of 21,000 conservatives and 97,000 liberals. The paper was just published last week in PLoS ONE. The findings largely confirm what libertarians have long said about themselves, but they also shed light on why some people and not others end up finding libertarian ideas appealing. Here are three of the major findings:
1) On moral values: Libertarians match liberals in placing a relatively low value on the moral foundations of loyalty, authority, and sanctity (e.g., they’re not so concerned about sexual issues and flag burning), but they join conservatives in scoring lower than liberals on the care and fairness foundations (where fairness is mostly equality, not proportionality; e.g., they don’t want a welfare state and heavy handed measures to enforce equality). This is why libertarians can’t be placed on the spectrum from left to right: they have a unique pattern that is in no sense just somewhere in the middle. They really do put liberty above all other values.
2) On reasoning and emotions: Libertarians have the most “masculine” style, liberals the most “feminine.” We used Simon Baron-Cohen’s measures of “empathizing” (on which women tend to score higher) and “systemizing”, which refers to “the drive to analyze the variables in a system, and to derive the underlying rules that govern the behavior of the system.” Men tend to score higher on this variable. Libertarians score the lowest of the three groups on empathizing, and highest of the three groups on systemizing. (Note that we did this and all other analyses for males and females separately.) On this and other measures, libertarians consistently come out as the most cerebral, most rational, and least emotional. On a very crude problem solving measure related to IQ, they score the highest. Libertarians, more than liberals or conservatives, have the capacity to reason their way to their ideology.
3) On relationships: Libertarians are the most individualistic; they report the weakest ties to other people. They score lowest of the three groups on many traits related to sociability, including extroversion, agreeableness, and conscientiousness. They have a morality that matches their sociability – one that emphasizes independence, rather than altruism or patriotism.
In other words: Libertarians, liberals, and conservatives all differ from each on dozens of psychological traits, which help to explain why people – even siblings in the same family — gravitate to different ideological positions as they grow up. Understanding these psychological differences will be crucial for politicians and political movements that want to appeal to libertarians, who are often left out as so much attention is lavished on liberals and conservatives.
http://righteousmind.com/largest-study-of-libertarian-psych/
Maybe Plato should invert his argument … “Kings should be philosophers”.
I think native intelligence, however you might define it, is an important quality of a leader – but as you and others point out, certainly not the only one.