I'm highly sceptical of this claim. Life is easier for smart people, and that is perhaps why they can be more generous. However, some of the kindest people I've met aren't very intelligent and some of the most devious people I've met have high IQs.
Much of the advantage of being smart might be wiped out when everyone has a high IQ personal assistant inside their phone, thanks to AI.
Compassion is supposed to be the key reason for mankind becoming the dominant species on our planet, and with intelligence being key to survival, it would follow that compassion would be a key marker for intelligence. A lot of scientists generally fit this characterization, a classical example being Einstein. As a counter-example, a lot of people regarded as poor leaders would probably also rank low for perceived compassion.
I'm always skeptical of anything that tries to measure intelligence objectively, as the study of IQ is mired in eugenics and racism. I could see, however, that this behavior can be an indicator of high emotional intelligence and social awareness.
Reaching and publishing "conclusions" like this is not.
it's easy to be altruistic when you can see others as different and not a threat or competition, when their success does not come at a cost to yours. the blunted emotional engagement of many savants may have protected them from internalizing attempts to discourage them and given them the extra focus to learn things. most of what we call intelligence is the downstream effect of attitude to learning imo.
personally I find malice too stupid to take personally, but am not smart enough to orchestrate deceptions the way I've seen smarter and more successful people operate. just comfortably mid. also, intelligence above a certain level, like wealth, is best kept a secret. it is often observed that mine is hidden quite cunningly.
My mother is both mean and dumb.
After a lot of conversation with her I've noticed one of the reasons why she's so mean is she doesn't seem to have the cognitive ability to think about the consequences of what she says or does before she says it or does it. She operates entirely on instinct and thinking through words/actions beforehand is a totally foreign concept to her.
Maybe EQ, not IQ
I have my doubts on this. It’s probably better to split it into emotional intelligence and cognitive intelligence being fuzzily orthogonal with perhaps a bit of dependency.
Being smart might give you enough slack in your life to be able to emotionally afford those qualities of personality
Simple when you think about it. It's so much easier to be the opposite of those things.
All I know is that Adam Grant makes a whole lot of shallow, trite posts on LinkedIn.
What about highly intelligent psychopaths?
https://www.spring.org.uk/2022/12/high-functioning-psychopat...
Maybe some of those highly intelligent people are good at pretending to be generous, thoughtful, and kind because it helps achieve their goals.
attaching good attributes generously is a sign of nothing but a willingness to produce hot air from calories over abandunt in a non exhausted environment. its easy being noble if you are rich in a still rich world .
The smartest people I have ever met are usually generous, but often not kind.
Can wet please stop this nonsense of calling psychology a science, and starting these kind of articles with “science says”?
This is really eroding public trust on real science.
A generous, thoughtful and kind individual sounds like just the person to buy this bridge I have for sale in New York for the low price of ...
Clearly most I̶R̶C̶ ̶u̶s̶e̶r̶s̶ people have never made this connection. /s
Your Spidey sense should tingle whenever you read about a psychology result in a popular medium. Especially if that result flatters you in some way.