If you are calling average, then half of people will be above, half will be below. About 2. Well, some of them are right—some of them do have above average intelligence! College degrees are not the cause or measure of intelligence. These folks become inventers, business owners, innovative leaders, even criminals.
There is actually a high percentage of high IQ prisoners across the world. This article seems to be weighing intelligence against college degrees, which only measures a few things. For example, it measures willingness to study the things others tell you to believe and regurgitate them onto tests. It shows a willingess to question little, and do what you are told. It demonstrates patient compliance, and willingness to trade years of your life learning what others feel is important.
Before weighting to the U. To ensure that the age effect observed in each survey was not a spurious result of dichotomization, we regressed the dichotomized agreement variable on the continuous unweighted measure of age using logistic regression.
In both surveys, people with more education were more likely to claim above-average intelligence see Fig 2. Although the measured education levels are not linear per se , the typical number of years of education required to attain each level follow a nearly linear structure. What proportions of people should claim above-average intelligence? This result suggests that college graduates in our samples actually slightly underestimated their relative intelligence. This result suggests that relatively uneducated participants tended to overestimate their relative intelligence [ 30 , 31 ].
Because only a minority of Americans have college degrees, members of the population as a whole tended to somewhat overestimate their relative intelligence. The survey methods telephone, online yielded similar overall agreement rates after weighting responses to match the U.
In both surveys, men were more likely to express confidence in their intelligence than were women, and younger people were somewhat more likely to agree with the claim than older people.
These beliefs about relative intelligence appeared to be somewhat calibrated: Highly educated individuals were more likely to agree that they are more intelligent than the average person, whereas relatively uneducated individuals were less likely to agree [ 21 , 31 , 32 ].
These findings are consistent with several major theories of overconfidence: that the least intelligent are the most overconfident [ 30 ]; that self-perceptions are somewhat calibrated to reality [ 33 ]; and that comparative self-judgments regress toward the mean when collected from groups of educated and uneducated individuals [ 34 , 35 ].
Several explanations are plausible [ 36 ]. First, although one-item, self-report measures of global intelligence correlate positively with IQ scores [ 37 ], participants may conceive of intelligence more broadly [ 38 ] and select that aspect of intelligence where they believe they outperform others. Still, our finding that more educated people are more likely to agree suggests that participants are thinking to at least some extent about general intelligence.
Finally, it may simply be the case that people are somewhat calibrated, though overly optimistic on average, in their beliefs about their own intelligence [ 35 ].
Because these results were collected from and weighted based on the United States population, we caution against generalizing our findings before they are replicated in other cultures and regions. Our methodology was limited by the static question order presented to participants. Although we had no a priori reason to expect an order effect in this context, future research should consider this possibility.
The authors reported no difference in overconfidence regardless of whether or not there was a neutral scale midpoint. These results were similar across 2-, 3-, 5-, and point rating scales. Thus, we have no reason to believe that including a neutral midpoint would have meaningfully affected our results. The education-based analysis was limited to comparisons based on population characteristics, not objectively measured individual performance.
Our results update the textbook phenomenon of intelligence overconfidence by 1 replicating the effect using large, representative, contemporary samples and two distinct survey methods, 2 demonstrating a degree of calibration across levels of education, and 3 showing moderation based on sex and age.
National Center for Biotechnology Information , U. PLoS One. Published online Jul 3. Patrick R. Daniel J. Christopher F. Therese van Amelsvoort, Editor. Author information Article notes Copyright and License information Disclaimer. Competing Interests: The authors have declared that no competing interests exist.
Received Feb 27; Accepted Jun This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License , which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited. This article has been cited by other articles in PMC. Abstract Psychologists often note that most people think they are above average in intelligence. Introduction The statement that a majority of people claim to be more intelligent than average is literally a textbook example of overconfidence and self-enhancement [ 1 — 6 ].
Procedure The telephone survey originally was designed to achieve a nominal, nationally representative sample of 1, participants after weighting to the U. Weighting to U. Census To directly compare both surveys, we weighted each to a nominal nationally representative sample of nationally Americans using the U. Table 1 Weighted sample proportions and demographic weighting values obtained from U. Census data.
Open in a separate window. Fig 1. Table 2 Demographic report of weighted survey data telephone. Table 5 Demographic report of unweighted categories online.
Table 3 Demographic report of unweighted categories telephone. Table 4 Demographic report of weighted survey data online. Comparing telephone and online surveys Before weighting to the U. The smarter than average effect within weighted demographic categories Sex. Education: Are beliefs calibrated? Fig 2. Funding Statement The authors received no specific funding for this work.
References 1. Alicke MD. Global self-evaluation as determined by the desirability and controllability of trait adjectives. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology. Bachman JG. Youth in Transition. Brim OG. Demographic report of weighted survey data telephone.
Table 3. Demographic report of unweighted categories telephone. Table 5. Demographic report of unweighted categories online. Comparing telephone and online surveys Before weighting to the U. The smarter than average effect within weighted demographic categories Sex.
Education: Are beliefs calibrated? Fig 2. References 1. Alicke MD. Global self-evaluation as determined by the desirability and controllability of trait adjectives. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology. Bachman JG. Youth in Transition. Brim OG. College grades and self-estimates of intelligence. Journal of Educational Psychology. Myers D. Social psychology. Torrance EP. Some practical uses of a knowledge of self-concepts in counseling and guidance.
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