31–40 of 87 posts
Earlier quoted context omitted.
In order to empathize it requires a mental model of how someone else thinks/feels.
Probably most social species have this capability.
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.
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.
“Being X is a sign of Y” doesn’t imply “Being Y is a sign of X.”
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.
In the first, the correlation is between either spouse having donated “$500 or more to a religious or other non-profit” so it potentially loses a lot of smaller donors, but the biggest issue is their definition of a measure of cognitive ability is probably not what you think:
> cognitive ability was measured in a variety of ways (Ofstedal et al., 2001). These measurements included immediate word recall, delayed word recall, serial 7’s, recog- nition tasks, backwards counting tasks, and a 35-point scale combining each of the previous elements.
None of those are what I would consider difficult (serial 7s is starting at 100 and subtracting 7 over and over). It is entirely possible that given the methodology (survey) that what they are actually measuring is altruism (effort put into helping the surveyor) and that there is also some selection bias because someone who was intelligent but not giving probably would decline/avoid the survey in the first place.
In the second, the hypothesis is that altruism is a “costly signal” of intelligence and the study was done in a hunter-gatherer community where members were providing food for a feast.
The third link sends the reader to a tweet that cites these two and two additional studies, but the further two are studies linking general intelligence to negotiation ability, which seems at best indirectly related to being generous and kind to me.
If there is a potential truth here, I think it might be that being more intelligent could be linked with a greater understanding of the benefits of altruism and a tendency to behave that way, or that being altruistic leads to higher intelligence through vicarious learning, but neither of these hypotheses are being evaluated in these papers.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Probably most social species have this capability.
That is not the case at all. There's a guy on yt with a 'pet' coyote and it's fascinating how different it behaves to his dogs and how they interact.
The smartest people I have ever met are usually generous, but often not kind.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
That is not the case at all. There's a guy on yt with a 'pet' coyote and it's fascinating how different it behaves to his dogs and how they interact.
Further to being a social species dogs are domesticated, which introduces more layers.