Why You're Smarter Than You Think

This is Hidden Brain. I'm Shankar Vedantam. Many of us know what it feels like to be overlooked. The school we would love to study at doesn't love us back. We get passed over for a job or a promotion. When we ask to try our hand at something, we're told no. Now, sometimes rejection might be a true reflection of our abilities. We can't run fast enough to make the team or remember all the facts needed to get through medical school. There are other times, however, when rejection is not about our limitations; it's that other people see us as limited. Our concerns over how we are judged are often most acute, most charged, when it comes to the topic of intelligence. Most of us don't just want to be smart; We want to be seen as smart.

I just remember being taunted and being, you know, told things like, oh, you're too stupid to go on to 4th grade, you idiot. Like, that sort of thing. But yeah, it was really painful.

This week on Hidden Brain, many of us have knee-jerk conclusions about what intelligence is and how it can be measured. We think we know what intelligence is. But do we really?

It almost instantly seduced me into loving the science of IQ and intelligence, and I forgot that I was supposed to be on this vendetta. I forgot.

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Quick question, do people come to you for answers at work? Maybe you're managing projects, training new hires, or just the one everyone relies on. That's leadership. Through UVA Darden's Part-Time MBA in Rosslyn, we help professionals like you turn real-world experience into recognized leadership credentials without stepping away from your career. Whether you work in healthcare, education, government, or business, this is how you take the next step. Learn more at darden.virginia.edu/ptmba.

Support for Hidden Brain comes from Progressive. Whoever says saving money is hard doesn't know that new customers who bundle and save with Progressive Save hundreds. Because switching your home and auto insurance is better than cutting down on those iced lattes you love. Switch to Progressive and see if you could save. Get your quote today at progressive.com. Progressive Casualty Insurance Company, affiliates, and other insurers. Not available in all states. In the first 3 years of his life, Scott Barry Kaufman suffered from a number of ear infections.

It made it very hard for me to process auditory input in real time. And so I was a couple milliseconds behind everyone else. I would hear things and then I would have to, in my head, cognitively process it. Like, listen to it over again while everyone else was already on to the next thing.

The conclusion that many people drew? Scott wasn't very bright.

You know, it's very easy to look at someone and just judge them as dumb because they're slower than someone else. And that sort of processing speed issue is one that I confronted first and foremost as a kid.

Scott's teachers didn't know what to make of him. He was often very creative, but he didn't seem to be able to keep up with his peers. Things came to a head In the 3rd grade.

And I believe the official diagnosis was I was too immature to go on to 4th grade. And I remember thinking to myself, my gosh, I must be really immature if I'm too immature to go to 4th grade. That's really bad.

Scott has seen the reports his teachers wrote about him when he was a kid. They say the problem was about more than academics.

They say things like, he's off to the side often, like socially isolated. He seems to be in his own world. I guess they viewed all that as some form of learning disability, you know, that I sort of was off on my own planet over there.

He quickly discovered that when you repeat a grade, the kids around you start to look at you differently.

It really amplified this feeling I already had of that I was different. I remember even, you know, from first to third grade, I felt like a huge outsider from the other kids. But then making me repeat third grade and then having all my friends go on and they kept me there made me like it amplified it to a very, very large degree. I remember feeling really, really low self-esteem, and I remember just being very, very confused because. I didn't actually feel like there was anything wrong with me.

Scott has a specific memory from that additional year he spent in 3rd grade. A group of kids formed a circle around him in the bathroom.

If you took me back to Penwyn Elementary School and you're like, show me the bathroom, show me the sink that you were pushed, your face was pushed into the sink and the water was running, I could point you directly to it. And I just remember being taunted and being, you know, told things like, oh, you're too stupid to go on to 4th grade. You idiot, like that sort of thing. But yeah, it was really painful.

When Scott was 7, and again at 11, school administrators made him take IQ tests so they could figure out next steps for him. One test stands out in his memory like a scene from a movie.

I remember driving up this very windy road to get there. Somehow seems fitting. It's a very, very long, long windy road. I remember the road. I remember I was with my mom. I remember the building. So as I'm there and I'm taking this IQ testing session, I remember second-guessing all my answers. I remember desperately wanting to show him I was smart. And that report, his observations are things like, Scott obviously wanted to do well, and he, uh, he second-guessed his choices a lot. My estimation is that he is Very, very bright, but gets in his own way because of his self-doubt. All I knew from that meeting is that I was shipped off to a whole school for kids with learning disabilities. I was taken away from my public school. So that's all I knew. There was like, I know I took this test, I knew it was a terrifying experience, and then I know I was shipped off, taken away from all my friends. So That was, like, pretty traumatic.

From the outside, it might seem like Scott was privileged. His family had the resources for him to go to a school that would meet his needs. But as a kid, Scott felt the adults in his life were sending him a clear message.

I'm really different.

Like, I am—

oh, okay, we'll go even further. I'm a freak. Like, I'm a freak. Like, I am— Like, something's really wrong with me.

The outcome of Scott's IQ test was the opposite of what he had secretly hoped for. His dream was that he would do so well that the psychologist would recommend he move to a prestigious school near his Philadelphia home. It was called the Haverford School. Now, each day on his way to his new school, He'd pass Haverford. To Scott, his dream school might as well have been on Mars. By the 6th grade, Scott was back in public school, but still on the special ed track. That was the year he discovered that along with kids like him who had special needs, There was another category of kids who were really special.

I have a vivid memory of walking to my special ed classroom and hearing the announcement on the speaker, gifted kids report to room 3 for your gifted classes. I remember thinking to myself, wow, here I am reporting to my special ed class, like, Like, like, what? Who are these people? That was one of my first introductions to the term gifted, by the way, was through the speaker in my school, in my middle school. And I— and it was a vivid moment for me. It really was a big moment because I was like, wait a minute, wait a bit. There, there, there's a whole different class of humans that's the direct opposite of what I am, and they're the— they're the gifted ones. And suddenly it was like a, I'm stuck in the complete opposite world.

It felt awful.

One way it felt awful was that the expectation carried me around from class to class to class, even some of the more mainstream classes I was starting to be put into in middle school. I remember being in a mainstream class, and on the first day of class, I saw this girl who I had such a crush on. Oh my gosh, I was way too shy to ever say anything to her, but I saw her all around, and she was at the front of the classroom. And I was walking in and I think I sat at the back and the teacher opened up the class and said, is Scott Kaufman here? And I was like, oh my gosh, like looking down, you know, Scott Kaufman here? Oh, you're Scott Kaufman. Can you please come up to the front of the class? Your mom says that you need— you have trouble listening, hearing things, and that it'll really help you hear my directions in the classroom. She sat me right next to this girl. that I had a crush on. And I mean, that was mortifying. Can you imagine? Think— everyone listening to this episode right now, think back to your 12-year-old self and that happening to you. I mean, I was so mortified.

There were more psychological tests as time passed. Scott found himself simultaneously angry with psychologists and fascinated by them. On one occasion, his mother took him to see a therapist.

I remember him asking me what I want to— what do I want to be someday? You know, what are my dreams? And I remember seeing the tag name Dr. Milnik, I believe was his name, Dr. Milnik, psychologist. And I remember it just like snapped in my head. I remember telling him like, I want to be a psychologist. I want to be a psychologist someday. And I still have the reports. I have them all saved from like 1989 or something like that where it said when he grows up, he wants to be an academic PhD psychologist. But here's a big kicker to this. My mom tells me that they told her that, your son wants to be an academic PhD psychologist. He wrote that on his thing, but he— we think he has delusions of grandeur.

In Scott's young mind, psychologists had all this power. They were able to peer into your head and see things no one else could see. When they said stuff, people listened to them. The things they wrote down in their charts changed your life. They determined which school you went to and which school you didn't go to. Scott felt psychology had shaped his life for the worse. If he could become a psychologist himself, he was sure he could do better. Sometimes he'd imagine himself giving talks about psychology to rapt audiences.

I remember taking a shower and just closing my eyes and, and giving a 50-minute speech on human potential. The thing that excited me were ideas about how people are capable of so much more than they realize, um, how we don't really see the fullness of a human being. And this is even before TED Talks, but I remember in my head The recollection of it is that the kind of talk I was giving matches exactly like what a modern-day TED Talk looks like, you know?

Scott tried to become his own psychologist. If he couldn't convince psychologists that he had potential, he decided he would prove his case to himself.

I became obsessed with IQ tests around that point. I remember just taking One IQ test after another. Some of them I didn't do too well on, and then some of them I did really, really well on. And I was like, okay, I'm gonna throw away those ones that said they weren't so good. I'm gonna keep the others. I remember even— I remember one IQ test result I took on the internet which said I was profoundly gifted, and I took it and I printed it out and I put it on my bedroom wall. I put this IQ test result on my bedroom wall. I remember the specific corner of the wall that I put it on displaying my IQ test results I took from the internet. Yeah. I think I was desperate to prove to anyone, like, just to show anyone, like, look, there was— there's some intelligence over here.

Scott had one other pivotal interaction with the world of psychology and IQ tests. When he was in high school, he requested access to some of the classes his friends on the gifted track were taking. He was told to go see his school psychologist to get permission.

Yeah, I remember the office. It was a tiny room with file cabinets and a desk. There was like a little small desk that he sat in, and I sat right next to him. And he had my files of like my files. My worst nightmare, by the way. I was like, I really hope he doesn't look at my files and he just looks at who I am now.

Scott was now 17 years old. The file on the psychologist's desk was a report with Scott's IQ test.

And he's like, so look, here's the deal. And he draws on a piece of paper, it was either a napkin or a piece of paper, he drew a bell curve. And a bell curve, for anyone that doesn't know what a bell curve is, you can place someone's IQ score on this kind of bell curve which shows what proportion in the population, what percentage you are, where you are, where you stand. Where do you stand on IQ compared to everyone else in the general population or in your particular demographic? And he started in the far right and was— and he had like the label gifted there. He's like, this is the far right, you know, like of the bell curve, about 130. And he starts moving to the left. I'm like, oh my God. Uh, he moves him to the left, he moves to like 110. He's like, well, this is about where average is, you know, about the 100 mark. And he still keeps moving to the left. I feel like I'm getting agita over here, you know? Like, he's— I'm like, when's he gonna stop? When's the When's that pen gonna stop? Like, what's— what are we getting at here? Um, he stops to a score which I believe was my score when I was tested at age 8 or 9. It wasn't even the one that I was tested at 11. Um, and he's like, you know, this is— this is your score. Uh, he's like, you're not gifted. Um, you can't— you know, unfortunately you can't qualify for gifted education. Um, but I'm here, you know, if you want to talk about anything else school psychology related.

What was your score, Scott?

89, something like that. 87, something like that. I mean, that's almost embarrassing. I'm almost embarrassed because it's just like, it's a pretty low score. Not that anyone should be embarrassed who has that score, but it's— I am so resistant to having people judge me through the lens of that. Like, that's why I don't even really tell the story anymore, you know? Like, I feel like I'm even taking a risk, like, even saying, giving a number, you know? You know, I'm not that person anymore.

When this happened, Scott, do you recall him saying where you sat on the IQ spectrum? I mean, if 130 was gifted and, you know, 90 to 110 was normal, did he describe what 87 was?

He didn't really describe it to me, no. There wasn't a real explanation. It was really like a, you know, you're not gifted. And this is the— so there's not— my hands are tied. Like, what can I do?

I understand that after you left his office, you went to the school library and you basically looked up how to read IQ tests. What did you find?

I remember seeing a textbook on human intelligence, and they have a chart in there that shows what different IQ bands people are capable of achieving. And I remember seeing my range that he kind of just showed me, and it said, uh, it said unlikely to graduate high school. And I, you know, I always had this rebellious bone in my body though, because I remember saying, fuck that, and throwing the book across the library.

By this point, Scott was actually doing well in school. He had a case to be moved to the gifted track. But in looking at the results of his IQ test from when he was in elementary school, the school psychologist was saying some important things. First, the test had picked up something innate about Scott. It didn't matter how much he'd learned or what he'd accomplished in the years afterward. The test had peered into his mind and the test had determined he was not gifted. Not then, not now, not ever. You're listening to Hidden Brain. I'm Shankar Vedantam.

Quick question. Do people come to you for answers at work? Maybe you're managing projects, training new hires, or just the one everyone relies on. That's leadership. Through UVA Darden's Part-Time MBA in Rosslyn, we help professionals like you turn real-world experience into recognized leadership credentials without stepping away from your career. Whether you work in healthcare, education, government, or business, this is how you take the next step. Learn more at darden.virginia.edu/ptmba.

Support for Hidden Brain comes from Progressive. Whoever says saving money is hard doesn't know that new customers who bundle and save with Progressive save hundreds. Because switching your home and auto insurance is better than cutting down on those iced lattes you love. Switch to Progressive and see if you could save. Get your quote today at At progressive.com. Progressive Casualty Insurance Company, affiliates, and other insurers. Not available in all states. This is Hidden Brain. I'm Shankar Vedantam. Scott Barry Kaufman desperately wanted to be seen as a smart kid, but everyone kept telling him he was the opposite of smart. He ended up repeating 3rd grade was sent to a school for kids with learning differences, and scored poorly on IQ tests. Scott didn't just experience these things as setbacks. He found them confusing. He thought of himself as a smart kid with lots of potential. Why didn't the world see him that way? At one point, though, when Scott was in high school, a new teacher noticed that he looked bored in the special ed resource room.

And she was looking at me for most of that class, and I was wondering why she kept looking at me. She took me aside after class and she said, look, I just had to ask, like, what are you doing here? You know, I see you. And boy, it really was like a profound moment in my life because I remember thinking in my head, what am I doing here? Repeating her question. And then, and then, yeah, what am I doing here? It was like just the empowerment I needed.

Scott felt like he had been trying for years to tell people he had potential. Suddenly, there was someone else who could see the same thing.

I felt like people thought I was crazy for thinking that I had some potential. In this moment, I was like, yeah, I don't know what I'm doing here. That's what I've been trying to tell people.

Scott was allowed to leave special ed on a trial basis. The effect of someone believing in him was transformative.

I actually went from like a C/D student to like a straight-A student, like almost overnight. And I took summer school classes. I joined so many things like plays, you know, I did musicals and everything. I just— something just erupted in me at that point where all this stuff just bubbled forth. And I was like, I love learning. I love everything about this, and thank you for giving me that opportunity finally, school system that never gave me the opportunity before.

And it's almost like this one teacher in this one moment, it was almost like a light bulb going off in your head, it sounds like.

It wasn't like a light bulb. It was like a volcano erupting, a volcano of human potential. That had been dormant.

One day, he was hanging out with friends after school.

And they said, hey, we have to just go to the choir room and pick up something. This was after class— after school, after school. And so I just walked, went with them, and they were in the choir room and the choir conductor was there. And I remember just sort of like making fun of them, like, I was like, you know, you all sound like this. And the choir conductor turned around, looked at me, and said, what just happened? Like, you have talent. Like, do you want to join our choir? And so that was one of my first big things that It gave me such an amazing sense of efficacy and excitement, and it, it just felt so good. I mean, I can't tell you how good it feels to go from a long period in your life where you are invisible, you are literally invisible, and you know deep inside you that you're capable of more, to a moment where suddenly you're now allowed to be discovered. It was almost like I went through 9 grades where I was forbidden for anyone even to see that I had any potential.

So you graduate high school and you still want to become a psychologist. You decide that you want to go to Carnegie Mellon. It's a college in your home state. It has a strong program in cognitive Psychology. So you take the SAT. What happens?

So I didn't do too hot on the SAT. I'm going to just lay it to you straight there, my friend. Huge anxiety. I'm getting anxiety thinking about that SAT session, even just thinking about it. How many, 20 or 25 years later? I'm getting anxiety. I remember seeing the countdown of the clock on the screen tick. You got 2 minutes left to answer all these questions, and my brain just freezing. I didn't do too hot on the SAT.

I'm wondering at the point at which you got your SAT scores back, it seems almost as if this is déjà vu. You've taken another test, and the test is supposed to purportedly tell you something about your potential and how smart you are and whether you— which track you can go to, which college you can get into. Very much like what happened when you were 8 and what happened when you were 11, you were having a test that basically told you, Scott Barry Kaufman, you are not destined for this track. You are destined for some other track.

That's very astute of you to notice that, but that's exactly how I felt as well. I was like, again, you know, you can't escape it.

To compensate for his weak score, but also to settle scores with standardized testing, Scott came up with a plan. He decided to apply to the psychology program at Carnegie Mellon University and to focus his application essay on his pet peeve with standardized tests. He argued that these tests did not reveal the true potential of students.

And I wrote a very, very from-the-heart personal essay, which I still have saved, saying our notions of human potential are really inaccurate. We need broader notions that go beyond standardized metrics to understand the real achievement potential of humans. And I wrote that from my heart, and, and I got rejected from the cognitive science program at Carnegie Mellon, uh, presumably in large part to my lower SAT scores.

But Scott didn't give up. He came up with a new idea. What if he applied to another department at the same school? Scott's voice teacher in high school thought he could become a professional opera singer. Could he get into Carnegie Mellon Via the opera program.

And I was like, you know what, I can— let me sing Stars to them in the opera program at Carnegie Mellon. Maybe I can get in that way.

Scott's favorite song in high school was Stars from Les Misérables. He sang it all the time, including at a performance in his senior year, a few months before his audition.

I went to the audition and I sang my heart out. Everything in that moment of like frustration, anger, like I put it into that song. I never shall yield till we come face to face. And they accepted— they told my parents that they thought I was— that I could be a real good opera singer, and they accepted me on a partial scholarship to Carnegie Mellon. the other department at the university, and they already— they rejected me. So I didn't bother to tell the music department, just so you know, I've already been rejected in another part of your school. I didn't do that.

Scott mentally prepared himself for the path of an opera student. But then his second semester, he signed up for an intro to psychology course.

It reaffirmed how much I love psych. Like, it just, you know, when you meet something, you're like, this is me. And then you go away from it and you come back to it and it's still, this is me. That's telling you something. Like, that's important information. And I was like, I gotta do this.

He quietly transferred into the psychology department. Soon he was learning about intelligence and the science of IQ tests. His goal from the very start was to tear down the edifice of IQ testing, but he felt he had to go into the lion's den first in order to tear it down. By the time he was 20, Scott had talked his way into a spot at Cambridge University in England, working with one of the most prominent researchers on the science of intelligence.

I was so nervous and excited. I didn't know if I was going to be able to to be as intelligent as I needed to be to be a research assistant at Cambridge University. It was kind of almost hard for me to fathom that I would legitimately be intelligent enough to be worthy of the situation. I was like, that's even, you know, Scott, even with all your grandiose fantasies and everything, this is a little— are you serious? What are you doing, Scott? What are you doing?

But Scott's mentor, Nick Mackintosh, set him at ease.

Nick couldn't have been more wonderful, more supportive, and he must have seen something in me.

He just—

he saw the person that I was in that moment.

Scott didn't tell Nick about his own experience with IQ tests. He was still ashamed.

I mean, he didn't know my background. By the way, I kept all this a secret from him throughout all the times we worked together and everything. You know, he didn't look at my IQ score when I was age 11. And he— He accepted me to work with him, and I did some pretty rigorous research with him in that 6 months as an undergrad that would then form the basis of my master's thesis with him.

Studying under Nick, Scott started to learn about the deep history of IQ tests, starting with Alfred Binet, a French psychologist. In 1904, Alfred Binet was charged by the French government with devising a test. The idea was to direct resources to kids who needed help in school. Alfred Binet made it very clear what he thought the test could and could not measure.

He wrote that. He said, this is not an intelligence test that I'm creating. This is a test that I've been, I've been given the task of differentiating those who would need more remediation and those who don't. We say only about the child's Current needs, not his future potential. He said this. Benet said this in the manual, in the testing the Benet manual, the original manual. He says things like that. We do not even begin to purport what this person is capable of. The great tragedy of that story is that they ended up never using his tests in France.

Instead, it was the Americans who fell in love with Alfred Binet's test, and they used it to measure the very thing the French psychologist had warned against. They used it to assess intelligence.

It completely betrayed the, the spirit, the philosophy, the principles upon which Binet originally wanted to create the test. Completely betrayed him. And on his deathbed, he wrote an essay saying, The Americans have betrayed me.

The psychologist Lewis Terman at Stanford was among those who transformed Binet's test in the United States. Instead of being used as a tool to direct resources to kids who needed help, he turned the test into a tracking tool to identify the gifted.

Terman was very, very interested in giftedness and really had this idea in his head That genius is only recruited from the line of high IQ. There's a lot of people involved in these, the early days of applying IQ tests. It's really the application part here we're talking about, using it to sort people in America, that betrayed the original philosophy. They made it into multiple-choice tests and gave it out to entire school systems, gave it out to in the Army, gave it out— they used it in lots of ways to send back people coming in from Ellis Island, right? Like, you know, uh, you're too feeble-minded to come to America, you know? Never mind that a lot of these tests had verbal components to it, and you're giving people who English is not their first language— it's, you know, it's mind-boggling the extents to which this test, which did have some potential for real utility, um, how much it was, uh, abused in the earliest days of Lewis Terman drew on the work of German psychologist William Stern and helped popularize the notion of something called an intelligence quotient, what we now know today as IQ. Mathematically, there's a formula that a lot of people started using in America, which I think is indicative of the way they thought about intelligence, right? And in order to understand the formula, you have to understand the difference between mental age and chronological age. But they're basically saying you could be 13—that's your chronological age in terms of your biology—in terms of you, your mental age can be below that or above it. So your mental age—you could be a 13-year-old with a mental age of 7—and they called you backwards. That was the term they used: you're backwards if that's the case. But you're gifted if your mental age far exceeds your chronological age.

MacIntosh obviously was one of the most respected researchers in the field of intelligence, but he was also genuinely open-minded and responsive and curious and not sort of dogmatic. Can you just describe that? You, in some ways, were coming to him perhaps with an agenda that he didn't know, that your agenda was really to pull down the edifice of intelligence and intelligence testing, and maybe he didn't know that you were a saboteur who had just arrived at Cambridge University.

Yeah.

Describe to me the way he worked and sort of the effect this had on you and the way that you started thinking about the questions you were grappling with?

Mackintosh was a traditional British psychometrician. I mean, that's as traditional IQ as you get on paper and pencil, but his personality and his demeanor and everything about him just signaled a pure, pure love of science. No agenda. No agenda on Nick Mackintosh's part. He wrote a textbook, The Science of IQ, which I remember reading, and it almost instantly made me a— I won't say convert. I don't know if that word quite applies, but it almost instantly seduced me into loving the science of IQ and intelligence. And I forgot that I was supposed to be on this vendetta. I forgot.

At one point, Nick McIntosh asked a simple question. Assume for a moment that there is no underlying innate ability called intelligence. Some people are good at math, others are good at reading. But if that was the case, he asked, why is it teachers often notice that the same students who do well at math also do well at reading?

I mean, if you read this book, The Science of IQ by McIntosh, it's just so interesting to see all the little nuances of the field. Things like, things I just didn't— dawned on me could be true. I had all these ideologies and thoughts that There's no such thing as general intelligence, or that IQ doesn't matter in life, you know, and then here I am reading in this textbook— generally didn't have to be this way, but it's very curious that someone's score on a nonverbal IQ test could correlate so highly with someone's score on a verbal. And then he would ask questions like, what is it about vocabulary that could be in common in terms of cognitive processes than rotating an image in the mind?

What does vocabulary have in common with cognitive processes like rotating an image in the mind? If verbal skills and spatial skills were just that— skills that could be learned with practice— wasn't it odd that the kids who were good at one were often also good at the other? Scott found himself intrigued by questions like this.

My curiosity just took over, you know, and I, and I started actually doing really traditional, serious experimental research with him.

There was a second area where Nick McIntosh started to sway Scott's preexisting views about IQ tests.

Something that I found fascinating when I started to go to Nick McIntosh's lectures, he did present data showing the correlation between IQ and lots of outcomes in life. And that was a time I did feel a little triggered. Based on my childhood. And I found it very, very interesting and almost a moral quandary. He presented like basically the same table I saw when I was 16 and said, fuck that, in the library. He presented that in his lecture at University of Cambridge, showing the different IQ bands and what they tend to do in their life. Like, oh my gosh, this, really? This chart again? I kind of like snapped back to my childhood. And I was like, well, what do I do? Because this is the science. This is the data.

Scott's foray into the lion's den of IQ testing hadn't turned out the way he'd expected. When we come back, how Scott responded to his moral quandary. You're listening to Hidden Brain. I'm Shankar Vedantam. Support for Hidden Brain comes from Stripe. Stripe is built for whatever comes next. Because as your business scales, so does the complexity of fraud. New customers, new markets, new AI-driven attack patterns. Stripe Radar protects your business as it scales with the scale of the Stripe network. The more payments Stripe sees, the smarter its AI gets at detecting these patterns as they emerge. Stripe's network is so vast, it has seen $1.9 trillion in payment volume across millions of global businesses. In fact, when a card is used, there's a 92% chance the Stripe network has seen it before. All of this means fraudulent patterns across payments, accounts, and customer abuse can be detected, flagged, or blocked more easily based on the rules you set up, of course. Blocking bad actors, welcoming good customers, keeping more of your revenue your revenue. Learn more about fighting fraud with Stripe I need a lawyer.

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This is Hidden Brain. I'm Shankar Vedantam. Early in his career, intelligence researcher Scott Barry Kaufman set out to tear down the edifice of IQ testing. He felt it had greatly limited his own prospects as a young person. But then he found himself convinced by much of the science behind IQ. It left him with a quandary. Should he trust his own experience with IQ tests, or should he trust the data? As he finished his undergraduate studies and went on to get a PhD in cognitive psychology, Scott came to feel that the real question was not whether the science of IQ was wrong, but whether it was incomplete. One thing that IQ tests had not looked at was how much a person cared about what they were doing.

When you go take an IQ test, it tends to be divorced entirely from your— the context of your own life. That's by design. They want to see how good are you at abstract reasoning, and that's thought to be the height of intelligence. However, so much of life is not decontextualized from our life. In fact, most of our life. When we're excited about certain things, our attentional system is directed towards it. This engagement aspect is absolutely essential to our understanding of someone's potential. The more we engage in something, we learn, and the more that we learn something, the more it makes us want to engage in something, because once we start becoming good at something, then we start to invest more of our time and energy into it. So it's a very strong dynamic cycle.

Teachers, managers, and coaches can testify to Scott's insight. Talent matters, but sometimes passion and drive matter more. Along with deep engagement, creativity is another driver of performance that is overlooked by IQ tests.

In fact, researchers have found that there can be an inverse relationship between intelligence When you look at the neuroscience of creativity, those who have the most imaginative sort of ideas are the kind of brains that show reduction of gray volume in what's called the prefrontal cortex. So sometimes you actually find that, that some of the brains that look the least intelligent are actually the most creative. That's the point I'm trying to make here. So it depends a lot on Your ability to sometimes put aside all the prior expertise you have, maybe even put aside your critical thinking facilities, and be able to really have more associative processes. I like to say it's really important to be really open-minded, but not so open-minded that your brain falls out. So that's why I think intelligence is important. I'm not saying intelligence isn't important, but it depends on the thing that you're creating. We actually published a paper showing the distinction between the arts and the sciences and its prediction of IQ, and the extent to which IQ predicts these things. And you find IQ had a zero correlation with artistic creative achievement in life.

And why do you think it is that in artistic fields you're not seeing a connection between IQ and outcomes? What do you think is happening there if you're a painter or a poet or a musician?

One important... Cognitive process that's associated with arts is what's called latent inhibition, and it's particularly reduced latent inhibition. So usually we tend to see the world and tag things as relevant or irrelevant to a problem we're working on based on our prior expectations. But people in the arts are really good at constantly seeing things with fresh eyes. They're constantly good at putting aside their prior preconceptions and trying to find meaning in the here and now. And I've published papers, and there are other papers showing that people who tend to have a reduced latent inhibition, reduced, tend to score higher in the arts creative achievement domain. Also, it's correlated with openness to experience as well, the personality trait openness to experience, openness to aesthetics, openness to beauty, and also emotions, being able to tap into the rich, rich tapestry of your emotions and not view some of your emotions as off limits, like saying you always have to be happy all the time. time, but actually saying, I'm actually going to take this depression I'm going through and use that as fodder for creativity.

You've also said that IQ tests fail to capture the full range of human potential in that they focus on the explicit, the conscious, the controlled forms of thinking. What does this leave out, Scott?

Absolutely. Well, one specific thing I did study in my dissertation is this idea called implicit learning, which is our ability to Learn the probabilistic rule structure of the world automatically and implicitly without our level of awareness. This has deep implications. So, I mean, so you talk about the theme of your show right here. We're getting to— this is very, very congruent. I mean, think about what is required to develop social intelligence. Sometimes when people smile, they mean this. Sometimes they don't. Sometimes when people's eyes are like this, sometimes they don't. The world is messy. And, um, I, from, from a cognitive scientist lens, I, I developed tasks to measure people's differences in people's ability to learn about the probabilistic structure of something. And, uh, we have found that's, uh, virtually uncorrelated, wholly uncorrelated with IQ. Um, the, the, the people that can go into an IQ testing, one of our sessions, be like, A, C, B, D, and get like a Extremely off-the-charts IQ, oftentimes the ones that are not learning implicitly.

Solving puzzles involves logic and analysis, but logic cannot help you read someone's expression in a crowded room. That requires cognitive skills that are often learned unconsciously. Scott is not merely saying that the cognitive ability that IQ tests measure is different than the abilities that allow us to apprehend unwritten patterns and relationships in the real world. He's saying that sometimes these different cognitive abilities might come at the expense of each other.

It's like a seesaw. Sometimes the thing on one side causing you challenges brings you up in another way.

He sees this especially among so-called 2E kids.

2E stands for twice exceptional, where you have a profound, extraordinary difficulty or challenge in your life, and you also have a profound gift or talent or ability. But there are people that really do have profound difficulties and profound gifts and talents in one body.

In some ways, it complicates the notion of how we think about people. We think about smart people as always being smart, dull people always being dull. What you're doing partly with this 2E label is basically saying, No, people are more complicated than that.

Absolutely. I saw that just going all the way back to the 6th grade Scott who heard the announcement on the, you know, the speaker, gifted kids go to their room. I sensed in my gut there's something much more complicated about humans than the way that we're dividing and sorting people here. And I still believe it. And I believe it in so many ways, you know, like hidden ways that we don't explicitly acknowledge in ourselves. society, old systems, especially in the education system, but you also see it in organizations and hiring practices. It goes deep, this stuff. A lot of these assumptions we have about human potential that are really outdated and just wrong.

The story that has stuck with me, I think, through this whole episode is the one that you told me about the school psychologist who looked at your IQ test and showed you where you fell on the bell curve of intelligence and started with the gifted and moved the pencil over and over and over to the left and then to the left and then more to the left. That moment was really crushing for you in all kinds of ways. But some years ago, you had an extraordinary experience. You were walking in a park in Philadelphia and you came by an elderly man sitting on a park bench. Set the scene for me and tell me that story, Scott.

I was really— Happy. I was pumped. I just had a nice weightlifting session, and I'm running, and I cross a man on a bench, and I feel something in my gut like like dread. Like what? Like why am I feeling dread? This I don't know. This like I look back at the person, and then it hits me. That's the school psychologist from high school who drew the bell curve on the napkin and basically. Inspired me to go into this field, not in the way that he would have ever thought. But I'm like, that's him. He's older, but I recognize him. And it did create a bit of a dilemma in me, which is like, what do I— do I approach him? Do I say hi? Do I— what do I sock him in the face? What do I do? And with a lot of trepidation and my heart beating very fast, I approached him on the park bench and I said, hey, do you mind if I if I just sit next to you for a second? I want to tell you something. And he's like, sure, no problem, no problem. And I sat down. I said, hey, I was a was a student of yours and you you changed my life. And and he he said, oh yeah, by in a sort of screw you sort of way, probably. He said that, and I, you know, I laughed, and I said, well, you know, you just, you did. I did, you know, I'm a psychologist now, and I didn't feel the need to yell at him or tell him the whole story. But he said something very interesting to me when I told him I'm a psychologist now. He said, oh, that's, he's like, well, that's interesting. I'm actually tutoring a kid right now who Really low IQ, really low IQ is really not the sharpest tool in the shed. Well, my blood boiled a bit and I calmed myself down. I just said, maybe you could just keep looking deeper beyond the IQ into maybe think about him in a bit of a broader way where you look at the totality of him, not a particular slice of him when you're making that kind of judgment call. Um, he agreed. I mean, he, he agreed. To his credit, he, he's like, that's a good point. And I just kind of realized in that moment, like, you know what, like, he's not evil. He's human. He was probably doing the best that he could at the time in what he knew and how he was trained. And, and he— and even now, he was doing the best he can to try to help this kid. And the best I could do is not yell at him or tell him my story, but to just tell him about the field of twice exceptional and to tell him about, well, maybe here's some resources. So I offered him some resources to help this kid based on the research I've done. I wish someone told him that when I was in 11th grade. Maybe he would have treated me differently. But then again, if he treated me differently, maybe I wouldn't have been in the position to ever even be at that park bench to tell him that. So it's all very weird. I don't know, life sometimes you just gotta go with it.

Psychologist Scott Barry Kaufman studies the science of human potential. He's the author of Ungifted: Intelligence Redefined and Transcend: The New Science of Self-Actualization. Scott, Thank you for joining me today on Hidden Brain.

Thank you. This was wonderful.

Hidden Brain is produced by Hidden Brain Media. Our audio production team includes Bridget McCarthy, Annie Murphy-Paul, Kristen Wong, Laura Quirrell, Ryan Katz, Autumn Barnes, and Andrew Chadwick. Tara Boyle is our executive producer. I'm Hidden Brain's executive editor. Our unsung heroes today are Jay and Jessica Shear. Jay is a novelist and runs a nonprofit production company called the Reclamation Society. Jessica is an editor of nonfiction and fiction books. We recently had some questions about the publishing industry, and Jay and Jessica graciously made time to chat and share their insights. Thank you, Jay and Jessica. If you enjoy Hidden Brain and have found the ideas we explore If you find the content we explore to be useful in your own life, please consider supporting our work. You can do so at support.hiddenbrain.org. Again, that's support.hiddenbrain.org. I'm Shankar Vedantam. See you soon. Thank you.

Quick question: Do people come to you for answers at work? Maybe you're managing projects, training new hires, or just the one everyone relies on. That's leadership. Through UVA Darden's Part-Time MBA in Rosslyn, we help professionals like you turn real-world experience into recognized leadership credentials without stepping away from your career. Whether you work in healthcare, education, government, or business, this is how you take the next step. Learn more at darden.virginia.edu/ptmba.

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