When you meet a new person, one of the things you look for in evaluating that person, if you're like me, is an estimate of their intelligence. We all have our ways of judging that, and the criteria are probably as varied as we are. Broadly, though, most folks judge other people's brain capacity by how articulate they are, how they present themselves, and so forth.
Now, in all modesty, I think I'm a pretty sharp sort myself. I've had one IQ test in my life, and while I won't give the number, as there's no need to get into that, let's just say I was pretty pleased with the result. And I do value intelligence in the people around me; one of the things that makes our marriage work, in fact, is my understanding that my wife is smarter than I am. I mean, she married me, after all.
So, when I happened across a Psychology Today piece on two "commonly overlooked signs of intelligence," I was intrigued - and a little bemused.
Most of us have a fairly tidy mental image of what an “intelligent person” looks like: someone with good habits, who’s always articulate, composed, and chooses their words with the utmost care. The allure of this unassuming, quiet type who has everything figured out before they speak can be quite tempting. But psychological research keeps dismantling this image.
Dismantling, how? Turns out that, according to this piece, those two commonly overlooked signs are talking to yourself, and - yes, really - swearing.
First, talking to yourself:
There is a long-standing cultural assumption that people who talk to themselves are, at best, eccentric and, at worst, showing signs of something more concerning. It’s the kind of behavior that invites sideways glances in supermarket aisles and prompts well-meaning family members to ask if you are OK. The research, however, tells a different story.
In a 2012 study by Gary Lupyan and Daniel Swingley published in the Quarterly Journal of Experimental Psychology, participants were asked to search for a common object—let’s say, for instance, a banana—among images of other objects. Some participants were instructed to repeat the object’s name aloud as they searched. Others, conversely, remained silent.
Consistently, the researchers found that those who spoke the target name out loud found it significantly faster. Speaking, it turned out, made the visual system a more efficient detector. Lupyan and Swingley described this as the label feedback hypothesis: the idea that verbal labels don’t just describe the world, but that they actively shape how we perceive it.
OK, there's just one problem here. That's more of a pattern recognition than cognition thing, it seems. But as a general rule, I can see how the "talking to yourself" rule may well hold some weight. My parents both did it, and they were two of the most intelligent people I ever knew. I talk to myself; to steal a line from the great old BBC comedy, Black Adder, I find it's the best way to be assured of intelligent conversation. In fact, I don't just talk to myself; I also talk to the birds and squirrels hereabouts. I find they are good listeners and, frankly, better company than some people I know.
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But, swearing? If that's a sign of intelligence, in my years in Uncle Sam's colors, I must have served alongside some real Einsteinian intellects. Still... Psychology Today has this to say:
The assumption here is so embedded that it has become a kind of folk wisdom: People who swear frequently do so because they lack the vocabulary to express themselves any other way. It is, in this view, portrayed as a sign of laziness: a linguistic shortcut taken by people who cannot be bothered to find the right word. But this is almost precisely backwards.
The most cited challenge to this assumption comes from a series of studies by Kristin and Timothy Jay, published in the journal Language Sciences in 2015. Participants were given a standard verbal fluency task, in which they had to name as many words beginning with a specific letter as they could in one minute. Then, they were given a taboo fluency task, in which they were asked to list as many swear words as they could in the same timeframe.
The researchers found a clear positive correlation: participants who scored highest on the verbal fluency test also generated the most swear words. Those with the weakest general vocabulary produced the fewest. This suggests that the same cognitive resource that gives someone access to a rich general lexicon also gives them access to a rich taboo lexicon. The vocabulary is simply larger on both ends.
There is some logic to that. My parents, World War II generation people, were among those people who looked down on people who swore, reckoning it to be, as noted, a sign of someone who isn't articulate enough to express themselves politely. I was always careful to watch my language around them, even though my own language is, admittedly, on the salty side. I mean, #$*&!!, *#&#, **&()#@!
All this is interesting, but here's one of my primary ways of judging a person's wits: An ability to speak extemporaneously. That is, the ability to have someone suggest a topic, then to talk on that topic intelligently and articulately for at least a few minutes. Now, granted, one has to be familiar with the topic. Ask me to speak extemporaneously on, say, a sportsball competition, and I would have to decline; I am certifiably clue-free on sportsball in general. But on subjects like energy policy, climate science, guns, and so on? Yeah, I can speak on those topics. And not just to blow my own horn, but some American political figures have been pretty good at this. Ronald Reagan was a good speaker both on and off the teleprompter. So, in all candor, was Bill Clinton. Barack Obama, though, off the teleprompter, was a terrible speaker; he hemmed, he hawed, he hesitated; he didn't speak with confidence. Joe Biden? Kamala Harris? Listening to either of them actually makes one's brain hurt.
Here's the thing: People, smart people and not-so-smart people, are all very different. We all have our own skills and abilities, we all have our own strengths and weaknesses, regardless of the capacities of our brain pans. The smart (hah) thing to do here is to do what my father taught me when I was very young: You judge each person for themselves, as they are, as a whole, regardless of their appearance, whether they talk to themselves or not.
