Are hackers smarter than average? Or are they, like most criminal groups, less intelligent than average? A study from the Netherlands investigated these questions.
The authors had three groups of individuals: (1) people accused of hacking, (2) people accused of crimes that were not cybercrimes, and (3) non-criminals. Groups 2 and 3 were matched to group 1 on age, sex, and country of birth.
The results showed that the accused hackers had previously scored higher (at age ~12) than the other accused criminals on a nationwide school test that covers language, mathematics, and information processing. However, the accused hackers scored lower than the non-criminals on the test and all of its sections.
Converting the results to IQ scores indicates that the accused hackers had average IQs 3.5-4.2 points lower than the non-criminals, but 2.4-2.9 points higher than people accused of non-cyber crimes.
The authors also conducted a sibling control study by identifying the accused hackers’ siblings who had not been accused of a crime and comparing their IQs with the accused hackers’ IQs (controlling for age and sex). The results showed were very similar. Accused hackers had IQs that were 2.8-3.4 lower than their non-criminal siblings. This shows that most of the IQ differences between accused hackers and similar non-criminals are NOT due to confounds that exist between families.
It is important to note that this study was limited to younger accused criminals (avg age = 21.1, SD = 3.1) and that the people in the study had not been convicted of any crime–only accused. The accused hackers were also overwhelmingly male (83.2%), and these characteristics of the sample will limit generalizability. Also, because of the small sample size of the sibling control portion of the study (n = 60 sibling pairs), most of the results were not statistically significant.
Nevertheless, this study provides important insights into IQ variations among people within the criminal justice system. Accused hackers are less intelligent than similar people in the general population, which may show that white-collar crime bears some resemblance to the profile that we see with violent criminals. On the other hand, accused hackers differ in one very important respect – IQ – from other criminals, and that is important for the justice system to acknowledge.
Original post: https://x.com/RiotIQ/status/1971270932279763192?s=20
Full study here: https://doi.org/10.1016/j.chb.2021.106985