The good judge of intelligence

IQ Research
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Article 1
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In a new German study, higher-IQ people are better at judging the intelligence of others.

Participants in this study watched short videos of 50 people reading a weather report and explaining the concept of “symmetry.” In addition to IQ, raters’ emotional perception and life satisfaction were positively correlated with the ability to judge others’ intelligence. Negative affect was negatively correlated with the ability to judge intellgence. The best cues of intelligence were the target’s articulation and the content of their speech (i.e., how sophisticated, accurate, insightful, or elaborate the speaker was).

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The correlations aren’t very strong (all <= |.23|), but given how short the videos were, this is pretty impressive. It is likely that in-person interaction for a longer time period would yield better estimates of IQ.

This study is consistent with evolutionary theories that suggest that signaling one’s own intelligence and identifying those signals is advantageous. It also suggests that social-emotional awareness is a valuable skill. Finally, this study shows that “it takes one to know one.”

Read the full open access study here:
https://doi.org/10.1016/j.intell.2025.101994

Original post: https://x.com/RiotIQ/status/2050203333822980356

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The design actually controls for the bias concern pretty well. Accuracy was measured as how closely each rater tracked real IQ test scores across 50 different targets, not just whether raters agreed with each other. Higher IQ predicted greater accuracy at around r = 0.21, and emotion perception came in at a similar level. The correlations are modest but the videos were only about a minute long, so that is actually impressive. Articulation and speech content quality were the strongest cues raters picked up on.

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The emotion perception finding is the part I keep thinking about. Social awareness predicting IQ judgment accuracy at roughly the same level as IQ itself suggests these abilities are more connected than most people assume. It takes one to know one, but apparently it also helps to be good at reading people.