I did a quick investigation into the three papers linked in the article.
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.
And even if a correlation was to be found on average, it doesn't really say anything about the individuals or median levels or many other nuances.
I think we can all agree on the base level that there are intelligent people who are kind, and there are intelligent people who are very not kind. And then there's intelligent people who are kind only for the reasons that it makes them succeed, not for pure altruistic reasons.
Not to mention if intelligent people are able to make more income and therefore have the capability to share a portion of it while less intelligent will try to get by and don't have time or resources to help others.
They claimed in the first study to control for income, but I wonder how effective that is when you are considering a household of people a majority of the time. The person who donates may not be the person with higher general intelligence or higher income; only someone in their household must have the characteristic.
> None of those are what I would consider difficult (serial 7s is starting at 100 and subtracting 7 over and over).
I worked with a guy who used to brag about having an IQ of 60. Dude wasn't much smarter than a rock, but he could follow directions really well. Pretty sure he could pass these tests too.
Yes, but being manipulative will be discovered and punished in the long term. It's not a stable strategy, as it get riskier and riskier the more you do it. So you are naturally disincentivized from being manipulative.
On the other hand, being generous will be recognized and rewarded in the long term. In the short term you carry some risk if you are generous with people you don't know. This is where having good social skills to develop relationships comes in.
It's also the difference between playing zero-sum and positive-sum games. Manipulation is zero-sum. Positive-sum games have more reward all-in-all in the long term.
What do you suppose compels social animals to cooperate socially? I can imagine a few possibilities:
1. Maximizing self interest using an understanding of social contract theory
2. A complex system of instincts that depends on others behavior, but doesn't manifest as intuition about the reasons for those behaviors
3. Like 2, but it manifests as an intuitive undestanding of how others may feel
I admit, 1 seems unlikely, even for humans. 2 and 3 sound more plausible, but 3 seems like the simpler explanation to me. We have an example case of it in humans (of course humans may additionally reason about others intent), and I'd expect similar tendencies to have similar mechanisms. Plus, grouping behaviors into intents reduces the number of rules needed for the observed behavior -> response mapping at the cost of some pattern recognition ability.
It's possible there's another explanation, including why similar tendencies aren't explained by similar mechanisms, despite the availability of similar "hardware". If there is, I'm not clever enough to have thought of it.
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.