| 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. |
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.