The Social Animal

CHAPTER 10 INTELLIGENCE

ERICA DIDN’T HAVE TO FIND HER WAY IN BUSINESS. Business found her. Recruiters had been chasing her since her junior year in college all the way through business school, and she fended them off like an heiress in a Victorian novel, carefully guarding herself for the right suitor.

She flirted with finance, got serious for a time with a tech company, but eventually decided to start her career with one of the elite consulting firms. The firm gave her a choice. She could join one of what they called the “functional-capability groups” or one of the “clientele–industry sector” groups. This was no choice at all because she didn’t really know what either did.

She chose an FCG, because somehow it sounded cooler, and wound up working for a man named Harrison. Three days a week, Harrison would gather his team for a meeting about the research projects they were working on. The meetings weren’t held around a table with a speakerphone in the middle like an altar, the way normal meetings were. Harrison, with his own quirky ideas, had hired some interior designer to build a different conversation space. Instead, his team sat on low padded chairs in a vast open area that looked like a big living room.

The arrangement was supposed to be flexible and allow small groups to huddle, but instead it allowed large groups of men to be mutually avoidant. They’d come in at ten a.m. and plop their coffees and papers on the floor, sink down into their chairs, and subtly adjust them so they were slightly askew. The chairs would be in a rough circle, but each became slightly misaligned so that one guy would be looking at the window, another guy would be looking at a piece of corporate art on the wall, and a third would be facing the door. The members of the team could go an entire hour without ever making eye contact, even as they were talking together happily and productively.

Harrison was about thirty-five, pale, large but nonathletic, and utterly brilliant. “What’s your favorite power law?” he asked Erica during one of her first meetings with the unit. Erica didn’t really know what one was.

“It’s a polynomial with scale invariance. Like Zipf’s law.” Zipf’s law, Erica was told later, states that the most common word in any language will appear exactly twice as frequently as the next common word, and so on down to the least common. The largest city in any large nation will be twice as populous as the next largest city, and so on down the line.

“Or Kleiber’s law!” Another worker chimed in. Kleiber’s law states that there is a constant relationship between mass and metabolism in any animal. Small animals have faster metabolisms and big animals have slower ones, and you can plot the ratio of mass to metabolism of all animals on a straight line, from the smallest bacteria to the largest hippopotami.

The whole room was suddenly aflame with power laws. Everybody but her had their favorites. Erica felt astoundingly slow-witted next to these guys, but happy she’d get to work with them.

Every day’s meeting was another intellectual-fireworks display. They’d plop down into their chairs—lower and lower as their meeting progressed until they were practically horizontal with their bellies sticking up and their wing tips crossed in front of them—and about once a meeting there’d be some brilliant outburst. One day they spent an hour arguing over whether “jazz” was the best of all possible words to select when you are playing Hangman.

“Suppose Shakespeare plays had titles like Robert Ludlum thrillers?” one of the crew wondered one day.

“The Rialto Sanction,” somebody suggested immediately.

“The Elsinore Vacillation,” another chirped, for Hamlet.

“The Dunsinane Reforestation,” cried another, for Macbeth.

These guys had been marked out as geniuses before they could walk. It seemed as though they’d all been whizzes at College Bowl or debate. Harrison once mentioned that he’d dropped out of med school because it was too easy. If somebody mentioned that somebody in another company was smart, he’d ask, “But is he smart like us?” Erica played a little betting game with herself. She allowed herself to eat one M&M for every second that passed between the time Harrison mentioned the name of somebody and the time he noted whether or not they went to Harvard, Yale, or MIT.

Then there were the silences. If they weren’t having fierce debates about methodologies and data sets, the whole group was perfectly content to sit in silence—for seconds and minutes at a time. For urban-ethnic Erica, this was torture. She’d sit upright in her own chair, staring at her feet, repeating a mantra silently to herself, “I will not break this silence. I will not break this silence. I will not break this silence.”

Erica would wonder how these geniuses could sit mutely this way. Maybe it was just that they were mostly men and the few other women in her group had over the years learned to adapt to the male culture. Erica had, of course, grown up with the popular notion that men are less communicative and empathetic than women. And there is plenty of scientific evidence to support that. Male babies make less eye contact with their mothers than female babies, and the higher the testosterone level in the womb during the first trimester of pregnancy, the lower the eye-contact level will be. Simon Baron-Cohen of Cambridge surveyed the research literature on male communication and feelings and concluded that men are more curious about systems and less curious about emotions. They are, on average, more drawn to rules-based analyses of how inanimate objects fit together. Women are, on average, better empathizers. They do better in experiments in which they are given partial clues and have to guess a person’s emotional state. They are generally better at verbal memory and verbal fluency. They don’t necessarily talk more than men, but they seem to take turns more while talking, and they are more likely to talk about others while men are much more likely to talk about themselves. Women are much more likely to seek somebody else’s help when they’re in a stressful situation.

But Erica had been around groups of guys before, and it was not always like this. This culture was peculiar, and it was shaped from the top down. Harrison had turned social awkwardness into a form of power. The more cryptic he became, the more everyone had to attend to him.

He ate the same lunch every day: cream-cheese-and-olive sandwiches. As a boy he’d developed a formula to help him predict the winners of dog races, and now his business was to look out for hidden patterns. “Did you read the footnotes in the company report?” he asked Erica mysteriously, after the group had acquired a new client. “They’re about to experience a crossover moment.” She pored over the footnotes and still had no clue what he was talking about.

He studied charts for hour upon hour—stock prices, annual cocoa-production levels, weather patterns, and cotton output.

He could be deeply impressive. Clients respected him even if they didn’t love him. CEOs were humble in his presence. Everybody believed that Harrison could look at a page of numbers and tell them if they’d be bankrupt or booming five years out. Harrison shared this reverential attitude toward his own intelligence. He was certain about many things—everything, actually—but he was most certain about two propositions: He was really smart, and most people in the world were not.

For a few years, Erica enjoyed working with this man, even with all the weirdness attached. She liked watching him talk about modern philosophy. He was avid about bridge. He loved any intellectual game with a fixed set of rules. Sometimes she helped him apply his insights, which were always dazzlingly complex, into the language of everyday reality. But gradually she began to notice something. The department wasn’t doing very well. The reports were brilliant but the business sucked. New clients would come, but they would rarely last. People would use their services for specific projects, but they never brought the team on board as trusted advisors.

It took Erica a surprisingly long time to come to this realization, but once she did, she looked at her group with a different and more critical eye. The meetings went on forever, she realized, but there was little actual debate. Instead everybody would bring little bits of information that confirmed theories Harrison had concocted years before. Erica felt as though she were watching courtiers bring candies to the king and then watching him savor them in everybody’s presence.

Harrison’s favorite locution was “That’s all you need to know!” He’d make some sharp, pithy observation about a complex situation, and then he’d bark it out: “That’s all you need to know!” It occurred to Erica that sometimes it wasn’t all you needed to know, but the conversation was effectively over.

Then there was the Model. Many years before, Harrison had had a big success restructuring a consumer bank. He was a legend in the banking community. Now every time a bank came to him he tried to implant that model. He tried in big banks and little banks, urban banks and rural banks. When he tried to implant that model in different nations, Erica tried to wheel out her cultural expertise. One meeting she tried to explain the Varieties of Capitalism approach pioneered by Peter Hall and David Soskice. Different national cultures, she said, have different motivational systems, different relationships to authority and to capitalism. Germany, for example, has tight interlocking institutions like work councils. It also has labor markets that make it hard to hire and fire people. These arrangements mean that Germany excels at incremental innovation—the sort of steady improvements that are common in metallurgy and manufacturing. The United States, on the other hand, has looser economic networks. It is relatively easy to hire and fire and start new businesses. The United States thus excels at radical innovation, at the sort of rapid paradigm shifts prevalent in software and technology.

Harrison dismissed her with a wave of the hand. Different countries excelled at different things because of different government regulations. Change the regulations and you change the cultures. Erica tried to argue that regulations emerge from cultures, which are deeper and longer lasting. Harrison had turned away. Erica was a valuable employee, but she was not smart enough to bother arguing with.

Harrison didn’t just treat her this way. He treated clients this way, too. He ignored arguments that didn’t fit his mental framework. He had his group prepare long presentations in which they presumed to lecture people about the industries they’d spent their whole lives mastering. They made presentations deliberately opaque as a way of demonstrating their own expertise. They didn’t understand that different companies have different risk tolerances. They didn’t understand that a particular CFO might be in a power struggle with a particular CEO and they should be careful not to make the latter’s life more difficult. There was no piece of office politics so obvious that they couldn’t be oblivious to it, no attempt at empathic accuracy they could not fail. For Erica, no day was complete unless Harrison and his team had committed some incredible faux pas. She spent the final five months of her tenure at the firm going home each day with one question on her mind: How could people who are so smart be so fucking stupid?

Beyond IQ

This turns out to be a revealing question. Harrison had built an entire lifestyle and career around reverence for IQ. He generally hired people on the basis of intelligence; socialized with people on the basis of intelligence. He impressed clients by telling them he’d unleash a team of Ivy Leaguers on their problems.

And to some extent Harrison’s faith in intelligence was justified. Researchers have studied IQ pretty extensively over the decades and know a lot about it. The IQ scores a person gets in childhood are reasonably predictive of the scores he or she gets as an adult. People who are good at one kind of intellectual skill tend to be good at many others. People who are really good at verbal analogies tend to also be good at solving math problems and reading comprehension, though they may be less good at some other mental skills, such as memory recognition.

The ability to do well on these sorts of tests is significantly influenced by heredity. The single strongest predictor of a person’s IQ is the IQ of his or her mother. People with high IQs do better in school and in school-like settings. As Dean Hamer and Peter Copeland note, “In study after study, IQ is the single best predictor of school performance.”

If you want to lead a business, it probably helps to have an IQ over 100. If you want to go into nuclear physics, it probably helps to have an IQ over 120.

But there are a couple of problems with Harrison’s emphasis on IQ. In the first place, it is surprisingly malleable. Environmental factors can play a huge role in shaping IQ. A study of black children in Prince Edward County, Virginia, found that they lost an average of six IQ points for every missed year of school. Parental attention also seems to matter. Firstborns tend to have higher IQs than secondborns, who tend to have higher IQs than thirdborns. This effect disappears, however, when there is more than a three-year gap between children. The theory is that mothers talk to their firstborns more and use more complicated sentences. They have to divide their attention when they have young children born closely together.

The broadest evidence of IQ malleability is the Flynn Effect. Between 1947 and 2002, IQ levels across the developed world rose steadily by about three percentage points per decade. This was found across many countries, across many age groups, and in many different settings, and it’s stark evidence of an environmental component to IQ.

Interestingly, scores did not rise across all sections of the IQ test. People in 2000 were no better at the vocabulary and reading-comprehension portions of the test than people in 1950. But they were much better at the sections designed to measure abstract reasoning. “Today’s children,” James R. Flynn writes, “are far better at solving problems on the spot without a previously learned method for doing so.”

Flynn’s explanation is that different eras call forth different skills. The nineteenth-century society rewarded and required more concrete-thinking skills. Contemporary society rewards and requires more abstract-thinking skills. People who have a genetic capacity to reason abstractly use those skills more and more, and hence get better and better at them. Their inherited skills are multiplied by their social experiences, and the result is much, much higher IQ scores.

However, once you get beyond the school environment, it’s not a very reliable predictor of performance. Controlling for other factors, people with high IQs do not have better relationships and better marriages. They are not better at raising their children. In a chapter of Handbook of Intelligence, Richard K. Wagner of Florida State University surveys the research on IQ and job performance and concludes, “IQ predicts only about 4 percent of variance in job performance.” In another chapter of the handbook, John D. Mayer, Peter Salovey, and David Caruso conclude that at best IQ contributes about 20 percent to life success. There is great uncertainty about these sorts of numbers. As Richard Nisbett puts it, “What nature hath joined together, multiple regression cannot put asunder.” But the general idea is that once you get past some pretty obvious correlations (smart people make better mathematicians), there is a very loose relationship between IQ and life outcomes.

One famous longitudinal study known as the Terman study followed a group of extremely high-IQ students (they all scored 135 or above). The researchers expected these brilliant young people to go on to have illustrious careers. They did fine, becoming lawyers and corporate executives, for the most part. But there were no superstar achievers in the group, no Pulitzer Prize winners or MacArthur Award winners. In a follow-up study by Melita Oden in 1968, the people in the group who seemed to be doing best had only slightly higher IQs. What they had was superior work ethics. They were the ones who had shown more ambition as children.

Once a person crosses the IQ threshold of 120, there is little relationship between more intelligence and better performance. A person with a 150 IQ is in theory much smarter than a person with a 120 IQ, but those additional 30 points produce little measurable benefit when it comes to lifetime success. As Malcolm Gladwell demonstrated in Outliers, the Americans who won Nobel Prizes in Chemistry and Medicine did not mostly go to Harvard and MIT, the schools at the tippy-top of the cognitive ladder. It was simply enough that they went to good schools—Rollins College, Washington State, Grinnell. If you are smart enough to get into a good school, you’re smart enough to excel—even in academic spheres like chemistry and medical research. It’s not important that you are in the top 0.5 percent. A study of 7,403 Americans who participated in the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth, conducted by Jay Zagorsky of Ohio State, found no correlation between accumulating large wealth and high IQ.

Harrison’s mistake was to equate IQ with mental ability. The reality is that intelligence is a piece of mental ability, but it is not the most important piece. People who score well on IQ tests are good at logical, linear, and computational tasks. But to excel in the real world, intelligence has to be nestled in certain character traits and dispositions. To draw a parallel, a soldier may be phenomenally strong. If you gave him a test involving push-ups and pull-ups, he would do very well. But unless he possesses courage, discipline, technique, imagination, and sensitivity, he probably won’t survive amidst the chaos of the battlefield. In the same way, a thinker may be very smart but unless she possesses moral virtues such as honesty, rigor, and fair-mindedness, she probably won’t succeed in real life.

In his book What Intelligence Tests Miss, Keith E. Stanovich lists some of the mental dispositions that contribute to real world performance: “The tendency to collect information before making up one’s mind, the tendency to seek various points of view before coming to a conclusion, the disposition to think extensively about a problem before responding, the tendency to calibrate the degree of strength of one’s opinions to the degree of evidence available, the tendency to think about future consequences before taking action, the tendency to explicitly weight pluses and minuses of a situation before making a decision, and the tendency to seek nuance and avoid absolutism.”

In other words, there is a big difference between mental force and mental character. Mental character is akin to moral character. It is forged by experience and effort, carved into the hinterland of the mind.

Clocks and Clouds

The science writer Jonah Lehrer sometimes reminds his readers of Karl Popper’s distinctions between clocks and clouds. Clocks are neat, orderly systems that can be defined and evaluated using reductive methodologies. You can take apart a clock, measure the pieces, and see how they fit together. Clouds are irregular, dynamic, and idiosyncratic. It’s hard to study a cloud because they change from second to second. They can best be described through narrative, not numbers.

As Lehrer has noted, one of the great temptations of modern research is that it tries to pretend that every phenomenon is a clock, which can be evaluated using mechanical tools and regular techniques. This is surely true of the study of intelligence. Researchers have spent a great deal of time studying IQ, which is relatively stable and quantifiable, and relatively little time studying mental character, which is cloudlike.

Raw intelligence is useful for helping you solve well-defined problems. Mental character helps you figure out what kind of problem you have in front of you and what sort of rules you should use to address it. As Stanovich notes, if you give people the rules they need to follow in order to solve a thinking problem, then people with higher IQs do better than people with low IQs. But if you don’t give them the rules, people with high IQs do no better, because coming up with the rules to solve a problem and honestly evaluating one’s performance afterward are mental activities barely related to IQ.

Mental force and mental character are only lightly correlated. As Stanovich puts it, “Many different studies involving thousands of subjects have indicated that measures of intelligence display only moderate to weak correlations (usually less than .30) with some thinking dispositions (for example, actively open-minded thinking, need for cognition) and near zero correlation with others (such as conscientiousness, curiosity, diligence.)”

Many investors, for example, are quite intelligent, but behave self-destructively because of their excessive faith in their intelligence. Between 1998 and 2001 the Firsthand Technology Value mutual fund produced an annualized total return of 16 percent. The average individual investor in this fund, however, lost 31.6 percent of his or her money over this time. Why? Because the geniuses thought they could get in and out of the market at the right moments. They missed the important up days and caught the devastating down ones. These people, who are quite smart, performed worse than if they had been stolid and stupid.

Other people score well on IQ tests but can’t hold down a job. James J. Heckman of the University of Chicago and others compared the workplace performance of high-school graduates with those who dropped out of high school but took the GED exams. The GED recipients are as smart as high-school grads who do not go on to college, but they earn less than these high-school grads. In fact, they have lower hourly wages than do high-school dropouts, because they possess fewer of the so-called noncognitive traits like motivation and self-discipline. GED recipients are much more likely to switch jobs. Their labor-force participation rates are lower than that of high-school grads.

At the very top of intellectual accomplishment, intelligence is nearly useless in separating outstanding geniuses from everybody else. The greatest thinkers seem to possess mental abilities that go beyond rational thinking narrowly defined. Their abilities are fluid and thoroughly cloudlike. Albert Einstein, for example, would seem to be an exemplar of scientific or mathematical intelligence. But he addressed problems by playing with imaginative, visual, and physical sensations. “The words of the language, as they are written or spoken, do not seem to play any role in my mechanism of thought,” he told Jacques Hadamard. Instead, he said that his intuitions proceed through “certain signs and more or less clear images” that he could manipulate and combine. “The above mentioned elements are, in my case, of visual and some of muscular type,” Einstein observed.

“I can only think in pictures,” the physicist and chemist Peter Debye declared. “It’s all visual.” He said that when working on a problem he saw fuzzy images, which he tried to progressively clarify in his mind and then eventually, after the problem was largely solved, he would clarify the pictures in the form of mathematics. Others proceed acoustically, rehearsing certain sounds associated with certain ideas. Others do so emotionally: “You had to use your feelings,” Debye explained, “What does the carbon atom want to do?”

Wisdom doesn’t consist of knowing specific facts or possessing knowledge of a field. It consists of knowing how to treat knowledge: being confident but not too confident; adventurous but grounded. It is a willingness to confront counterevidence and to have a feel for the vast spaces beyond what’s known. Harrison did not rate highly on any of these character traits.

Time to Go

Erica was in an office filled with people with impressive brains who nonetheless couldn’t find their way out of a paper bag. As the months went by, she became more and more impatient with their shortcomings, and more dumbfounded by their ability to miss opportunities and repeat their mistakes. Here, as so often in her new life, Erica felt like a semi-outsider. Maybe it was because her upbringing was so different, or her skin color was different, or for some other reason, but she seemed more aware of the irrational, darker, and passionate side of life. One day, when she was at her most exasperated, she half-jokingly decided that she had been put on this earth to fulfill a Mission from God: to save the white man from himself.

Because the Almighty is a testing God, he had sent down upon this earth upper–middle class suburban kids who went to white-bread high schools, polo-shirt colleges, and light beer–sipping business schools and then were spit out into the world of bottled-water corporate America and who never got closer to reality than occasional forays into turnpike rest stops. Their worldviews rested upon an assumption of pristine equilibrium. As long as everybody was civil and genial, the way they were, then their way of thinking made sense. As long as everything was neat and orderly, they could retreat and live inside the formulas they’d learned in school.

But, much of the time, because the world is not neat and gentle, they were the babes of the universe. They fell for Bernie Madoff schemes, subprime mortgages, and derivatives they didn’t understand. They were suckers for every moronic management fad, every bubble mania. They wandered about in the mist, blown about by deeper forces they could not understand.

Fortunately, God, in his infinite and redeeming mercy, had also sent down a tight-abbed, small-boned Chinese-Chicana woman to rescue the innocents. This hard-assed, chip-on-her-shoulder, hyper-organized human Filofax would liberate the overprotected masses from the six-delta PowerPoint bullet points and introduce them to the underworld of reality. God had raised his servant in chaos and squalor so that she might be armed with enough knowledge, drive and vinegar in her bloodstream to jostle the White Man from the comfort of his categories and help him see hidden forces that actually drive the mind. God had armed Erica with the strength and the bad attitude she would need so she would take up the yellowish-brown woman’s burden and pave the way for the salvation of the Earth.

As the months went by, she grew increasingly bored, and frustrated by the groupthink. She took long walks at night, fantasizing about what she would do if she ran her own department or her own firm, and as she strode she would furiously type her ideas into the memo section of her iPhone. During these walks she felt almost euphoric, like she was destined to do some great thing. She realized that her imagination had raced beyond her current job. She was restless. There was no going back.

Erica began to think about creating her own consulting firm. She decided to coolly weigh the pros and cons of such a venture, but with her emotions racing ahead, she rigged the exercise from the start. She exaggerated the pros, minimized the cons, and vastly overestimated how easy it would be.

Erica told Harrison she was leaving. She set up the world corporate headquarters of her new firm on her dining-room table, and she worked with a sort of mania that was a wonder to behold. She called every old mentor, client, and contact. She barely slept. She was flooded with ideas about things she could do with the firm. She would sit down and remind herself that she needed to find one narrow niche, but she couldn’t help herself—the flood of scattershot ideas just kept coming. She felt liberated not having to follow the guardrails of some other person’s thinking. She was going to create a consulting firm that would be unlike any other. It would be humanist in the deepest sense. It would treat people not as data points, but as the fully formed idiosyncratic creatures they are. She was utterly convinced she would succeed.