EUR 12.-Is High IQ negatively correlated with achieving higher management positions?

I see that my wording (hardware-software) is not very popular in this discussion and I apologize for the too rough simplification.

@Cesare: "treating things in a very simplified way allows people to understand nature to the extent of allowing engineers making useful designs and finally you to use your car, your cell phone and to have a roof on your head. This is what we engineers do all the time" ... sounds a little like "to a man with a hammer every problem looks like a nail". And I disagree that the simplification you propose is helpful in this case.

Exactly. I will believe all that the day you could go to a clinic and ask a doctor to improve your musical skills using some piloted neural growth techniques. I have to say that even I may be happy of it (I always dreamed to be a better guitar player), I am also scared of the implications of such a procedure, for obvious reasons. Nevertheless, I surely look to the progresses of neurosciences in a very positive way and I hope that someday we could heal people with problems in that field. But I believe we are going too far from the original topic of your question: is IQ (or intelligence) beneficial to one's career?
My answer is yes and I don't believe the inverse relationship of intelligence vs management positions. If you exclude countries like mine (guess which one it is) where you become manager because your father is a friend of the owner of the company or because you are in a certain political party, in general, managers are not stupid people. This is what I want to say, and I base my statement not on a paper published on Science and based on a pool of 25 managers that took an IQ test, but on the experience of working close to the top management and for several years in international companies ranging from 20 to 20.000 employees...

@Cesare: Thanks for the reply, due to limited time I keep it short:
* There are about 20'000 neurons born every day in the human brain. Those neurons have not been discovered since we were lacking tools to trace them. These days we have those tools.
* I may not discuss whether not quantities are big or small, that is purely subjective: I challenge you on the fact that there is something like a rigid hardware in our brain on which a magic software runs. If you lose an arm, the brain is able to cope with that. If you transplant a third eye onto the brain of a frog, the brain learns to wire up to that eye. If you cut away the arm of a salamander, the neural tissue regrows and is able to establish connections.
Hence, I agree that the "housewife" knowledge you are referring to is a valid point. On Starmind I am interested in facts and figures, if I want to chat I use yahoo answers and forums alike. This is no offense and you raise also valid points with the pianist. Yet more interesting I think is that many people think of the brain like hardware-software. That might be a main reason that progress in neuroscience might be slowed down due to this misconceptions. Sure you can say that you do not believe it until you see it, yet based on your replies I think that you accept the fact when there are several hundred papers confirming that.
Thanks for your inputs though.
@Peter: Fully agree with you.

Pascal,
well, I am not a neuroscientist so I am not informed about the latest discoveries in this field. I talk about "housewife" knowledge coming from less specialistic sources (stuff like newspapers, scientific american, tv documentaries and in the end from common sense). I am pretty sure that the brain can somehow repair small damages and redirect some circuitry, but you have to agree with me that this is only to a very limited extent. You had to meet my poor dad after the brain stroke he suffered, and I can tell you that even if he learned how to walk somehow again, he was never again the same person he was before this event.
Moreover, I never heard of anyone that was not that good to play piano when he was young that one day, suddenly, at the age of 45 woke up and discovered that overnight his brain reshaped its circuitry and made him a super virtuoso... I am sorry to hear that people are not able to read "cum grano salis" what they read in scientific publications, and I tell you as one that wrote and collaborated in many. If they say that they saw one single adult neuron growing on a petri dish or in the brain of a mouse, it doesnt' mean that your brain can regrow or radically regenerate after an accident and even less that it can reshape itself when you are adult. please challenge me on this.

Peter,
I think that the simplification of hardware and software is useful to discuss some aspects in a chat like this. If you believe there is no other way of talking about things rather than doing it in the deepest detail, then I am sorry I will never be able to communicate with you of anything else than nanocrystalline materials which is the topic of my research. And by the way, treating things in a very simplified way allows people to understand nature to the extent of allowing engineers making useful designs and finally you to use your car, your cell phone and to have a roof on your head. This is what we engineers do all the time...

Dear Cesare, I see. It is always funny what one can find in the internet. 1998 I have learnt the same, yet at least in 2000 it became evident that the neural substrate is growing throughout life:


"Newly Adult-born Neurons Are Functionally Similar to Mature Neurons"
21.11.2006 - "Adult neurogenesis produces neurons with similar functional properties to mature neurons in the hippocampus of mice"

You can also google neurogenesis and you will see what neuroscience discovered. Also, if you suffer stroke etc, the brain can reshape and grow new circuitries. hence, I think the notion the brain is once grown and the remains static should be dropped and replaced with a more accurate picture. Thanks.

seems there must be people who have a pretty basic, mechanistic view on human intelligence... hardware and software are human artifacts (as are the theories about intelligence and knowledge). so while hardware and software can well be compared to what the brain is and does (such as software is something like ...), a comparison the other way round (intelligence = harware, knowledge = software) are utter nonsense, immho at least.

well, yes. many studies showed that after that age there is no further development of the brain (e.g. see under chapter "environmental" in: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intelligence). of course, through education you can learn how to use the hardware you have to do something, like people learning to sing even if they are tone deaf, but the result is not the same. it is not "native" hardware, you see? like using some usb+software graphic cards, they work, but very slow...

Dear Cesare - thanks for the comment: Are you sure that you mean "I believe there are no ways of improving your knowledge after a age of, say, 6" ? Then the entire education would be in vain, right? ;-)
Also, if you meant that the hardware brain is static after 6 I would challenge that too, right?
Looking forward to your reply.

Elie, you are mistaking intelligence and knowledge. Intelligence (which theoretically should be measured by IQ tests, but it is not) is "hardware" while knowledge is "software". I believe there are no ways of improving your knowledge after a age of, say, 6. (But if you train yourself at the IQ test, which you can, you can improve your IQ score as much as you want)...

Dear Elie
Thanks for the input - however, it seems to me to lack any foundation, right?
Why should I forget a word in french, when I learn a new one in English?
Viewing the brain like a glass of water, which can be full at some point in time seems alittle bit naive, dont you think?
Rather there is evidence, that the reverse may be true - the more you learn, the easier you can learn. Maybe it is more like a muscle - the more you use it, the more can you do with it.
Would you mind correcting your statement?
Thanks.

In my opinion, there is a negative correlation between high IQ and high management position. The reason can be pictured like this:
Imagine that I'm a CEO (which is far from the reality :-D), my brain is full of important managing notions and skills. Plus I'm a little bit old (40y and +). I'm like a glass full of water. Improving my IQ would mean that I will "add" something very very very small to my knowledge. In this case, a drop of water. Inevitably, another drop of water will fall from the top of the glass.

I don't know if you got it. But that drop affects negatively and it's impossible to notice it, due to a very very very small scale (we are talking about knowledge).

Same phenomenon happens when we learn a new language. Inevitably. Example: When learning a word in French, we are forgetting one in English...

Hi Cesare, I actually made another experience - my superiors had mostly a so called high "emotional quotient", yet what regards IQ they certainly ranged average. Good average of course.

I think that what you heard is not true or, more scientifically phrased, it is not supported by any statistically significant correlation. Many of the "bosses" I had in my life were extremely intelligent people. I would say the vast majority. Now, maybe also my "data pool" is not significant, but since I perfectly know it, I don't make any statement out of it...

@Peter: Your solution you could have handed in actually, useful pointers indeed!
@Cesare: Fully agree with your comments - yet then again that would mean that there is no correlation between high-IQ and success in business life - yet I heard that there is a negative correlation.
What do you think?

Once I read that high score in the TOEFL test did not mean that your english is good, but just that you are good in the TOEFL test. IQ test is the same, there are plenty of studies saying that if you have a high IQ means only that you are good in the IQ test, nothing related to intelligence. And managers are not there because they are smart but because they have good interpersonal skills or good negotiation skills or good network or good friends. This is how the world goes. See some episodes of "The big bang theory" and discover what smart people end up doing...

There has been done some work here: http://www.halfsigma.com/2006/06/high_iq_causes_.html and here http://www.gnxp.com/MT2/archives/004173.html concluding that a high IQ is not related to income (except at the bottom end of the IQ distribution); a longer read here: http://www.mega.nu:8080/ampp/murray_income_iq.pdf, and this one is interesting too: http://digitalcommons.ilr.cornell.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1111&context=cahrswp. Further throw in this one for some fun http://inductivist.blogspot.com/2009/01/having-high-iq-for-prez-aint-that.html

Great question! I'd be interested to hear the answer ;-)