If I was just looking for a little fling, I wouldn’t really care about their level of intelligence.
Thank you sweetheart, I appreciate that.
(OK, that was a joke. Sorry Anaamika I’m feeling onry today.)
Smart as, or a little smarter, please. I am, seriously, smart (in that I have had my nose in a variety of books since age 4, and am a walking compendium of useless knowledge.) I was once paired up in a Trivial Pursuit contest with a couple of people including a guy who was to die for, to look at him, looks-wise. He could not contribute one answer in any category, including the arts and sports. He just sat there, totally lost. I could never, ever be involved with anybody, even for a fling, who never heard of Humphrey Bogart, Salvidore Dali, or even Scott Hamilton or Joe Namath!
Just the idea of me making the first move by approaching a hot guy . . . this is so laughable, that I’d never get to the point of finding out how smart he is. When I met my partner, we were totally focused on each other from several feet away. Yet he still had to practically reel me in with a tractor beam.
Anyway . . . smarter is always hotter.
This was great.
My answer is: A, by a mile.
It’s unanswerable. I prefer the one who I naturally prefer, but if you did it 100 times with different choices I’ll bet it won’t always be the smarter or less smart one. I honestly don’t think intelligence matters that much to me unless it affects those other things.
A little smarter. I guess I’ll naturally assume she’s as smart as me, as sort of a default position. If I discover that she’s smarter than I thought, then I have a better chance, because if I’m in competition with a bar full of meatheads, generally they’re happier with someone less intelligent, so they won’t be interested in the girl I’m talking to. My odds go up.
But if she’s actually smarter than I thought but for purposes of meeting/hooking up she pretends to be dumber, our relationship is over. That’s a huge turn-off.
A little smarter. (Of course, for the other person, that means I’m a little dumber…)
Dumbing oneself down is a major turnoff.
Back in college, I dated a guy who was incredibly handsome. Tall, athletic, great body, great smile. We spent one evening making out, then made plans for an actual. Sadly, he was as dumb as a box of round dice.
I could have cried with disappointment. All that beauty, wasted.
There are all kinds of problems with the OP’s scenario:
Without knowing the person, how smart or dumb would you expect that person to be anyway? You approached them because of something other than intelligence to begin with. So maybe you envisioned a Marie Curie mind who looked like Kim Kardashian. Now she’s a little bit dumber, and she’s not as attractive? If you’re that caught up in intelligence, you presumably wouldn’t approach a dumb person anyway.
Also, most people are going to be smarter than you in some areas and dumber in others. So in this case, it would depend on being intelligent or dumb in a subject or subjects that you value. But again, you approached them to begin with and with no knowledge of their intelligence up to that point.
Finally, if we’re able to simplify the equation between “dumber than expected” and “smarter than expected”, the flip side is that they’d tend to view you in the opposite way. So, in order to hook up, they would have to answer this poll opposite of the way that you answered it.
I think that the real answer is that ‘smart’ and ‘dumb’ aren’t that easy to decipher for most of the population. And the hidden information in the poll results is that people tend to view themselves as more intelligent than they really are or at least over-estimate their ability to gauge the intelligence of someone else.
I guess I broke the OP’s rule of not over-thinking the question.
FTR, I answered “A little smarter is hotter” 
The poll asks if they’re smarter/dumber than expected, not if they’re smarter/dumber than us, right?
I picked “a little smarter” but either way would probably be fine. And even if the question was in relation to ourselves, either way would be okay then too, just as long as the difference was “little.”
Smart is always hotter.
Smarter, always. I’ve Got The Hots For The Smarts