Yeah, I can see this being a social trapdoor for smart people. Most people are opinionated to a certain degree and confuse “fact” with “opinion”. So they’ll say stuff that feels right (like, “Crime is worse now than it used to be”), and when you start in with “Well, that’s kinda not true..”, they’ll automatically take a defensive stance. Since it’s considered impolite to argue with someone who you are mere acquaintances with, it’s just easier to just hold your tongue in the first place. But then it becomes impossible to talk to them, because the entire premise of the conversation is wrong.
When I was in academia, having polite “heated” discussions was considered normal and fun. But outside of academia, I’ve learned that it is inappropriate. Most people either don’t know how to argue well or they think having a disagreement over an issue means that “you just can’t get along”. So when people spout off about stuff, "Being pear-shaped is healthier than being apple-shaped…“Orthodox Jews are required to have funerals three days after a person’s death, just like Jesus(!) did”…“Potatoes and apples belong to the same taxonomic family”), I just don’t say anything anymore. Which often makes me a non-participant in conversations and thus not “cool”.
I think another mechanism is that people want there to be some fairness in the way positive attributes are divvied up. Oh, that person is good-looking? They must be stupid. That person is popular? They must be shallow. That person is smart? They must be a social cripple.
And it works both directions. It works for the non-smart to belittle the smart, and it works for the socially anxious to belittle the socially gifted. “Oh, well of course smart people don’t make small talk. It’s just so beneath us.”
This doesn’t sound like any of the smart people I know, and I know a lot of smart people. In my experience most intelligent people are very good conversationalists, like to laugh, and can discuss a wide variety of subjects with ease.
In contrast, I don’t think I’ve ever known a person who was both unintelligent and a delightful conversationalist. One can be pleasant and a good listener without being particularly bright though, so there are unintelligent people who are wonderful to talk to. If you prefer to be the one doing most of the talking and want your listener to be impressed by what you have to say then you may be better off with a less intelligent person.
It sounds like you’re describing a person with an autism spectrum disorder like Asperger’s syndrome. As others have pointed out, while it’s possible for someone to be very intelligent and have Asperger’s syndrome, the vast majority of intelligent people do not have Asperger’s syndrome. Many people with Asperger’s syndrome are also of “merely” average intelligence. (Part of the diagnostic criteria for Asperger’s syndrome is that the person demonstrates “no clinically significant delay in cognitive development”, so one cannot be both mentally retarded and have Asperger’s syndrome.)
Heck, even people with Asperger’s syndrome don’t necessarily come across as robot-like. I had a friend in college who was very intelligent and had also been diagnosed with Asperger’s syndrome, but she mostly just seemed very blunt, sometimes to the point of rudeness.
I certainly don’t think it’s true across the board, but it is somewhat true in my experience that very intelligent people are more likely to be socially awkward. ETA: I’m thinking of the people I have known with high IQ scores.
I’m not sure what data this is based on but I have read before that introversion increases with IQ score, and the vast majority of very-high-IQ people are introverted. Introverts often struggle with social skills and/or shyness.
I’m no genius (in fact I have a learning disability and have trouble with some very basic skills) but I was a ‘gifted’ child according to my school, and was a few years ahead of my peers verbally and in some other areas. I think I got set back very far socially because for a long time I had difficulty relating to other children, or communicating with them. In many ways I acted and spoke like a ‘mini adult’ starting at age 3 or 4, and it wasn’t because this was encouraged by my family or how I was expected to act - it’s just how I was, and it got worse after I became obsessed with reading. It was off-putting to many people and especially other kids my age.
Since high school I’ve slowly gotten to be a lot better with people, in large part because my abilities became more normal the older I got, and also because I put effort into learning better social skills. Now I’m pretty close to being an average 25-year-old and relate very well to most adults.
Introversion is not necessarily related to social skills. It is quite possible to be introverted and have social skills. The extraversion/introversion difference isn’t tied to presence or absence of social skills; it’s whether the person finds social interactions energizing or fatiguing.
There are extraverts who love being with tons of people, but lack social skills (like loud, obnoxious douchebags) and introverts who prefer being alone/with small groups, but can hold great and friendly conversations at large gatherings. I’m definitely the latter; I really prefer solitude or smaller groups, but I’m perfectly capable of going to large parties/etc. and meet new people, doing the friendly introductions, chit chat, yadda yadda. It’s just that after awhile, I’ll be fucking exhausted and feel the need to gtfo NAO! But the time I’m there, I’m not a social moron (and yes, I’ve had outside confirmation of that ;)).
What about well-meaning mothers who, when their child complains that they’re getting picked on by the other kids, repeatedly responds with, “They’re just jealous because you’re so smart!”
That’s what my mom did. Young children are inclined to believe what their mothers tell them, especially when it’s repeated many times. It took me until high school to finally figure out that the problem wasn’t my intelligence; it was my behavior that was turning off the other kids. In other words, the problem was me, not them. Until I figured that out and was able to consciously modify how I interacted with other people, it was easier to just keep to myself and my books. And of course, deliberately avoiding social interaction did nothing to improve my abilities in that area.
Of course, it doesn’t help when your parents also think television rots your brain, rock & roll is a tool of Satan, and movies are are a wasteful extravagance, leaving you with essentially no common ground for conversation with your peers.
Rik, is your mother a tiny Costa Rican woman? If so, I didn’t know either of my brothers posted here! I didn’t get picked on much as a child, but when I did, my mother’s response was the girls were jealous of how smart I was. Ha ha - no they weren’t. I’ve never even been that smart. It’s just that a) some kids are assholes and pick on people, and b) not everyone likes everyone, and so some kids just didn’t like me. My mother also had a serious beef with television, and we were not even allowed to watch it on school nights for a very long time. My mother never even took me to a movie theatre until I was maybe nine? I had no one idea what people were talking about when they discussed pop culture half the time, but I was all over weekend TV. I’d seen more “I Love Lucy” than any eight year old anywhere. I also played the trombone, which I’m sure gained me negative cook points, can anagram like a motherfuck.
As an adult (of sorts) I listen to secular music, another thing I did that I had to hide as a child because my folks didn’t like it, and watch television sometimes, but that kind of upbringing can set your habits for life. Even now I don’t watch a lot of TV, don’t have cable, and have just recently made a point of watching movies. I saw “The Big Lebowski” for the first time in 2010.
Despite all this, I don’t think this has ever made me socially awkward. I don’t lack the ability to recognize when the vibe is amiss. Words like “vibe” are a mystery to the socially weird. Then again, what percentage of awkward people believe they are that way? In any case, I know a lot about politics and literature, and what I lack in Monty Python references, I make up for in being interested in conversation and having an acceptable sense of humor.
I’m introverted and am routinely introduced to third parties by friends and clients as a “genius”, for whatever that is worth.
I can work well with small groups of people, and am generally amusing and a reasonably decent conversationalist in that circumstance. But I never learned how a party or large social gathering “works”. I simply don’t know how. I’ve been to parties, but I’ve never figured out from external observation how they function. Apparently this is an important social skill, and is a key element in business. Part of it may have been due to rarely being invited to parties when young. So when I’m in a party situation, I wind up wandering around the edges and not talking to anyone except a small number of people that I know well.
This was brought home rather starkly twice in the last year. A good friend has held a party every year for ten years in memory of another friend of ours. I’ve managed to avoid going to any of these parties, but this year another friend wanted to go.
It was awful.
I had, at one time, met more than one hundred of the people at this large party. But I had no idea how to get involved in any of the conversations that were happening there. I would have enjoyed talking to any number of these folks, but how?
Another time was at a fan party before a concert - all these fans of the artist had gathered in a city, and the night before we had a big party. So, presumably there was a topic of conversation, an easy opening “What’s your favorite album?” but again, they all seemed to be involved in other discussions. It was another painful evening.
Eh, I went to a high school that you can only enter by competitive examination. About 25,000 students compete for about 800 seats. The VAST majority of students there were socially normal – with nerdy interests and/or extreme achievement levels. Maybe not MORE socially skilled than the average high schooler, but not remarkably unskilled in the social realm.
Another place where I met a lot of highly intelligent, socially-skilled people, was at law school. A fair number of annoying assholes, for sure, but completely normal to above-average in terms of social skills.
Eh, I don’t think they knew any more about D&D and the like than I did when I was a kid, which was “nothing”. I didn’t discover RPGs until my senior year in high school (1983-84), when I was teaching myself to use the Apple IIe computers in the school library, and via the public library’s software-lending services I discovered a public domain text RPG called “Eamon”. Since I didn’t have a computer at home and only played this game at school, they didn’t need to know about it I never played another “fantasy” game until I discovered Magic: The Gathering when I was in my late 20s and out on my own. I got my first computer of my own in 1996, when I was 30, and eventually ended up playing games like the WarCraft RTS games, and Diablo II, and then when I was 38 or so I finally got around to playing D&D (and later, online fantasy games, including World of Warcraft now).
I guess one fortunate “entertainment” aspect of my youth was that my reading material wasn’t “censored”. I was encouraged to read, and since I lacked any other form of non-self-generated form of entertainment, I did a lot of that, and devoured large quantities of science fiction and eventually fantasy. And, fortunately, as I got into my later teenage years, my mom stopped falling so easily for the latest round of moral panics over the next thing that was going to corrupt me.
I dunno. Sounds like fairly normal introvert behavior to me. I prefer larger groups over smaller ones because of the anonymity the former provides, but my endurance doesn’t last as long because I get over-stimulated easily. The noise, in particular, gets to me. The music, the simultaneous conversations that have to be screened out, and the energy put into small talk, banter, and deciphering things like sarcasm and “gotchas” really start to wear on me after awhile. But I’ve never thought of it as me not “getting” the concept of how parties work. Rather, it’s more like I just don’t like them. I wander the edges because that’s where I feel most comfortable.
Even as a kid, I was like this. Whenever we had school dances in middle school, I made sure I was behind the counter of the concession stand, or that I worked the door collecting tickets (yes, I was that girl). I needed the structure those jobs gave me because they allowed me to be at the dance without really being at the dance. It’s a habit that has continued to today. I generally don’t go to parties, but at the last one I attended, I volunteered to be put to work. I socialized whenever the opportunity arose, but having something to do besides socializing made going to the party much less of an ordeal.
It occurs to me that if uber smart people do tend to be introverted*, then this would explain why most people think of them as socially awkward. Most people in this world are extroverts…and from my experience, extroverts tend to think there’s something wrong with introverted people’s social lives. When really they just have a different interpersonal style.
*I have no problem believing that many introverts are highly intelligent, but I’ve known smart people who are extroverted too.
The main people who held my intelligence against me were my parents, particularly my father. I don’t care to get into the whole nasty story right now, but yes, there is such a thing as prejudice against smart people.
Both my parents were fairly smart, probably smarter than I’ll ever know, and they were introverts. We didn’t visit other families and hang out with their children, we didn’t hang out with our cousins and there were very few children in our neighborhood. To a certain extent we were introverted because that’s how we grew up and that was normal in our family.
In grade school, when I was the unpopular nerd, I didn’t really care because all the things I was teased for seemed like ridiculous things to be teased over. My brain was an adult when I wasn’t. Because most of the children teased me about the same stupid things I didn’t care if I had anything to do with them. I stayed in my little group of nice friends.
I imagine that if I had been adopted into an extroverted family I would have still been an introvert but just had more social skills. I’ve worked hard as an adult to be more comfortable around other people but as someone mentioned above; it’s tiring. Being in a party is like having to be “on” all the time. It’s a definite different way of being that takes a lot of work.
After years of trying so hard to fit in I was told that I am “difficult to talk to and uncomfortable to be around” by a relative of my husband’s. I was crushed. Now I avoid most social situations outside of my comfort group and I totally avoid his family because I’m sure they talk about how weird I am all the time.
Funny thing is most of the people I currently know probably think I’m an extrovert but kind of quirky. Public speaking doesn’t make me nervous and I’ll usually take the lead when other people are standing around being indecisive. I do still prefer to be alone or in a small group and I do find it hard to make small talk.
Something it’s taken me years to recognize is that I am one of those smart people, and I realize that I can be a bit socially awkward sometimes. One of the things that gets me in trouble is thinking that certain topics (like math and statistics) are easy for other people. For me, Math isn’t that hard, I just don’t like doing it (I have degrees in physics and engineering, though, so I’ve done a lot of it). But Algebra just makes sense, I don’t really have to think about it. And basic stats (Correlation does not equal causation) is something I have to explain and re-explain on a weekly basis at my workplace. A lot of times, I forget that it’s not rote for other people, and I come out being socially awkward.
For example, we get more dissatisfied calls at work during a certain time of day, and a manager of mine had put together a chart showing that we get more dissatisfied calls at this certain time of day, and was showing us at a meeting. I point out that it’s not normalized, so it just relates to how many calls we’re taking (which was glaringly obvious to me). I get blank stares from the room. I started in on an explanation of what normalizing something is… and realize that I’m that socially awkward smart person (I then changed my tactic to just saying that we need to make it a percent of calls we take, so that we can compare apples to apples).
This sort of thing has happened to me more than once, where I’m just trying to be conversational, and then realize that I’m light-years ahead of someone else in the conversation. Against that group, it was socially awkward, but against someone who knew what normalization meant, it wouldn’t have been.
INTJs (“the Engineer”, the nerd) and ENTJs (“the Marshal”) are about as rare, IIRC, but the first ones are introverted and the second lot are extroverts; the introverts are relatively-likely to be socially awkward… but that applies to any combination in the other letters, and it applies whether you’ve got enough book-smarts to pick up a whole major in one year or can’t stay focused long enough to light a match.
I don’t know how many people this happens to, but I’m both a nerd and the granddaughter of a guy who could have sold the Brooklyn Bridge to the engineer who built it. In installments. And for a mere $29.99 a month more, I’ll throw in a can of paint!
There have been times when my usual direct approach wasn’t working, I’ve analyzed the other parts’ thought processes in the same way I analyze work processes and then picked an approach which got them to do what I wanted and be happy about it. Thing is, it makes me feel dirty… I’d much rather be told I’m “not sweet enough” than be thought of as a weak-minded, bright-eyed, busy-tailed, need-a-man-to-hold-my-hand “nice girl”.
Well, OK: so long as people do what I know is good for them, damnit
The most extreme case of this and one which I wouldn’t have done if I hadn’t been desperate was coworkers who were up to their necks in work but whose pride would not allow them to delegate some work on me, the only woman and the only person in the team whose work was ahead of schedule - by several months, and our boss making us all be at work for 10-12h every day… I was desperate for something to do!; a much-less extreme situation and one which I’m comfortable with is that I use different colors, different letter types, different graphs and tables and even different types of documents depending on which kind of personalities I know I’ll be adressing. Mind you: my primary school years would have been a lot nicer if I’d known then what I know about how to present information now, it’s something I learned by analyzing people.
How are their social skills around people who are not academic overacheivers?
[QUOTE=Nava]
INTJs (“the Engineer”, the nerd) and ENTJs (“the Marshal”) are about as rare, IIRC, but the first ones are introverted and the second lot are extroverts;
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Totally normal, with of course the rare exception of the ODDBALL GENIUS which realistically there were maybe two in the school. The large majority have gone on to “social intelligence” careers - law, teaching, religious advisors, journalism, and other areas where your chance of sucess are limited unless you can relate to a wide variety of people. There are quite a lot of people sucessfull in entertainment as well.
Is it possibly true that people who achieve academically in fields where social intelligence is less required, have less than average social intelligence? Possibly. But being smart at say, computers or engineering is not the only kind of smart there is. And to tell you the truth, most computer geeks that I know are a little zany and possibly are more likely than average to be introverted, but they have normal social skills.
I never played another “fantasy” game until I discovered Magic: The Gathering when I was in my late 20s and out on my own. I got my first computer of my own in 1996, when I was 30, and eventually ended up playing games like the WarCraft RTS games, and Diablo II, and then when I was 38 or so I finally got around to playing D&D (and later, online fantasy games, including World of Warcraft now).