Smart People More Likely to Trust Others, Study Suggests

Rebecca Lewis March 17, 2014

A study by Oxford University found that intelligent people are more likely to trust others. One explanation is that more intelligent individuals are better at judging characters and so they tend to form relationships with other people who are less likely to betray them.

Another is that smarter individuals are better at weighing up situations, recognising when there is a strong incentive for the other person not to meet their side of the deal.

The study was based in the analysis of General Social Survey, a nationally representative public opinion survey carried out in the United States every one to two years.

“Intelligence is shown to be linked with trusting others, even after taking into account factors like marital status, education and income. This finding supports what other researchers have argued, namely that being a good judge of character is a distinct part of human intelligence which evolved through natural selection. However, there are other possible interpretations of the evidence, and further research is needed to disentangle them.” said lead author Noah Carl, from the Department of Sociology.

The new findings support previous research which linked trust with intelligence. Oxford researchers, however, found that the links between trust and health, and between trust and happiness, are not explained by intelligence. For example, individuals who trust others might have only reported better health and greater happiness because they were more intelligent.

But this turns out not to be the case. The finding confirms that trust is a valuable resource for an individual, and is not simply a proxy for intelligence.

"People who trust others seem to report better health and greater happiness. The study of social trust therefore has wider implications in public health, governmental policy and private charity, and there are good reasons to think that governments, religious groups and other civic organisations should try to cultivate more trust in society. Social trust has become an increasingly important topic for academics, who want to understand the causes of better health and greater happiness within society."

The study was published in the journal Plos One.

Source of this article:

Generalized Trust and Intelligence in the United States