A High IQ Makes You an Outsider, Not a Genius

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Who has the highest IQ in history? One answer would be: a 10-year-old girl from Missouri. In 1956, according to lore, she took a version of the Stanford-Binet IQ test and recorded a mental age of 22 years and 10 months, equivalent to an IQ north of 220. (The minimum score needed to get into Mensa is 132 or 148, depending on the test, and the average IQ in the general population is 100.) Her result lay unnoticed for decades, until it turned up in The Guinness Book of World Records, which lauded her as having the highest childhood score ever. Her name, appropriately enough, was Marilyn vos Savant. And she was, by the most common yardstick, a genius.
I've been thinking about which people attract the genius label for the past few years, because it's so clearly a political judgment. You can tell what a culture values by who it labels a genius—and also what it is prepared to tolerate. The Renaissance had its great artists. The Romantics lionized androgynous, tubercular poets. Today we are in thrall to tech innovators and brilliant jerks in Silicon Valley.
Vos Savant hasn't made any scientific breakthroughs or created a masterpiece. She graduated 178th in her high-school class of 613, according to a 1989 profile in New York magazine. She married at 16, had two children by 19, became a stay-at-home mother, and was divorced in her 20s. She tried to study philosophy at Washington University in St. Louis, but did not graduate. She married again and was divorced again at 35. She became a puzzle enthusiast, joined a high-IQ society, and occasionally wrote an essay or a satirical piece under a pen name for a newspaper. Mostly, she devoted herself to raising her boys.
That all changed in 1985, when The Guinness Book of World Records published her childhood IQ score. How its authors obtained the record is murky: An acquaintance once told the Financial Times that he'd urged her to submit her result as a way of making her famous.
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Thanks to all the publicity, vos Savant met her third husband, Robert Jarvik, who had developed a pioneering model of an artificial heart. Jarvik had his own story of being overlooked: Before ultimately enrolling in medical school at the University of Utah, he had been rejected by 15 other institutions. He tracked down vos Savant after seeing her on the cover of an airline magazine, and she agreed to a date after finding a picture of him taken by Annie Leibovitz. They quickly became an item, and eventually took up residence in New York.
At their 1987 wedding, the rings were made of gold and pyrolytic carbon, a material used in Jarvik's artificial heart. The science-fiction writer Isaac Asimov gave away the bride. A news report has them telling their guests that they were relieved to meet each other, because they found most people difficult to talk to—the implication being that mere mortals were not on their wavelength. The honeymoon would be spent in Paris, they revealed; vos Savant would write a screenplay for a futuristic satire, and Jarvik would continue researching his 'grand unification theory' of physics. Yet despite their superior brains, vos Savant's screenplay was never made into a film, and Jarvik—who, according to a New York profile of the couple, thought the Big Bang theory was 'wrong' and the theory of relativity was 'probably wrong'—did not revolutionize physics.
What did happen, though, is that on the back of her anointment in Guinness, vos Savant built a career as a professional genius. She wrote books such as the Omni I.Q. Quiz Contest and Brain Building in Just 12 Weeks. Billing her as 'the smartest person in the world,' Parade magazine gave her an advice column, where she answered readers' queries and published puzzles. (She didn't respond to my attempts to contact her through the magazine.) Her specialty was logic problems—which showcase the particular type of mental ability most readily identified by IQ tests. In one column, she provided a solution for an apparently insoluble conundrum, the Monty Hall problem. Angry readers wrote in to correct her, but she stood firm.
Vos Savant's life perfectly illustrates how genius can be a self-fulfilling prophecy. She was a housewife raising her children in total obscurity, until she was labeled a genius. And then she became one.
She embodied what I call the 'genius myth,' the idea that humanity contains a special sort of person, what Samuel Johnson's dictionary defined in 1755 as 'a man endowed with superiour faculties.'
Seeing yourself as such can be poisonous: Think of the public intellectuals who embarrass themselves by straying far from their area of expertise. Think of the smart people who twist logic in impressive ways to convince themselves of crankish ideas. Think of, say, a man who has had great success in business, who decides that means he must be equally good at cutting government bureaucracy. One of the cruelest things about the genius myth is that its sufferers cannot understand their failures: I'm so clever. I can't possibly have screwed this up. I prefer to talk about moments of genius: beautiful paintings, heartbreaking novels, inspired military or political decisions, scientific breakthroughs, technological marvels.
Nowhere are the downsides of the genius myth more obvious than in ultrahigh-IQ societies. I don't mean Mensa, which began in England after the Second World War; it asks only that members are drawn from the top 2 percent of the population. Even more rarified are groups such as the Mega Society, which was limited to people with 'one-in-a-million' intelligence. Vos Savant made the cut.
The funny thing about ultrahigh-IQ groups is that they quarrel and schism with a frequency otherwise reserved for doomsday cults and fringe political movements. An exhaustive online history of the high-IQ movement, compiled by the blogger Darryl Miyaguchi in the 1990s, recounts the story of the Cincinnatus Society, which admitted only those with an IQ higher than 99.9 percent of the population. It usurped a previous group with the same criteria, called the Triple Nine Society, which was itself a breakaway faction from another group, the International Society for Philosophical Enquiry.
From the start, Mega was riven by infighting. In the 1990s, it merged with another society and announced that members would have to retake the entry test. This prompted something close to a civil war, and by 2003, the various factions in the high-IQ movement were so splintered that a dispute over who could use the group's name ended up in court.
The loser in that case, Christopher Langan, has a Facebook group where he outlines his 'Cognitive Theoretical Model of the Universe,' as well as his belief that George W. Bush staged the 9/11 attacks to stop people from learning about Langan's cognitive-theoretical model of the universe. In another post, he wrote that humanity was failing because 'rich libtards' were 'pandering like two-dollar whores to the degenerate tastes, preferences, and delusions of the genetic underclass, the future of humanity be damned.' Is Langan smart? Yes. Is he insightful about humanity, or at least fun to be around? Perhaps not.
Another onetime member of Mega was Keith Raniere, whose local paper, the Albany Times Union, claimed in 1988 that his self-administered test proved his intellect was 'one in 10 million.' In 2020, he was sentenced to 120 years in prison over the abuse he perpetrated as the leader of a cult called NXIVM. This operated according to a 'master and slave' hierarchy in which no one ranked higher than Raniere, who was known as 'Vanguard.' Some of NXIVM's disciples were branded with Raniere's initials. (Prosecutors also branded the group a pyramid scheme.)
As the cult collapsed, many of Raniere's early claims to genius came under new scrutiny. Had he really learned to read the word homogenized off a milk carton at age 2, and understood quantum physics by 4, as a news reporter had suggested in 1988—and was he also an avid juggler who needed only 'two to four hours of sleep'? People began to wonder, and then noticed something potentially important: The Mega test was not supervised, could be taken at home, and had no time limit. Draw your own conclusions.
Today, because of their infighting and their members' lack of worldly success, high-IQ groups have become kind of a joke. But their history helps illuminate why intelligence alone does not necessarily yield sublime works. In the 1980s, when some of these groups' members were asked to propose a term for the intangible quality that distinguished them from everyone else, none chose genius, according to a contemporaneous account by Grady Towers, a stalwart of the high-IQ community. 'When asked what it should be called, they produced a number of suggestions, sometimes esoteric, sometimes witty, and often remarkably vulgar,' Towers wrote in 1987. 'But one term was suggested independently again and again. Many thought that the most appropriate term for people like themselves was Outsider.'
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Towers believed that those with unusually high intelligence fell into three groups: the well-adjusted middle class, who were able to use their talents; those living marginal lives, working in manual or low-paid jobs and reading textbooks by night; and finally the dropouts, whose families had had no idea how to support their brilliant children, and might have gone so far as to treat them as a 'performing animal, or even an experiment.'
The first group did not get involved with high-IQ societies, Towers thought, because their intellectual and social lives were already full. 'It's the exceptionally gifted adult who feels stifled that stands most in need of a high IQ society,' he wrote, adding that 'none of these groups is willing to acknowledge or come to terms with the fact that much of their membership belong to the psychological walking wounded.'
The predominance of the lonely, frustrated, and socially awkward in ultrahigh-IQ societies was enough, he wrote, 'to explain the constant schisms that develop, the frequent vendettas, and the mediocre level of their publications. But those are not immutable facts; they can be changed. And the first step in doing so is to see ourselves as we are.'
Grady Towers was murdered on March 20, 2000, while investigating a break-in at the park in Arizona where he worked as a security guard. He was 55.
In 1990, The Guinness Book of World Records retired the highest-IQ category, conceding that no definitive ranking was possible, given the limitations of and the variation among the available tests. This new mood of caution means that vos Savant's Guinness record will remain untouched. If, that is, it was a record at all—critics have been arguing about the validity of her result for decades.
Why does the superlative matter? Because vos Savant couldn't and wouldn't have become a 'genius' without the label being pinned on her first. Attention was paid, and then more attention followed, because if people were looking, then there must have been something worth looking at, surely. That should make us wonder if the same process happens in reverse. Do children who struggle at school get the message that they aren't 'academic,' and lose interest and enthusiasm?
By thinking about IQ, I was venturing into one of the most bitter battles in 20th-century social science. In the decades following the development of standardized tests, the 'IQ wars' pitted two factions against each other: the environmentalists and the hereditarians. The first believed that IQ was entirely or largely influenced by surroundings—childhood nutrition, schooling, and so on—and the second argued that IQ was largely determined by genes. In America, these became synonymous with two extreme positions: hard-left advocacy for pure blank-slatism and far-right belief in racial hierarchy.
The hereditarians were tainted by the fact that so many of them dabbled in the murky waters of race and IQ—extrapolating beyond the observed differences in average IQ scores across various countries to the suggestion that white people are innately and immutably smarter than Black people. One example would be the Nobel Prize–winning engineer William Shockley, who followed what now seems a very modern trajectory: years of real achievements, including his involvement in the invention of the transistor, followed by a second career of provocative statements and complaints about what we would now call 'cancellation.' Shockley's views on white racial superiority were coupled with his advocacy for eugenics. In a 1980 interview with Playboy, he argued that people with 'defective' genes should be paid not to reproduce. As he put it: '$30,000 put into a trust for a 70 IQ-moron, who might otherwise produce 20 children, might make the plan very profitable to the taxpayer.'
But the environmentalists went too far in their claims too. Most geneticists now acknowledge that IQ is partially heritable, even though progressive activists attack almost anyone who says so out loud. When the geneticist Kathryn Paige Harden began to advance the arguments she would later turn into her 2021 book, The Genetic Lottery—which argued for social equality but conceded that genes influence educational attainment—The New Yorker reported that she was subjected to 'parades of arguments and counterarguments, leaked personal e-mails, and levels of sustained podcasting that were, by anyone's standards, extreme.'
Fascinated by the dangerous allure of IQ—its promise to provide a definitive ranking of human intellectual worth—I decided to sit for an IQ test myself. At the exam site, I was one of two dozen adults, plus a couple of children. One was reading a book called Why the West Rules—For Now, which didn't assuage my worries about the political overtones of this debate.
The question of what exactly IQ tests measure—and how accurately they can deliver judgment—is one that's wrapped around inflammatory questions about group identity, as well as a lively policy debate about the best system of schooling. It is no accident that so many IQ researchers have ended up endorsing scientific racism or sexism. If humans can be reduced to a number, and some numbers are higher than others, it is not a long walk to decide that some humans are 'better' than others too. In 2018, Christopher Langan wrote an obituary for Koko, a celebrated gorilla that he said could sign 1,000 words and therefore had an IQ between 75 and 95. 'Koko's elevated level of thought would have been all but incomprehensible to nearly half the population of Somalia (average IQ 68),' Langan wrote on Facebook, citing dubious research about that African country. 'Obviously, this raises a question: Why is Western civilization not admitting gorillas? They too are from Africa, and probably have a group mean IQ at least equal to that of Somalia.'
Langan was featured in Malcolm Gladwell's book Outliers, which attributed his lack of academic success to his chaotic, violent upbringing and the reluctance of educational authorities to extend him the same sort of grace and understanding a middle-class child might receive. But Langan has found other answers for why he did not fulfill the glorious destiny written in his genes. He blames affirmative action and a society controlled by 'globalists' and 'banksters.' Inevitably, he has a Substack.
As for me, I took two IQ tests that day. The first was a test designed in 1949 to be 'culture fair,' meaning that there were no language- or logic-based questions, only shape rotation. What became immediately apparent is that the test selects heavily for speed. The strict time limits mean you simply don't have time to luxuriate over questions, turning them over in your head. Now, you could argue that quickly grasping concepts is exactly what intelligence is. But you'd also have to admit that some of history's greatest breakthroughs came from years of careful observation and rumination.
That first test convinced me that whatever an IQ test is measuring, it can't be genius—that label we are so keen to bestow on people with singular achievements. It doesn't measure showing up day after day. It doesn't measure the ego necessary to insist that you're right and everyone else is wrong. And it doesn't measure the ability to market yourself as the spirit of the age.
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The second test was more recent, having been updated in 1993, and leaned heavily into verbal reasoning. What I noticed here, first, was how arguable some of these questions were. Is idle a synonym for inactive or a synonym for lazy? Both, surely—it can be used as a pure descriptor, as in 'an idle engine,' or to convey a value judgment, as in 'the idle rich.' My desire to argue with the test maker only increased in the analogies section, where the example given was: 'Trousers are to boy as skirt is to … ?' The supervisor read this out with some embarrassment, assuring us that the language was 'traditional.'
Things got worse. The logic puzzles in the final section included one about an explorer who might have been eaten by either lions or 'savages.' Another question asked me to work out what my surname would be, based on clues about family relationships, and clearly rested on the assumption that women all took their husband's name, and so would their children. Full of feminist zeal, I prissily ticked the box labeled 'It is not possible to know what my surname is' and resigned myself to losing points.
What were my results? Sorry—I'm not saying; we already know I'm not a genius, but I'm not an outsider either, so they don't matter. My time researching Langan, Raniere, and the others convinced me that IQ testing has narrow scientific uses, but it is a false god.
Vos Savant, who is now 78, made a career of being the smartest person alive, because she had a number to prove it. Once she was hailed as a genius, vos Savant was one. Nothing about her changed, but her life did. As big a brain as Stephen Hawking had little time for this kind of thinking. In a 2004 Q&A with The New York Times Magazine, the physicist was asked what his IQ was. 'I have no idea,' he replied. 'People who boast about their IQ are losers.'
This article was adapted from The Genius Myth: A Curious History of a Dangerous Idea, which will be published in the United States on June 17.
Article originally published at The Atlantic