Generalized Trust and Intelligence in the United States

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    • Published: 06-11-2014 09:16 am
    • http://www.plosone.org/article/info%3Adoi%2F10.1371%2Fjournal.pone.0091786

      "Generalized trust refers to trust in other members of society; it may be distinguished from particularized trust, which corresponds to trust in the family and close friends. An extensive empirical literature has established that generalized trust is an important aspect of civic culture. It has been linked to a variety of positive outcomes at the individual level, such as entrepreneurship, volunteering, self-rated health, and happiness. However, two recent studies have found that it is highly correlated with intelligence, which raises the possibility that the other relationships in which it has been implicated may be spurious. Here we replicate the association between intelligence and generalized trust in a large, nationally representative sample of U.S. adults. We also show that, after adjusting for intelligence, generalized trust continues to be strongly associated with both self-rated health and happiness. In the context of substantial variation across countries, these results bolster the view that generalized trust is a valuable social resource, not only for the individual but for the wider society as well."

      Intelligence is defined as:
      "Our first measure of intelligence is a 10-word vocabulary test in which the respondent is asked to identify which of five phrases supplies the correct definition of a given word [24]. Despite its brevity, the test has a correlation of 0.71 with the Army General Classification Test, an IQ exam developed by the U.S. Military [25]. In addition, there is abundant psychometric evidence that individuals with higher IQs have larger vocabularies [26], [27]. Prior to taking the vocabulary test, the respondent is told the following by the interviewer [24]: “We would like to know something about how people go about guessing words they do not know. On this card are listed some words–you may know some of them, and you may not know quite a few of them. On each line the first word is in capital letters–like BEAST. Then there are five other words. Tell me the number of the word that comes closest to the meaning of the word in capital letters. For example, if the word in capital letters is BEAST, you would say “4” since “animal” come closer to BEAST than any of the other words. If you wish, I will read the words to you. These words are difficult for almost everyone–just give me your best guess if you are not sure of the answer.” The respondent is assigned a score between 0 and 10, corresponding to the number of words she defined correctly.

      Our second measure of intelligence is an assessment by the interviewer of how well the respondent understood the survey questions. The interviewer notes down whether the respondent’s understanding of the survey questions was “good”, “fair” or “poor” [24]. We refer to our first measure as ‘verbal ability’ and our second measure as ‘question comprehension’. The Pearson correlation between these two variables is 0.37 (p lower than 0.001), meaning that they are moderately positively correlated. The strength of their correlation is depicted in Table 1, a simple cross-tabulation. It indicates that 98% of those scoring 10 out of 10 in the vocabulary test have a good understanding of the survey questions, yet only 36% of those scoring 0 out of 10 have a good understanding of them."

      Written about here in Psychology Today.

      Basically, higher IQ means that your more likely to trust people.
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