"Why Do Narcissists Care So Much About Intelligence?"

"Why Do Narcissists Care So Much About Intelligence?" (https://www.reddit.com/r/SneerClub/comments/gx2uh1/why_do_narcissists_care_so_much_about_intelligence/)

posted on June 05, 2020 11:33 AM by u/CunningPlanHaver

https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.1177/0963721420917152

“Grandiose narcissists consider intelligence to be an important resource that leads to benefits across life domains, they tend to maintain and defend illusory positive intellectual self-views, and they are extremely motivated to appear intelligent to other people. Thus, even though grandiose narcissism is essentially unrelated to objectively assessed intelligence, intelligence nevertheless plays an important role in the way grandiose narcissists think, feel, and behave.”

u/pyrrhicvictorylap 21 points at 1591368801.000000

I think people conflate being smart with being moral. From personal experience, it was the “smart people” that protested the terrible things a government does, like the intelligent, principled voices of reason during the Holocaust – whereas the “normal” people just went along with it. Really specific example, and obviously there’s no causal link between having intelligence and having good values, but I think it fits the narrative at least I was taught.

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u/BoojumG 12 points at 1591373628.000000

What do you think of the alternative view that intelligence enables more effective activism of any kind, and so the movements you're aware of tend to have smart people behind them because the ones run by less-intelligent people tend to either fail or have a smarter participant rise to prominence in it? This can apply to immoral movements too. In short, that intelligence is associated with success, not morality. That the Holocaust was both opposed *and supported* by relatively smart people on each side.

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u/l_lecrup 12 points at 1591391715.000000

I think a better explanation is that we are projecting traits that we deem good (intelligence) onto people that we deem good for other reasons (activism). We don't have any way to know that the leaders of these movements are intelligent. Anyway people grossly underestimate the capacity of people with average intelligence, and overestimate the chance that a problem can be solved by a genius with a bright idea rather than a committed group of ordinary people doing hard work over an extended period.

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u/BoojumG 6 points at 1591393079.000000

That's a good point. Is that a form of fundamental attribution error? They're smart people because they've had good outcomes? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fundamental_attribution_error Same thing happens with CEOs and entrepreneurs. Almost all fail, and we assume the successful ones must have special properties or qualities rather than being lucky among a sea of equally-good potential successes.

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u/l_lecrup 3 points at 1591447116.000000

I hadn't heard that term directly. I think that is part of it but I was going for something slightly different. I think the right term might be simply "halo effect", mixed in with another fallacy that intelligence is an unconditional good (in fact it is entirely neutral).

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u/pyrrhicvictorylap 9 points at 1591374632.000000

Totally. I think intelligence has nothing to do with morality, but enables you to be more efficient at achieving whatever your aims happen to be. When I meant "my experience", I meant what I was taught.

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u/DELETED 11 points at 1591385821.000000

> Totally. I think intelligence has nothing to do with morality, but enables you to be more efficient at achieving whatever your aims happen to be. If anything, it's possible that it's (very mildly) negatively correlated. One of the fun things with smart and well educated people is that they get pretty good at rationalizing whatever they want and overrule their gut sense of right-and-wrong in the process. Humility about what you don't know probably helps morality, and intelligent people could or couldn't be humble in that regard. Narcissists absolutely could not though.

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u/kwykwy 1 points at 1591384028.000000

I think excessive "intelligence" can be counter-productive. People who are overoptimized for solving IQ-test questions are not necessarily going to be the most effective leaders / entrepreneurs / etc.

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u/BoojumG 3 points at 1591384396.000000

You could reframe it by saying that's one kind of intelligence with a limited scope. An effective leader would have high social intelligence. I think you're right that there are people that think solving logic puzzles is all "intelligence" is and they're hamstrung by it.

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u/hashtagsugary 3 points at 1591434399.000000

There’s also something I have found lately - where knowledge is very often confused with intelligence. Say, you have a person who has worked a job for 25 years - very knowledgeable and everyone panders to that person for that particular piece of knowledge and it makes their lives easy. Simple to say “oh yes that person really knows their thing, they’re so intelligent”. When in reality, that person has limited themselves to that particular thing and they’re completely isolated from everything else - that isn’t intelligence, that’s just some knowledge about a thing.

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u/flannyo 8 points at 1591377862.000000

nsfw tag! nsfw tag! there are children here!

lol after months of being mean to Yud on Twitter he finally blocked me after I called him a sniveling narcissist. maybe I hit a nerve

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u/dizekat 1 points at 1591653442.000000

They probably came up by now with an idea that anyone who worries if they might be a narcissist can not be a narcissist, or other self referential nonsense along the same lines...

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u/SuzukiGrignard 5 points at 1591368459.000000

Already knew that

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u/reki 5 points at 1591380628.000000

Boy if he thinks narcissists enjoy “sounding smart” he’s clearly never seen people shitpost on 4chan.

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