The short answer to this question seems to be, “Some do and some don’t.” A recent study, titled, One Personality Trait Distinguishes Gifted People, and reported in Psychology Today on November 14, 2021, looked at correlations between giftedness and the Big 5 traits (Extraversion, Conscientiousness, Openness to Experience, Neuroticism and Agreeableness).* They found the following:
• Giftedness seems like a blessing but may be a burden.
• Gifted individuals have learning differences, including divergent thinking, quirky humor, and a penchant for complexity, that set them apart.
• Openness to experience is a key personality trait found in association with giftedness.
• Giftedness is not associated with less-social personality traits, dispelling the myth that gifted individuals have innate social problems.
While the fourth bullet suggests that gifted children on average do not have innate social problems, those who are extremely intelligent, i.e., more than two standard deviations above the norm, are susceptible to social problems because they think very differently from others.
You probably know of Jeff Bezos, the founder of Amazon.com. Biographer, Mark Leibovich wrote (see Leibovich, Mark. 2001. The New Imperialists: How Five Restless Kids Grew Up to Virtually Rule Your World, New York: Prentice Hall Press. p. 73.):
As a child and young adolescent, Jeff was bullied. He was neither shy about demonstrating his brilliance to people, nor about telling them if he believed they were not brilliant. One kid hit him in the head with a lunch box, drawing tears, but no blood. Jeff once called a big tough classmate “stupid,” and Stupid responded by punching him in the mouth and knocking him to the ground.
A chapter on the personalities and anomalies of the gifted in Intelligence, IQ & Perception reveals that Steve Jobs, Elon Musk and many other gifted people were victims of bullies and felt excluded from groups. Some survived by building friendships with fellow nerds like Jobs and Wozniak, or as depicted by the characters in the television sitcom The Big Bang Theory.
Why do the gifted have social difficulties? As seen in the biographies of people like Bezos, Musk, Jobs and others, children who are gifted have different interests from most others and therefore cannot self-reference to understand how others feel. In their early relationships with others, they begin to realize that they don’t “fit in.” Their difference often results in their exclusion from groups. From an early age, they see themselves as “different” and the pain of exclusion makes them more desperate to become part of the group–a response that tends to alienate them even more. Sometimes, they fight back by flaunting their mental abilities or putting down others–a practice that visited grief on Bezos and Jobs. Giftedness is, indeed, a gift but it comes at a price proportional to the size of the gift.
*The article in Psychology Today is accessible at: https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/experimentations/202111/one-personality-trait-distinguishes-gifted-people
**Uzeyir Ogurlu & Adnan Özbey (2021): Personality differences in gifted versus non-gifted individuals: A three-level meta-analysis, High Ability Studies, DOI: 10.1080/13598139.2021.1985438.
