There is a great deal of variation in how individuals, whether highly intelligent or not, react to someone making a false or inaccurate statement. Those who have limited people skills are likely to point out the error with an air of certainty and self-righteousness. This is perceived by the recipient of the correction as a put down or as an act of one-upmanship. This typically results in resentment that can damage a relationship.
Below is a simulation contrasting the response of a person with low people skills with the response of a person of high people skills to a statement that is false.
A person makes a false statement, “All those rich people are wealthy because they inherited their money.”
Response from the person of low people skills, “No, that’s wrong! Steve Jobs, Bill Gates and Elon Musk built corporations that made them the wealthiest people in the world.”
Result: The person making the statement perceives a put down and doubles down on his or her certainty, tossing out further “evidence” to support their statement. Both parties then indulge in a heated argument that alienates them from one another.
Response from the person of high people skills
The person of higher people skills recognizes that the person making the false assertion probably has a vested interest in believing their statement. Perhaps they envy the wealthy and assuage that feeling of diminished worth by attributing great wealth to the “luck of inheritance.”
Consequently, it is very unlikely that any rational response will change that person’s mind, so the intent of the response by a person of insight is to show polite respect for the person’s statement, albeit false, and acknowledge that this issue is complicated. Such a response might look like this:
“You could be right; I don’t know what proportion of the wealthy inherited their money. It’s probably true that many of those who accumulated great wealth, came from middle class and upper middle class families who were able to provide them with either education or resources.”
This is the kind of wisdom that Ben Franklin expressed in an aphorism he wrote in Poor Richard’s Almanack. “None but the well-bred man knows how to confess a fault or acknowledge himself in an error.” Employing both true humility as well as its pretense, he was able to disarm those of opposing opinions. Staying relatively quiet and rational, while others were consumed with passion, was a technique he had developed that enabled him to negotiate agreement where no accord seemed possible.
In the case when an intelligent person makes a false statement such as, “The atomic number of polonium is 86,” the person possessing high people skills is likely to respond something like this, “I thought it was 84, but I may be wrong.” The intelligent person making the false statement would later go to the periodic table to ensure he or she was not retaining false information.
Highly intelligent people who invest time in developing people skills are more likely than most to employ the kind of wisdom modelled by Ben Franklin. More information on the difference in how the highly intelligent and the less intelligent form opinions is accessible at: https://www.intelligence-and-iq.com/how-are-hi-q-people-similar-and-different-from-the-average-in-reaching-opinions/
