Intellectual giftedness is a double-edged sword. It comes with remarkable potential benefits as well as significant social challenges. A person who is intellectually gifted learns easily, can problem-solve at very high levels, and indulge in sophisticated abstract thought. This means that with sufficient work they can learn virtually any academic subject. For such a person, virtually all career choices, except those that require special athletic or musical aptitudes will be available. If coupled with tenacity and a passion to achieve, giftedness represents an unbeatable combination of personal assets for achieving intellectual and financial goals.
However, there are significant psychological challenges, especially during the childhood years. Gifted people, being outside the norm, typically perceive the world differently from most others, and therefore cannot self-reference to understand how others think and feel. During their elementary and high school years, they are often perceived by their classmates as different or, in some cases, weird. This typically results in exclusion from the “popular” or “in-groups.” Unless they can mollify this exclusion by participating in sports or group activities, they will feel isolated. In some cases, a gifted person will seek out another isolated person as friend. In other cases, they may be placed in a class for the gifted where they can connect with others like themselves.
As the gifted person approaches adulthood, they begin to take pride in their intelligence and socialize with others of higher than average intelligence. In these groups, intelligence is an asset that is admired, and the gifted person often begins to receive the recognition and acceptance they may have craved in their teen years. This is the greatest emotional benefit of giftedness–the feeling that you are a “very smart person” who can move easily through life’s challenges. But, then a particularly insidious challenge emerges.
As the gifted person moves into early-to-mid adulthood, their achievements and their growing recognition from others earns them status and respect among their peers. They become regarded as an expert in a particular field, whether academe or a profession, and people accord them substantial a respect that sometimes borders on reverence. It is at this point that the gifted person may fall into what has been called “the intelligence trap” or “Nobel’s disease”. This is the kind of confidence that prompts the winner of a Nobel Prize to assume that their special insight applies to all realms, even outside their sphere of expertise. In such cases the gifted person is closed to the opinions of others, always assuming that their insights are more likely valid.
One of the most dramatic examples of this occurred in 1998 with the failure of the investment firm Long Term Capital Management (LTCM), generally attributed to the prevailing hubris among its senior partners who seemed to believe in their public persona as “financial geniuses.” Buoyed by their successes, they continued to increase leverage while failing to test the assumptions underpinning their mathematical model. Since these highly intelligent people were used to being right much more often than being wrong, they may have been especially susceptible to this cognitive trap. Eventually LTCM collapsed because the senior partners continued to trust their original assumptions. (For the story of the rise and fall of LTCM, see Lowenstein’s book When Genius Failed.)
The penalties for those who fall into the intelligence trap are significant, because they leave the gifted person vulnerable to bad decisions. Sometimes the gifted person will remain in the intelligence trap to their death, but in most cases, experience will bring them back on track and they will develop the humility that comes with insight. Intellectual giftedness is potentially a wonderful asset, but it requires careful management from parents, teachers and especially from the person with the gift.
