People who have a high IQ are usually aware that they learn more quickly than others. They are often very successful in school, and faster than others in mastering cognitive tasks. Through these experiences, they acquire confidence in their ability to think independent of others. This enables them to escape from accepted beliefs and “think outside the box,” ignoring what normal people call “common sense.” It is this ability to think outside the bounds of normal thought that enabled Newton to propose the Law of Universal Gravitation, Einstein to challenge the concept of time as absolute and Tesla to propose the use of alternating current to harness electrical energy.
Those whose cognitive skills are closer to the average generally accept consensus opinion as “obviously true,” and have difficulty understanding why these “weird and eccentric” people don’t understand what everyone else knows to be “true.” Paradigm-changing discoveries cannot come from people who accept current belief without question; breakthroughs have to come from those who doubt common belief and seek new answers to old questions.
However, there is a downside to having a super high IQ. A person with special cognitive gifts is, by definition, an outlier and often finds himself or herself isolated, misunderstood or ostracized. This isolation can sometimes exacerbate the eccentricity of the individual, making them appear even stranger to normal people, as in the case of Tesla, Gödel, and others, such as Ted Kaczynski (known as the Unabomber).
These examples are extreme cases. Many of the super high IQ people such as, Elon Musk, Larry Page, Jeff Bezos, and others develop interpersonal skills that enable them to masquerade as normal people, but those close to them recognize their supreme independence of thought and their willingness to depart from what most people would consider common sense.
The greatest danger that prompts high IQ people to do “dumb” things is what is called the intelligence trap. (See: Does intelligence increase your ability to fool yourself? – Intelligence and IQ Sometimes, brilliant people overestimate their intelligence relative to others and assume that their brilliance in a particular field means that they have a superiority over others in all fields, even though they lack the adequate preparation.
Quite frequently, Nobel laureates or winners of other prestigious awards, make scientifically unjustified assertions within or outside their field of expertise. This phenomenon, often described as “Nobel disease,” is a common result of confirmation bias. Indian astrophysicist Subrahmanyan Chandrasekhar, who won the Nobel Prize in 1983, describes how a scientist may fall into this cognitive trap:
These people [winners of prestigious awards] imagine afterward that the fact that they succeeded so triumphantly in one area means they have a special way of looking at science that must be right. But science doesn’t permit that. Nature has shown over and over again that the kinds of truth which underlie nature transcend the most powerful minds.
The antidote to the intelligence trap is the deep humility that often accompanies high intelligence–what is sometimes referred to as “knowing what you don’t know.” As highly intelligent individuals learn more, they come to appreciate the deep complexities of the world around us and that imbues them with a sense of awe, making them slow to reach opinions, and less dogmatic in the opinions they hold. People like Albert Einstein, Werner Heisenberg, Stephen Hawking and others were able to achieve this balance.
