Are smarter people more likely to work cooperatively?
Although there has been considerable debate over just what IQ tests actually measure and might predict, studies have suggested that those who achieve higher scores are more likely to do well in school, earn more money, and even live longer.
But are would-be MENSA members out for themselves, or are they precisely the sort of people you want on your team?
Sign them up, says Garrett Jones, a professor at George Mason University, who feels that there is a strong relation between IQ and trust/trustworthiness.
"One of the standard games of trust and trustworthiness is the prisoner's dilemma. Two people deciding whether to work hard on a team project when the credit will be shared 50-50 no matter what; two tribes each deciding whether to make its own output or take the other's output; less naively, two firms deciding whether to carve up the auto market or instead engage in a price war," he explains.
Jones collected prisoner’s dilemma studies at different US universities, compared them to the schools’ SAT scores and found that when the experiment is done at a school with a higher average SAT score, the players are more likely to cooperate.
He found that students cooperate 5% to 8% more often for every 100 point increase in the school’s average SAT score.
The key, of course, is that the players in a prisoner's dilmema experiment achieve mutual benefit if both parties cooperate, but suffer a big loss if they try to cooperate but their partner doesn't.
By Gordon Powers, MSN Money
Posted by: Dave | Jan 24, 2022 4:53:38 AM
There is a slight weakness in the position put forward by Garrett Jones. The weakness is that of existing staff.
It is all well and good for a company to hire the best and the brightest but if they are put under the control of insecure managers who are only in their positions as a result of nepotism or 'other' means that it will end up badly for the company.
A firm that I worked for (which shall remain nameless) adopted this approach of hiring very bright people but kept their existing senior manager (I won't mention how she got this position) who did everything in her power to hobble the new staff's attempts at advancement for fear of her own position.
This rumbled on for a little over a year until one day when a large group (18) of these new bright employee's who's repeated attempts to get change were thwarted, all decided to hand in their notices at the same time, on the same day, dumping a mountain of work on everyone else (and doing who knows what damage to the balance sheet).
"Fortunately" the senior manager is still safe in her position