An excerpt from YourTango -
8 Subtle Traits Of People Who Have A Low IQ
People are intelligent in their own ways, but someone who exhibits these subtle traits has a low IQ.
By Alexandra Blogier
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| MAYA LAB | Shutterstock |
Intelligence can be defined as a person’s general mental abilities to reason, solve problems, and learn. Someone's level of intelligence includes their cognitive abilities, like perception, language, planning, and memory.
There's a difference between being book-smart and street-smart, yet people with low intelligence may struggle with both. Because reasoning, learning, and solving problems are essential aspects of intelligence, someone with low intelligence will have difficulty mastering those areas.
Here are 8 subtle traits of people who have a low IQ
1. They're not very curious
People with low IQs show little interest in learning new things or digging deeper into topics they already understand. They're content to have a shallow conceptualization of issues, without thinking about the underlying causes.
They also tend to have smaller vocabularies and lower intellectual curiosity overall. They don't think outside of their own worldview, and have a limited ability to see other people's perspectives, which can make them fairly close-minded.
The Positive Psychology Center at the University of Pennsylvania defines open-mindedness as the "willingness to search actively for evidence against one's favored beliefs, plans, or goals, and to weigh such evidence fairly when it is available." They define the opposite of open-mindedness as "the myside bias," in which people search and evaluate evidence in ways that favor their initial belief systems.
The Center notes that people who are open-minded score higher on tests that measure cognitive ability, which supports the association between lower intelligence and closed-mindedness.
2. They struggle to adapt to new situations
Oftentimes, people with low IQs have a hard time in new environments. They can have trouble with planning and problem-solving, which translates into difficulty getting used to new places or new roles.
While someone with a low IQ might have skills that look good on paper, they're often challenged by being thrown into real life situations, and don't have the mental capacity to find a way out.
3. They don't know what they don't know
People who have low IQs might think they're actually very intelligent, which is called the Dunning-Kruger effect. According to the Dunning-Kruger effect, people who actually know very little on a certain topic assume they're very knowledgeable about it.
Psychologist David Dunning wrote that "The scope of people's ignorance is often invisible to them." He referred to that lack of understanding of one's own mental limitations as "meta-ignorance," or being ignorant of "the multitude of ways they demonstrate gaps in knowledge."
Whereas high intelligence performers openly recognize what they don't know, people with low intelligence go the opposite route. They lack intellectual humility, which means they don't acknowledge that they struggle to understand certain topics. This creates a level of low-self awareness and, oftentimes, an inflated sense of self or ego.
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