Are people really scared of intelligence?

In my experience I’ve come to believe that as intelligence increases, so social skills decrease. Therefore there is a cross over point where someone becomes hard to impossible to identify with. & the problem being that when young, being a part of the group is critically important. & anyone who doesn’t conform is viewed as weird, an outsider.
(Obviously as with any rule there are exceptions but I’ve found the whole intelligence/social skills thing seems to be true)

I guess I would suggest you join mensa and make some older friends. Perhaps then you could socialize within a group of peers that understand you. Also you can joing any geek activity, such as the Society of Amateur Radio Astronomers or whatever floats your boat. Also you might want to look into gaining entrance to special schools or programs for the gifted. Such as http://www.cty.jhu.edu/

I don’t know if people fear you but they might have trouble relating at your level is all.

@JeffVader True, I didn’t have any friends as a child, for quite a long time, so I got into electronics.

@escapedone7 I may check out that site more.

I had joined a group that was making a windmill, but the first day we were winding copper coils, the second we just talked, and the third they had a party. It was pretty boring. I had also tried science camps, but they were just toothpick structures and lego robotics. I got along pretty good at Kelsey, I may audit another course sometime.

Joe the Plumber and Sarah Palin might be afraid of you elite Ivory Tower types, but anyone worth knowing wouldn’t be afraid of you. The trick is finding people worth knowing. ;) Joining clubs and organizations, like @escapedone7 suggests, is a good idea.

Of course, especially if you’re trying to get elected to office (or “not beat up” in some circumstances), it does pay to try to get to know all kinds of people. Most people have something that they’re good at (that’s the premise under which Fluther operates, after all), and it can be a learning opportunity to talk with them. You can decide if you want to dumb down the conversation or not – remember, as @JeffVader says, the people out there with great social skills probably aren’t all that smart. ;)

Smarts and social skills are both necessary for holding this society together. It’s a shame there’s such fear and distrust from each side to the other, and I’m guilty of that as well. On one hand, I remember getting beat up by “people with great social skills.” On the other, well, smart people invented the atomic bomb…

@XOIIO Personally I chose to put popularity, or as I saw it at the time, personal safety, above my intelligence & made the deliberate decision to dumb down. At the time it worked a treat & throughout high school I was part of the in-crowd. However, thanks to that I got into numerous things I really shouldn’t have & frankly, ended up letting myself down academically…. I did get my degree, but I could have achieved so much more. The sad thing is, once you get out of education, it’s just not an issue anymore & in-fact, so long as you can communicate effectively, is seen as the positive thing it really is. Just play the long-game, don’t sell yourself short & you will end up on top!

@laureth Being beaten up isn’t a problem If you mean being beaten up by bullies/enemies. People don’t mess with me, they just seem to know I can snap in a second.

I’m not so sure that I would join Mensa, but multigenerational friendships are a pretty good idea.

My theory is that most people are more comfortable with pack mentality than they are with individualism. It’s the “if everyone thinks this way, it must be right” or “Why are you thinking about that?” People don’t answer questions in class because they don’t want to be embarrassed by having the wrong answer, or they’re just there for the credit hour and want to move on. It doesn’t mean that they’re not intelligent; they just want to move on. Sometimes this has to do with the type of university you attend and the type of student they attract. “Education for employment” rather than “education for knowledge” can be a factor as well.

Keep in mind that there are different types of intelligences and strengths that people bring to the table that become more apparent in the workplace than in a school setting, and all have value. It’s important to understand that because intellectualism can be isolating if you assume that everyone needs to think at your level. Most of life is a collaborative effort.

People are intimidated by intelligence yes. But be proud of it. I know its one of the few reasons I bother with my work and to get ahead. I get smug when I get good grades (top in class for mathematics and science for 3 years and all As and A*s at GCSE)
Its a real ego boost to be honest.
But like I like to intimidate people with intelligence, when I meet someone who is more intelligent than me I am intimidated because I feel stupid, I guess.. or resentful even? 0_o
But like people and their vanity, don’t get too hung up on intelligence either. I like to make fart jokes with my friends. No big deal ;P

Been there, done that. I was never able, in childhood and adolescence, to relate to people my own age. By around age 14 I had given up trying. I didn’t have the same interests as other children and there were social skills that others had that I could not understand. My only acquaintances were adults. Even as an adult, I only socialize F2F to the extent necessary in my career. I learned much later in life (my wife diagnosed it) that I have Aspergers Syndrome, which explains why nonverbal communication (body language, etc.) is very difficult for me to understand. As a child, I thought that other children had some kind of “magical” way of communicating that I could never figure out. I occupied myself with academics and individual sports (running, cross-country skiing, target shooting and martial arts).

It often seems to me that there is an inverse relationship between intelligence and social skills. There are many intelligent people who are quite successful socially, but us “nerdy” types struggle.

You might want to get evaluated for Aspergers Syndrome, It is treatable to some extent in children and teens, but considered untreatable in adults. It was unheard of 40+ years ago when the diagnosis might have done me any good. Unlike autistics, who don’t want to socialize, people with AS generally want to be sociable but struugle at it for lack of basic skills and a lack of aptitude to learn these skills. It is easier in formalized, professional settings to memorize and mimic the behavior, gestures, etc appropriate to the setting, so as to make yourself minimally acceptable in that environment. Even then, I would only attend functions that I had to, never sought to be the center of attention and left as quickly as possible. Over a period of 50+ years I’ve learned to tolerate being around other people, but still require large amounts of solitude.

With modern technology (internet), it’s possible to reach out to others without the dread and pitfalls of face-to-face contact. In a wriiten context, one does not have to interpret nonverbal cues, creating a level playing field.

@stranger_in_a_strange_land I believe that I was diagnosed with aspergers, not sure when though. Internet hasn’t been a problem, I never even used it until 4 years ago.

@XOIIO Welcome to the club. We have much greater difficulty socially than others because we can’t read nonverbal cues as easily as others. We can’t tell when we are boring others with our talking, which is why people tend to avoid us after one meeting. As a young person, some “coaching” in these skills can be effective. Older aspies have much less ability to learn these skills and and are pretty much locked into whatever coping skills we’ve adopted on our own. I wasn’t diagnosed until my late 40s, my wife (a psychologist) was able to “interpret” for me to some extent, but figuring out social cues has never become intuitive for me. Internet is easier for us because everything is in writing (or used to be until recently) and no nonverbal cues to interpret. There are some good resources on AS on the web, many of them are advertising paid services though, I avoid those. PM me if you want more resources.

I believe it is more intimidation that being scared.

I don’t think they are scared. They are victims of a ‘math and science are uncool’ culture. It’s our job to change the image. Math must be seen as something cool.

Being smart and being social are two separate skill sets and as you are finding out being smart can work against you when mingling with people of average intelligence. You can be smart and social but it may mean leaving your brain at the door. Listen more, talk less, observe how your peers interact and learn to be funny. Or just hang out with other brainiacs.

Nah.

I doubt Einstein, Mozart, Socrates, Da Vinci, or Van Gogh had very many friends either. Hang in there dude. Don’t let others’ reactions change how you feel or who you are.

@Cruiser makes a good point. Often you have to “dumb down” in order to “fit in”. You have to decide if “fitting in” is worth it.

@stranger_in_a_strange_land There are plenty of intelligent folks. Dumbing down is, well, dumb. Hang out with the intelligent crowd.

Milo here; Use me as a role model. I am the most intelligent, modest and socially- integrated person cat I know.

@thriftymaid Sometimes it’s necessary if you are in a situation where less intelligent people have authority over you, such as in the military. Not a good idea to use vocabulary that a general with an sub-Mensa IQ doesn’t understand.

@stranger_in_a_strange_land This guy is in school; no reason for him to dumb down.

I’m not sure it’s fear, but perhaps it’s discomfort. They feel like they can’t keep up with you, intellectually, and are afraid you will think they are stupid and worthless because of that. No one wants to be thought stupid.

Once someone told me they were intimidated by me (I think they meant because of the way I think). This blew me away, especially since it was a woman that intimidated me. I think these things happen mostly because of lack of knowledge. You don’t know each other, and you don’t know each other’s patterns, and you don’t feel like you could be a person who would interest the other.

Sometimes it seems like it would be easier if you could shut down your thoughts and just be confident. I have no idea. I never tried shutting my mind down, and even if I tried, I doubt if I would succeed.

I think some just get “taken back” by it, as @wundayatta put it, maybe they just think you’ll judge them for not being able to keep up with you.

Their loss, I say. If I notice somebody is intelligent (or more intelligent than I at least) I try to make friends with them – I think of all I could learn from them.

I think people are scared by what they don’t understand and even if they can’t consciously identify what bothers them about intelligent people, then know there is something that bothers them and they don’t even want to get into it.

It isn’t that they fear you. They envy you. They don’t fear your intelligence, they hate that your intelligence is a measurement of their stupidity.

It is hard to relate to someone who thinks out of your range…in both directions. It can be enormously isolating when there is a much smaller pool of potential friends, ones that can keep up with you and challenge you, that can share similar and often vast interests.

I have only had two best friends in my life. One, when I was a child but then we moved. And then not another until 4 years ago. Thankfully, I have a brainy family and we support one another.

Through school, I learned to dumb down. It was the only way I could make friends, although I still took a LOT of flak about my grades and my study habits. It took me a long time to step out from behind the dumbed down me. Oh well, you do what you can to survive.

As to meeting people: it is not as though you can put sign up stating that you only want intelligent conversations. And please don’t jump all over me, I’m talking about finding a good friend here, not about how you treat acquaintances, of which I have had many through the years. You just have to be open and be patient. You never know when you’ll meet a truly kindred spirit.

I agree with @Simone_De_Beauvoir on this one. People are scared by what they don’t or can’t understand at the moment and it doesn’t necessarily have to make sense to them. Fear doesn’t always make sense; it may be more subconscious than they think. It may be due to insecurity.

However, I am going to present one of my wacky alternative theories that goes against what everyone’s saying here (big surprise): you’re judging them too harshly. You’re saying they’re looking at you funny and nervously and you’re interpreting that as fear and they’re just morons and they just don’t get you. I’m sorry, but there has to be something else to this. You don’t just not have friends because you’re good at school. There must be something else. I agree with @JeffVader about how, generally, as intelligence increases, social skills decrease.

But that is not a universal and there are always exceptions. In school, I did very well. Got all A’s every semester, people knew me for freaky things like memorizing the periodic table and having synesthesia and being insanely good at geography and Latin. I’d been called “genius” several times. And yet I had a ton of friends. I got some odd looks sometimes, especially that time in calculus last year where my teacher, at the end of the year, gave us a chance to just talk about ourselves for a few minutes and I shared all of that stuff at once. The people who didn’t know me had some weird looks on their faces. But still, I managed to have quite a few friends and socialization was easy for me. Then again, I lived in an educated area where getting into the best college possible was the goal for almost everybody and intelligence wasn’t something to hate.

In other words, what I’m saying is that intelligence and socialization do not necessarily not go hand in hand. It depends on the person and I think that there is a tendency for intelligent people to have worse social skills, but correlation doesn’t imply causation. Don’t “dumb down” to fit in. Don’t be a sell-out. There were times when I felt like doing that, but I never did that. I think in this case “dumbing down” means something like pretending to be more social and less aloof and less awkward (not saying you are, but some people in this situation are). That may be something that you can’t change all that easily, especially if you have Aspberger’s.

Just don’t flaunt your intelligence. Shorten your answers a bit. Maybe instead of just fixing the computer, you can give a tutorial.

@PacificToast I don’t flaunt it, people always ask me for help. I do try to explain it but they just stare at me blinkly.

@stranger_in_a_strange_land Free membership?

@all thanks for the help.

First off, I have to side with @stranger_in_a_strange_land on the issue of “dumbing down”. The Navy actually has a few epithets for those that use big words and there is quite a stigma attached to “Fucking Nukes”, similar to that attache to “brains” and “geeks” in school.

The truth is that people are generally afraid of that which they do not understand, and they tend to lash out in some way, shape, or form at that which they fear. So if you are too smart for others to understand, they will fear you if only subconsciously and do what they can to “cut you down to size” so they can deal with you.

While some people may occasionally find smart people useful, very few consider us much fun to be around, especially not people like me and @stranger_in_a_strange_land .

@davidbetterman I find that hatred and fear often go hand in hand.

@PacificToast Not always easy to do. It took me years to figure out how anybody could score less than a 70 on standardized tests like the CAT. It wasn’t until I was in the fourth grade and learned about percentiles that I even knew I actually was smart, and it took me many more to dumb down enough that only half of everybody hated me.
There are other factors there, but not flaunting high intelligence is kind of like trying to hide a pair of F-cup knockers; try as you might, people will notice.

Sometimes, knowing the answer all the time, and sharing it in great detail, shuts down other people because it comes across as intimidating to other people because it becomes patronizing. Pay attention to the inner script running inside your head when someone asks you a question or for help, because that affects how you come across to other people. If you’re thinking, “That’s so easy! I can’t believe they don’t know that” it comes across differently than “I can show you how to do that.”

Intelligence and demonstrating intelligence is not always a competition. Sometimes, you have to give people opportunity to fail or get things wrong in order to learn. Knowledge can either be pushed out at people, or shared. I don’t think it’s so much “dumbing down” as it is learning when not to speak, or when to to share knowledge in the form of asking a good question, that will lead others to the answer.

Can it be that I have been extremely lucky enough to only live and/or work in places where people appreciated and strove for intelligence all my life? Have I been so very fortunate to live where people want intelligent conversation and thinking all the time?

Naw. That kind of luck would never land on me. Must be that I’m just normal or subnormal and I only think people like intelligence because anyone would want to be smarter than stupid old me.

@XOIIO Well then… I’m not sure how to help. Perhaps you can broaden your circle of acquaintances. /shrugs/

@PacificToast Maybe.

And I don;t know how I got blinkly instead of blindly.

@XOIIO Both K and D are hit by the middle finger. It’s just not being able to tell your left hand from your right :D

@wundayatta re: “Can it be that I have been extremely lucky enough to only live and/or work in places where people appreciated and strove for intelligence all my life?”

You make up for all of that by coming on the Internet. ;) Thus is the balance restored.

There are a lot of people who appreciate intelligence here, too!

What the hell? When did I become a glass half full kind of guy???

Luckily! This is only a small piece of the Internet, no matter how much you and I come here.

perhaps you patronise people when you interact with em. how old are you?
dont change yourself, fuck that

They aren’t afraid of you. They just don’t know how to relate to you. If you were so smart, you should know the answer to this, hmm? ;P Just teasing.

@warwickmcghee 16

Smart = different
Different = scary (Many people are naturally Xenophobic to some degree)
Therefore, smart = scary

This response comes in a little late, but..

Have you ever been impressed by overachievers from other “categories”—e.g. athletes, dancers, artists, concert pianists, etc.? Or perhaps intimidated by someone very beautiful, popular, or social?

Perhaps in the same way that you express yourself very differently from them or don’t understand them, preferring to leave them alone, they also don’t understand you. Their world is richly theirs, just as you yours.

I think there are always opportunities for you to broaden your interest and to learn more about others, to look into their world. Not just because social interaction is good for you, but because in the real world you can’t get by without relating to others. You are productive; they can’t keep up. You are smart; they are average. You have a huge capacity for intellectual activities; their intellectual stamina is low. You are theoretical; they are practical. You are more stable; they are more sensitive. You are straightforward; they are more tactful. And the differences go on..

If you can’t relate to at least one person who is different from you, seeing things from her perspective or being able to feel what she feels, chances are slim that someone would understand a distinctly unique person like yourself. There’s always a room for empathy, for relating, which isn’t to say it’s easy to do especially in high school, where nobody cares about anybody else.

Bottom line… let’s take the focus off from “intelligence.” When you’re smart, people are afraid to say the wrong things around you. I know because I do feel intimidated around very intelligent people, their temper, and the sharp things that fall off from their mouth, and also because some people are intimidated by me, not that I’m very smart, just honest.

Focus on whatever you want people to notice about you. You shouldn’t dumb down or betray your core values to be like anybody else, but it’s always helpful to take the focus off yourself and be genuinely humble and of service. And being observant and genuinely interested in people’s behavior would really help.

I didn’t read any of the above quips. I would say that you are being type cast as the super smart computer teenager.

Maybe it’s because you say it’s easy for other people to do the things that you are doing without realising that it’s not easy for others. Maybe that is what makes them looked scared and intimidated. It’s not your intelligence that scares them, but the fact that they can’t do it. By telling someone something is easy, which they clearly don’t find easy, it makes them feel stupid, which makes people feel uncomfortable around you.
This is from a fellow intelligent person.