The trait is not normally associated with intelligent people.
People who are generous by nature have a higher IQ, research finds.
Generous people are unselfish and sometimes deny themselves so that others can have more.
Although generosity is not something people usually associate with intelligence, psychological research clearly shows a link.
Intelligent people may be more generous partly because they can afford it.
People with higher IQs generally have greater resources, or can expect to recover what they have given away later on.
The conclusions come from a study in which 96 people played games that involved either donating to others or keeping things for themselves.
The results revealed that intelligent people were more generous to others.
In contrast, those who kept more for themselves tended to be less intelligent.
The study’s authors used the results of SAT tests, which can be converted into approximate IQ scores.
They write:
“We find that subjects who perform better on the Math portion of the SAT [Scholastic Aptitude Test] are more generous in both the dictator game and the SVO [Social Value Orientation] measure.
[…]
Our results involving SAT scores […] suggest that measures of cognitive ability, which are less sensitive to the intrinsic motivation of the subject, are positively related to generosity.”
The study was published in the Journal of Economic Behavior & Organization (Chen et al., 2013).
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