You’re also liable to perceive people with low social skills as less intelligent than they are
Also, you are likely to underestimate the intelligence of people who are not native speakers of your language (because language skills influence all data your heuristics get), or have some speech problems.
Is this based on theoretical reasoning or do you have anecdotal evidence for it? I’m genuinely curious because I don’t know what to think on this issue.
It just follows from my model of the world, that the intelligence of a person correlates with their ability to react quickly, to make and understand jokes, to use a nuanced vocabulary, etc., and all these abilities are impaired when the person must struggle with the language or speech itself.
Of course there are also other things correlated with intelligence which don’t depend on language skills. I’m not saying that an intelligent person will seem like a complete idiot just because they speak another language. It’s more like a person with IQ 150 will seem like a person with IQ 120; and a person with IQ 120 may seem like a person with IQ 90. The difference would depend on their language skils.
I don’t know if anyone tested this experimentally, but it should be easy. Take a few foreigners, give them some standardized English tests and IQ tests… then let them do some verbals tasks (e.g. tell a story) in front of the audience… then let the audience rank them according to their intelligence.
lt;dr—Speaking slowly, making mistakes in difficult phrases, misunderstanding jokes… is evidence of low IQ. But it’s also what foreigners do when speaking your language.
It’s more like a person with IQ 150 will seem like a person with IQ 120; and a person with IQ 120 may seem like a person with IQ 90. The difference would depend on their language skills.
I am pretty sure that this doesn’t happen. The reason is that when you speak a language so badly that you make those kinds of mistakes that make you appear stupid, you also have an accent—and that is a sign to the listener that they have to account for your being someone with potentially poor command of a foreign language.
This won’t make the effect vanish completely, but I think it weakens it quite a bit so that it may not be a big issue in practice.
Incidentally, some people argue that for this reason, it’s better to not even try to have no accent. I’m not sure I agree. For one thing, an accent puts a sort of ceiling on how people will perceive your intelligence—you cannot, for example, make witty puns when you have a strong accent, because people will think it was unintentional and won’t give you credit for it.
And there’s brains like mine, which insist that the pronouncedness of one’s accent is correlated with intelligence. It probably is, though I suspect not as strongly as my brain thinks it is.
Also, you are likely to underestimate the intelligence of people who are not native speakers of your language (because language skills influence all data your heuristics get), or have some speech problems.
Is this based on theoretical reasoning or do you have anecdotal evidence for it? I’m genuinely curious because I don’t know what to think on this issue.
It just follows from my model of the world, that the intelligence of a person correlates with their ability to react quickly, to make and understand jokes, to use a nuanced vocabulary, etc., and all these abilities are impaired when the person must struggle with the language or speech itself.
Of course there are also other things correlated with intelligence which don’t depend on language skills. I’m not saying that an intelligent person will seem like a complete idiot just because they speak another language. It’s more like a person with IQ 150 will seem like a person with IQ 120; and a person with IQ 120 may seem like a person with IQ 90. The difference would depend on their language skils.
I don’t know if anyone tested this experimentally, but it should be easy. Take a few foreigners, give them some standardized English tests and IQ tests… then let them do some verbals tasks (e.g. tell a story) in front of the audience… then let the audience rank them according to their intelligence.
lt;dr—Speaking slowly, making mistakes in difficult phrases, misunderstanding jokes… is evidence of low IQ. But it’s also what foreigners do when speaking your language.
I am pretty sure that this doesn’t happen. The reason is that when you speak a language so badly that you make those kinds of mistakes that make you appear stupid, you also have an accent—and that is a sign to the listener that they have to account for your being someone with potentially poor command of a foreign language.
This won’t make the effect vanish completely, but I think it weakens it quite a bit so that it may not be a big issue in practice.
Incidentally, some people argue that for this reason, it’s better to not even try to have no accent. I’m not sure I agree. For one thing, an accent puts a sort of ceiling on how people will perceive your intelligence—you cannot, for example, make witty puns when you have a strong accent, because people will think it was unintentional and won’t give you credit for it.
And there’s brains like mine, which insist that the pronouncedness of one’s accent is correlated with intelligence. It probably is, though I suspect not as strongly as my brain thinks it is.