You Can Usually Tell How Intelligent Someone Is By What They Do After They Make A Mistake
MAYA LAB | ShutterstockHave you ever had that experience when you're getting to know someone, and you suddenly realize they're… well, not very bright? If only there were a way to test these things before you get too deep into a relationship or stack up too many expectations of a friendship, right?
There's no hard-and-fast way to do this, of course, but a philosopher shared one approach, and it all comes down to a basic sense of accountability.
If a person owns up to their mistakes, they're highly intelligent, according to a philosopher.
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Julian de Medeiros is a philosopher and lecturer at the University of Kent in the UK, where he teaches political theory. He also posts videos on TikTok, where he's known as @julianphilosophy. In a recent post, he delved into the topic of how to suss out someone's level of intelligence.
In his video, he referenced a famous quote by Ernest Bevin, a British union leader and politician from the 1920s through the 1940s. He once said, "Unintelligent people always look for a scapegoat."
Those who refuse to take accountability tend to lack introspection.
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"A sign that somebody is not very intelligent is that they always have to blame their problems on other people," de Medeiros said in his video. "Like, it's never something they've done, it's always somebody else's fault."
We've all known people like this, of course. We're kind of in a golden age (or dark age, as it were) of this kind of person, if you think about it, from our chilling political climate that blames every problem we have on minorities to the parents who end up estranged from their adult children simply because they refuse to take accountability for their mistakes.
By avoiding taking accountability, these people also avoid growth, de Medeiros said. "A smart person is introspective, self-critical, and wants to grow," he went on to say. "But an unintelligent person blames other people, blames the world, always needs an enemy, an antagonist."
It kind of puts the politicized efforts to rid schools of things like "social-emotional learning," which teaches precisely these dearly lacking emotional intelligence skills, into a whole different perspective.
Psychology suggests that self-awareness and introspection are, in fact, indicators of intelligence.
De Medeiros' take may be a bit reductive. A lot of people avoid introspection because they're traumatized, for instance. That doesn't necessarily make them unintelligent. Nevertheless, there is a long-standing precedent for his theory.
Psychology says traits like self-awareness and introspection, the ability to be "self-critical," as de Medeiros put it, are in fact indicators of high intelligence. Liking or needing solitude, which is a necessary pre-requisite for being able to be introspective, is also considered an indicator of high intelligence.
It mostly comes down to curiosity about yourself and your role in the world, and it is also a key part of the theory of multiple intelligences, a psychological concept that posits intelligence comes in several different types (like linguistic, mathematical, and visual-spatial). Among the types of intelligence in the theory are intrapersonal and interpersonal intelligence, both of which relate to emotional intelligence and, you guessed it, accountability, introspection, and self-awareness.
It certainly seems like de Medeiros and Bevin are on to something, and it makes the times in which we live, when we are basically drowning in a lack of emotional intelligence and accountability, make a whole lot more sense.
John Sundholm is a writer, editor, and video personality with 20 years of experience in media and entertainment. He covers culture, mental health, and human interest topics.
