A picture of a man jumping into a lake as his friends look on, with overlaid text saying, "There is a correlation between intelligence and low impulse control".
this post was submitted on 09 Apr 2024
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This seems like one of these “truths” that sound right, but the neuroscience is lacking or unconfirmed. For example, people who do poorly in school don’t necessarily have impulse control issues, and people who do better in school don’t necessarily have high impulse control.
In fact, lots of CEO and VC types seems to have poor impulse control, but other factors of their life, luck and personality seem to favor them. There’s also the cultural phenomenon of the asshole 10X engineer who people put up with because they’re so smart etc. I could be wrong as I haven’t looked into this extensively. Here’s a study though: https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/16255386/
To me it seems that for most people being intelligent or not is unrelated to success, academic or otherwise, and impulsivity is besides the point—what seems to matter most is the ability of someone to play well with others (EQ rather than IQ) if they’re anywhere left on the IQ bell curve. You can be impulsive, but play it off as charming or troubled if you have high EQ. High IQ people can afford being assholes (which sucks).
People with adhd generally have poor academic performance due to lack of impulse control. Those who do perform are either treated with therapy and sometimes stimulants, or they brute force their way through on pure IQ. Cognitive control is very important in getting shit done regardless of intelligence.