In popular culture there seems to be a strong link between intelligence and cynicism,
But this did not start with some characters that we could meet in real life or on TV, in fact, far back in time, philosophers like Diogenes of Sinope and his student Crates of Thebes associated the cynical personality with wisdom and having a Clear vision of reality and not the dark and pessimistic one that cynics actually have.
More recently, attempts have been made to justify the link between cynicism and intelligence in fields as diverse as evolutionary biology and neoliberal economics, assuming that individualism and the search for self-interest represent a greater opportunity for evolutionary and economic success respectively. For some reason, we have always thought that cynics are more intelligent and therefore more successful, that they are cynics because they have more experience and know how the world works where people are generally selfish and motivated by their own benefit.
This explains why cynics tend to be unfriendly and even rude people. Because they are convinced that people should be distrusted, they do not try too hard to be kind or try to be liked; This is what they have made us think, the relationship between the cynical personality and intelligence has no scientific basis.
In fact, cynicism is related to intelligence, but not as it is believed but in a negative way, a cynical person tends to be less intelligent, less competent and less capable of acting cooperatively or creating meaningful relationships with other people and therefore they are less successful in basically every aspect in life that someone can be successful at.
This was found through a huge investigation that first verified through four studies how widespread the belief is that intelligence and cynicism go together, most people believe it may be due to popular culture series like Doctor House and Ricky Morty are portrayed as cynical or pessimistic unfriendly characters who have a very poor opinion of people in general and are extremely intelligent, even reality TV characters like Simon Cowell and Gordon Ramsay who are supposed to be extremely skilled in their field and Successful people have these super rude and unpleasant personalities, supposedly.
Whether it is the media that influences this belief is not very clear, but the first four studies of this research say that most people believe that cynicism is a sign of intelligence, and that intelligence is an excuse for cynicism, It's time to change your mind and maybe then there won't be so many people thinking that being rude makes them look intelligent because now we know that it's exactly the opposite, within the same enormous research after the four studies that revealed people's perception. Three studies were conducted to check whether cynicism and intelligence actually go hand in hand.
The study is based on information from 200,000 people from 30 countries, that is, a huge and multicultural sample, which included tests of cognitive ability, language, mathematics and computer skills, all taking into account external factors such as level of Education, income and social climate, that is, in countries with high levels of corruption, high levels of cynicism were expected since the context causes people to distrust institutions and other people more.
And if that were not enough, the research was complemented with a study on adolescents where it was shown that those who showed less cynical attitudes, years later in their adult lives were generally more successful. This research yielded interesting results: cynics are less competent in tasks. and cognitive skills and general ability tests.
So it is quite evident that someone who is optimistic, who trusts people and who is not afraid to make mistakes and therefore learns from them and has more experiences, is objectively more intelligent and as a side effect happier and more successful.
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