Does IQ really matter for presidents?

Last time I wrote about whether the most powerful person in the world should also be smart. This seems to have struck a chord with a number of people. I claimed that when considering presidential job applications, an Ivy League degree might be a good thing to look for. Matthew Atkinson, my colleague at UCLA took this a step further and analyzed Presidential IQ and success. He sent me this diagram.

 

 

This plots Presidential IQ against Presidential success. First let me talk about what we see here and then I'll give my two cents on what to make of it.

 

IQ is on the horizontal access and Presidential success is on the vertical axis. You can see that as IQ increases, Presidential success generally increases too. The Presidents for which there is consensus about their IQ are marked in red.

 

You may be thinking that it doesn't really look like much of a pattern - it is true that the relationship is far from perfect. Look at Andrew Jackson, for example: not on the high end of Presidential IQ, but among the most successful. In social sciences, we very rarely find relationships that are very exact. Political science is not physics. We cannot predict Presidential behavior like we can the behavior of an atom. The reason that the Presidents appear all over the plot is that, obviouisly, things other than IQ determine their succes. But you can see a general pattern here. It is clear that, generally, as IQ increases, so does success. In fact, Matthew has labeled the plot to show that, in cases where there is consensus about the IQ of Presidents, the correlation is quite high: .59.

 

Making this particularly fun is that he has plotted John McCain and Barack Obama. This shows how we would expect them to do, based on IQ alone. Time magazine claims to know McCain's IQ to be 133, based on old Navy records. That means that if McCain's success were to be predicted only by IQ, he would be very much in the middle, near some rather undistinguished company, by Presidential standards, like Chester A. Arthur, Rutherford B. Hayes, and George H.W. Bush.

 

What does this mean for Obama? Nobody knows because we don't know his IQ. Matthew has plotted him at three different levels. I'm sure some of you are convinced of his genius - you probably think that a 148 is far too low. However, if we put him there, it predicts he will be as successful as Presidents like John F. Kennedy, John Adams, and James Madison. But he just might not be that smart - we just don't know. Maybe you believe that Obama is closer to McCain, or even below him. These possibilities are plotted in the diagram too. We really just don't know.

 

There are some things we might want to consider when discussing whether big brains make for good Presidents.

 

Most obviously is that we really do not have an adequate measure of Presidential IQ. Matthew gathered his IQ scores from the work of the UC Davis pyschologist Dean Keith Simonton. Simonton, of course, never gave an IQ test to any President. In fact, in being based on old Navy records, McCain's score might be the most accurate score that we have. For all other President's, Simonton scored IQ by combining the work of scholars that have studied Presidential biography. That the scores are based on presidential biography gives me pause because it might be that biographers think that Presidents have high IQ's because they were successful in office. For example, do we think FDR was smart because he was a successful President or was he a successful President because he was smart? It is probably a little of both, which means that the causal relationship between intelligence and Presidential success might be overstated. If IQ measures innate intelligence, being President cannot cause a President to have a higher IQ, it can merely change our perception of their IQ, which in turn makes their success look more related to IQ.

 

It is also worth mentioning that IQ, like many measures of aptitude, is not without its limitations and one should be cautious in trying to predict individual success with such a measure. However, Matthew put it this way:

 

"Most presidents have had IQs around 130. Having an IQ over 140 may on average be worth about 10 points (give or take) in the presidential success rankings. IQ alone certainly is not enough to turn a Herbert Hoover (128) into a Teddy Roosevelt or a Lincoln. But perhaps if Hoover's IQ were over 140, he would have handled a difficult situation better and in turn be remembered as average rather than something of a bust."

 

Matthew also looked at the relationship between IQ and Presidential success while statistically controlling for previous experience. The result...IQ has a strong relationship with success. Previous experience does not appear to have any observable relationship with success.

 

I should also add, and this is the realm of pure speculation, that maybe the relationship between IQ and Presidential potential is curve-linear, meaning that maybe, if a person gets too smart, it begins to hurt their Presidential capabilities. Think about the smartest person you know - perhaps a college professor - would you really want that person to be President?

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