A few days later, after it turned out these boasts were essentially untrue, Biden withdrew from the presidential race.
How Smart Should the President Be?
There may be a more useful question to ask: Does it matter how smart the president is? But Woodrow Wilson had a distinguished career as an academic specializing in the study of American government, and yet he proved impotent in his effort to get the U. Senate to ratify the League of Nations treaty. His intelligence did not extend to ordinary human decency, either; his blatant racism led to the resegregation of much of the federal government. Few presidents were as comfortable with the details of public policy as Jimmy Carter, but his understanding of the broader aspects of the job—persuading the public, for example—was far less impressive.
These Are the Smartest and Dumbest U.S. Presidents and How Donald Trump Compares
Back in , University of California at Davis psychologist Dean Keith Simonton attempted to assign an IQ to every president using academic performance, writings and other tools. Grant and Warren Harding were the dimmest.
Moreover, no such list can measure aspects that may be much more critical to a president than basic intelligence. That notion was captured in a famous observation by Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes, who was asked his opinion of President Franklin Roosevelt.
And there are other keys to presidential temperament. When I asked historian David McCullough what traits were most essential for a good president, he did not list intelligence first; he wanted presidents to have had failure or tragedy in their own lives—and also, a sense of humor. In a project known as the Study of Mathematically Precocious Youth, Vanderbilt psychologists David Lubinski, Camilla Benbow, and their colleagues found that, even among a sample of intellectually gifted people, a higher level of cognitive ability in childhood forecasted great accomplishment later in life, both in school and beyond.
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In another study, using four data sets with sample sizes in the thousands, a team of researchers led by the University of Minnesota psychologist Paul Sackett investigated the relationship between cognitive ability and both academic and work performance. In all cases, the relationship was positive and linear—the higher the level of cognitive ability, the better the performance. There is also evidence that IQ is an important predictor of acquiring expertise in specific domains.
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For example, in a study of 90 Austrian tournament chess players, the psychologist Roland Grabner and his colleagues found that IQ correlated positively with tournament chess rating. As it happens, over half of U.
These Are the Smartest and Dumbest U.S. Presidents and How Donald Trump Compares
The job of president of the United States calls on a wide range of knowledge, skills, and abilities. The president must acquire vast amounts of knowledge about a dizzying array of topics, consider competing points-of-view and ideas in making decisions, and solve complex problems of all sorts. Many other factors matter, including experience, personality, motivation, interpersonal skill, and perhaps above all else, luck.
Yet, what science tells us is that a high level of intellectual ability translates into a measureable advantage in the Oval Office. All the same, we should want smart people to run for president, and then we should wish the winner all the luck in the world.
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Are you a scientist who specializes in neuroscience, cognitive science, or psychology? And have you read a recent peer-reviewed paper that you would like to write about?
Please send suggestions to Mind Matters editor Gareth Cook. Gareth, a Pulitzer prize-winning journalist, is the series editor of Best American Infographics and can be reached at garethideas AT gmail. His research focuses on individual differences in intelligence and skill. He is an associate editor of the Journal of Experimental Psychology: