OCD and IQ

Posted on October 8, 2026 by Mahesh

Mind & Everyday Life

OCD and IQ: Is Obsessive-Compulsive Disorder Linked to Intelligence?

Is OCD a sign of high intelligence? A 2018 meta-analysis of 98 studies found people with obsessive-compulsive disorder score slightly lower than comparison groups, though still in the normal range. Here is what slows the scores, and where the high-IQ idea may come from.

By Alden Cross, Intelligence Research WriterPublished October 8, 2026 · 7 min readReviewed by Aarav Vardhan, Editor-in-Chief

Three findings on OCD and IQ as cards: a 2018 meta-analysis of 98 studies found slightly lower IQ than comparison groups with average scores still in the normal range; a 2020 meta-analysis reported OCD samples 3.74 points lower; and a 2025 study of 341 teenagers found mild symptoms linked to higher IQ than none or severe symptoms, an inverted U.

OCD and IQ are not linked the way the popular claim says. A 2018 meta-analysis of 98 studies found that people with obsessive-compulsive disorder score slightly lower than comparison groups on IQ tests, not higher, although their average scores still fall in the normal range. The idea that OCD goes with unusually high intelligence has been speculated about for a long time, the authors of that meta-analysis note, but the pooled data do not support it. This guide explains what the largest reviews found, why the scores run slightly lower, where the myth may come from, and how a recent study of teenagers with mild symptoms complicates the picture.

The largest review: 98 studies and 108 effect sizes (verbal IQ 55, performance IQ 13, full-scale IQ 40) found small gaps for full-scale and verbal IQ and a moderate gap for performance IQ, all favoring the comparison groups.
Still normal range: mean IQ across the OCD samples was in the normative range.
A second meta-analysis (2020): OCD samples scored about 3.7 points lower (95% CI 2.6 to 4.8).
Speed, not reasoning: the authors discuss reduced processing speed as a possible contributor.
Mild versus severe: in 341 help-seeking teenagers, mild obsessive-compulsive symptoms went with a higher IQ than no symptoms or severe symptoms, an inverted U.
No shortcut: an IQ score cannot show whether someone has OCD, and OCD does not fix a person’s IQ.

OCD often travels with other anxiety problems, which we cover in anxiety and IQ. Related guides look at depression and IQ, autism and IQ and ADHD and IQ.

Is OCD linked to high intelligence?

No, not on the pooled evidence. Obsessive-compulsive disorder is a condition in which unwanted, intrusive thoughts, images or urges (obsessions) lead to repetitive behaviors or mental acts (compulsions) that a person feels driven to perform, and that take time or interfere with daily life. It is a clinical diagnosis, distinct from being tidy, careful or a perfectionist.

The belief that it signals unusual intelligence has long been repeated. When researchers pooled the IQ data, they found the opposite direction, if only slightly. The next section shows the numbers.

What do the largest reviews find?

Two meta-analyses of IQ in OCD
Review	What it pooled	Result
Abramovitch et al., 2018 (Neuropsychology Review)	98 studies, 108 effect sizes: verbal IQ (55), performance IQ (13), full-scale IQ (40); OCD against non-psychiatric comparison groups	Small gaps for full-scale and verbal IQ, a moderate gap for performance IQ, all lower in OCD. Mean IQ in OCD samples in the normative range. No significant moderators among the clinical and demographic variables tested.
Hu et al., 2020 (Medical Hypotheses)	45 studies reporting IQ in OCD, inside a review of 108 studies and 8,049 people that also covered treatment trials	OCD samples significantly lower, by 3.74 points (95% CI -4.83 to -2.64).

Both reviews drew on the published IQ literature, so they are not fully independent, but they agree on the direction and rough size. A note on the second one: its abstract labels the pooled figure an odds ratio, although for a continuous measure such as IQ it can only be a difference in score, and we read it as points.

What does a gap of 3.7 points mean in practice?

On a scale with a standard deviation of 15, 3.74 points is about a quarter of a standard deviation (our arithmetic). If the comparison group averaged 100, a group averaging about 96 would sit near the 40th percentile of the general population, so the typical person with OCD would still be in the middle of the distribution. You can check any score on our IQ percentile calculator or against the IQ bell curve. Averages also hide the spread: if scores in OCD samples spread out like the general population (an assumption, with a standard deviation of 15), roughly four in ten people with OCD would still score above 100. That is part of why the myth survives: a high-scoring person with OCD is easy to notice, while a small downward shift in a group average is not.

What verbal and performance IQ mean

The meta-analysis used the older Wechsler labels. Verbal IQ draws on word knowledge and verbal reasoning. Performance IQ draws on visual puzzles and hands-on tasks, many of them timed. Full-scale IQ combines the two. Newer Wechsler editions report index scores instead, but earlier research, including most of the studies pooled here, used these three.

Why do OCD samples score slightly lower?

The meta-analysis authors discuss reduced processing speed as a possible contributor: OCD is associated with moderate underperformance on cognitive tests, including slower processing speed, and they note that the IQ gap is largest on the performance scale. Their conclusion was that OCD goes with normative full-scale and verbal IQ but a relatively lowered performance IQ.

Here is a plausible reading, and it is ours rather than a tested result: many performance subtests are timed, so a person who double-checks answers or hesitates over decisions can lose points on speed without any weakness in reasoning. That would fit a bigger gap on the performance scale than on the verbal one. For background on what these subtests reward, see processing speed and IQ and verbal vs non-verbal IQ scores.

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Where might the OCD and high IQ idea come from?

Nobody has traced it with certainty, but the studies suggest three ingredients. The first is mild symptoms. In 2025, Stefanelli and colleagues gave full IQ tests (WISC-IV or WAIS-IV) to 341 help-seeking adolescents (65% female, mean age 15.4) with a mix of psychiatric problems, and measured obsessive-compulsive symptoms (OCS) across a range of severity. The link between OCS and IQ was an inverted U: mild OCS went with a higher IQ than either no OCS or severe OCS. The association stayed significant after controlling for sociodemographic variables and other psychopathology.

Read that carefully. The sample was a clinical one with mixed problems, so the “no OCS” group is not a healthy comparison group; the data are cross-sectional; and symptoms are not the same as a diagnosis. Still, one possible reading, again ours, is that a mild, high-scoring end and a severe, lower-scoring end would average out to a slightly lower IQ in a group defined by a full diagnosis, which is what the meta-analyses found.

The second ingredient is overlap with admired traits. Carefulness, orderliness and perfectionism are ordinary traits, and in the Big Five model the related trait of conscientiousness predicts school and work outcomes; our guide to the Big Five personality traits explains it. OCD is not simply the high end of those traits. The third is who ends up in studies: people who reach a clinic, receive a diagnosis and take part in research are not a random draw from everyone with obsessive-compulsive symptoms.

Does a lower childhood IQ predict OCD?

A little, and not specifically. In the Dunedin birth cohort, Grisham and colleagues compared 36 people diagnosed with OCD at age 26 or 32 with 613 healthy controls and 310 people with other anxiety problems. Childhood neurodevelopmental, behavioral and personality risk factors were associated with an adult OCD diagnosis and with symptoms. A lower IQ non-specifically predicted increased risk for most symptom dimensions, meaning it was not special to OCD; social isolation, retrospectively reported physical abuse and negative emotionality were the specific predictors of a diagnosis. With only 36 cases, treat the details cautiously.

This matches the wider pattern in large cohorts, where a lower IQ goes with a higher risk across many categories of mental disorder, as we describe in anxiety and IQ.

Taking an IQ test when you have OCD

A test cannot diagnose OCD. It measures cognitive performance. A diagnosis comes from a clinical interview.
A diagnosis does not set your score. The OCD samples averaged in the normal range, and individuals vary widely.
Time pressure can matter. If checking, doubt or slowness affects you on timed items, tell the examiner before a formal assessment and ask what adjustments are available. How to read the result is explained in how to read an IQ test report.
Keep online results in proportion. A one-off online quiz is a rough guide; see IQ test accuracy for the limits.

If obsessive thoughts or rituals are taking up your time or causing distress, that is a reason to speak to a doctor or mental-health professional, whatever any score says. If you simply want a baseline of your reasoning, you can take our IQ test.

Quick answers

Do people with OCD have higher IQs? No. Pooled across 98 studies, they score slightly lower on average, with means in the normal range.
Is OCD a sign of low intelligence? No. The gap is small, and averages stay normative.
Why do OCD samples score a little lower? Reduced processing speed is the explanation the authors single out; the performance scale showed the biggest gap.
Do mild obsessive traits go with higher IQ? In one clinical teen sample, mild symptoms went with a higher IQ than none or severe symptoms. That is one study, not a rule.
Can IQ predict OCD? Lower childhood IQ predicted most adult symptom dimensions in one cohort, but not specifically OCD.

Sources

Abramovitch, A. et al. (2018): Meta-analysis of intelligence quotient (IQ) in obsessive-compulsive disorder, Neuropsychology Review, 28(1), 111-120.
Hu, L. et al. (2020): Intelligence quotient level and treatment of obsessive-compulsive disorders: meta-analyses, Medical Hypotheses, 144, 109995.
Stefanelli, R. et al. (2025): IQ and socio-occupational functioning in relation to obsessive-compulsive symptoms severity in a clinical sample of adolescents, Scientific Reports, 15, 14021.
Grisham, J.R. et al. (2011): Risk factors prospectively associated with adult obsessive-compulsive symptom dimensions and obsessive-compulsive disorder, Psychological Medicine, 41(12), 2495-2506.

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Bars showing how much the odds or hazard of an anxiety-type disorder rise for each 15 points lower IQ: generalized anxiety disorder 1.43 and post-traumatic stress disorder 1.39 among 3,258 US veterans, and 1.51 for hospital admission with a neurotic disorder among 1,049,663 Swedish men, measured against a no-difference line at 1.0.

Mind & Everyday Life

Anxiety and IQ

Does anxiety lower IQ, or do smart people worry more? Large cohorts link a lower IQ to more anxiety disorders, Mensa surveys report the reverse, and anxiety weakens working memory on test day. Here is what each study measured and where selection bias may explain the gap.

October 8, 20269 min read

Understanding IQ

High IQ and Mental Health

A widely cited 2018 study found sharply higher rates of anxiety and depression among members of a high-IQ society. Why that finding is far from the whole story, what a century of gifted research actually shows, and what seems to matter more than IQ itself.

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Processing Speed and IQ

Fast thinkers are assumed to be smart thinkers, and there is a real finding underneath the stereotype: people who score higher on IQ tests do respond faster on tasks with no reasoning content at all. But the link is weaker than the folklore, and on a professional battery the speed index is the least g-loaded.

September 1, 20266 min read

Anxiety and IQ

Posted on October 8, 2026 by Mahesh

Mind & Everyday Life

Anxiety and IQ: Are Anxious People Smarter? What the Research Shows

By Arjun Vardhan, News & Research WriterPublished October 8, 2026 · 9 min readReviewed by Aarav Vardhan, Editor-in-Chief

Anxiety and IQ are linked in two ways that look contradictory but are not. In studies that follow thousands of people for years, a lower IQ in youth goes with a higher risk of anxiety disorders later, roughly 1.4 to 1.5 times the risk (odds or hazard, depending on the study) for every 15 points lower. In smaller studies, people who worry and ruminate more tend to have stronger verbal skills. Neither pattern shows that anxiety makes anyone less, or more, intelligent. What is better established is a short-term effect: anxiety goes with poorer working-memory performance, which can pull down a score on the day. This guide goes through the main studies, explains why the Mensa surveys that report high anxiety among high-IQ people need careful reading, and separates anxiety disorders from test anxiety.

Lower IQ, higher risk: among 3,258 US veterans, each 15 points lower in early adulthood went with 1.43 times the odds of generalized anxiety disorder in midlife. Among 1,049,663 Swedish men, hospital admission for a neurotic disorder rose 1.51 times per standard deviation lower.
Not specific to anxiety: the Swedish slope was almost the same for mood disorders (1.50) and higher for schizophrenia (1.60), so it looks like a general mental-health association.
Worry and words: in one study of 126 undergraduates, higher verbal intelligence was a unique positive predictor of worry and rumination.
On test day: a 2016 meta-analysis of 177 samples (22,061 people) found anxiety goes with poorer working-memory performance, an effect size of -0.33.
Mensa surveys: members of high-IQ societies report high rates of anxiety, but the authors of a European replication say who joins the society may explain it.

This is the anxiety companion to our guides to depression and IQ and bipolar disorder and IQ. Obsessive-compulsive disorder has its own page, OCD and IQ. Test nerves, the anxiety that can lower a score on the day, are covered in test anxiety and IQ scores.

What do we mean by anxiety and IQ?

Three different things get called anxiety, and they behave differently in the research. Everyday worry and nervousness is normal and passes. An anxiety disorder, such as generalized anxiety disorder (GAD), is a diagnosed condition in which fear or worry is persistent, hard to control and interferes with daily life. Test anxiety is nervousness about being evaluated. Studies of anxiety and IQ use all three, which is one reason their answers differ.

IQ is not one thing either. A full-scale score blends reasoning, vocabulary, memory and speed, and a single ability such as working memory can behave differently from the total. Where a study measured only verbal ability or only working memory, this guide says so.

Does a lower IQ raise the risk of anxiety disorders?

In prospective studies, which measure IQ first and ask about mental health years later, the answer is yes, modestly. Three studies carry most of the weight.

Vietnam Experience Study (US): cognitive ability was measured at enlistment, at a mean age of 20.4, and psychiatric disorders by structured interview at a mean age of 38.3, in 3,258 male veterans. For a 1-SD (15-point) lower score the unadjusted odds ratio was 1.43 for generalized anxiety disorder, 1.39 for post-traumatic stress disorder, 1.32 for major depression and 1.20 for alcohol abuse or dependence. Most associations stayed significant after adjusting for confounders.
Swedish conscripts: 1,049,663 men took intelligence tests on conscription and were followed for 22.6 years on average. For each standard deviation lower, the hazard of a hospital admission was 1.51 for neurotic disorders, 1.50 for mood disorders and 1.60 for schizophrenia.
Dunedin birth cohort (New Zealand): in 1,037 people followed to age 32, a lower IQ at ages 7, 9 and 11 predicted more adult depression and more adult anxiety, and more comorbidity.

Anxiety-type outcomes per 15 points lower IQ
Study	Who	Outcome	Increase per 1 SD lower IQ
Vietnam Experience Study	3,258 US male veterans	Generalized anxiety disorder, midlife interview	Odds 1.43 (95% CI 1.27 to 1.64)
Vietnam Experience Study	Same veterans	Post-traumatic stress disorder	Odds 1.39 (1.18 to 1.67)
Swedish conscripts	1,049,663 men	Hospital admission, neurotic disorders	Hazard 1.51 (1.48 to 1.54)
Swedish conscripts	Same men	Hospital admission, mood disorders	Hazard 1.50 (1.47 to 1.51)

To see what 1.43 means, here is our own arithmetic: if the odds rise by that factor with each 15 points, a 30-point gap (an IQ of 70 against 100) would roughly double them (1.43 x 1.43 = 2.0), assuming each step is the same. That is an extrapolation, not a result from the paper. It is also a difference in risk, not a prediction for any one person: people with anxiety disorders are found across the whole IQ range.

The studies cannot say why the two are linked. Candidate explanations include shared early causes such as adversity in childhood (see toxic stress and IQ), fewer coping resources or more stressful life events for people with fewer cognitive resources, and differences in who gets diagnosed; the Dunedin authors framed it as lower “cognitive reserve”. The Swedish design counts hospital admissions, so it captures the more severe end of anxiety.

Are anxious people smarter? The Mensa surveys

The opposite claim, that high intelligence goes with anxiety, comes mainly from surveys of high-IQ society members. In 2018 Karpinski and colleagues surveyed 3,715 American Mensa members, people at or above the 98th percentile, and reported much higher rates of diagnosed or suspected mood and anxiety disorders than national figures. We summarize the numbers in high IQ and mental health.

A preregistered replication in 2022 asked 615 Mensa members in Austria, Germany, Hungary, Switzerland and the United Kingdom. Generalized anxiety was 3.82 times as common as in the general population (risk ratio), depression 4.38 times and autism spectrum disorders 2.25 times. Asthma, allergies and autoimmune disease, which the first survey had reported as elevated, were not. The authors add that the effect may come from sample selectiveness, meaning who joins a high-IQ society, rather than from high IQ itself.

That is the key to reconciling the two bodies of evidence. A population cohort samples everyone and shows a gentle slope across the whole IQ range: lower scores, slightly more anxiety. A society survey looks only at the top 2%, only at people who chose to take a test and join, and relies on self-reported diagnoses, including suspected ones. Neither design shows that a higher IQ causes anxiety.

Do worriers have stronger verbal skills?

One small study points that way. Penney, Miedema and Mazmanian (2015) measured generalized anxiety, depression and social anxiety, plus worry, rumination and post-event processing (replaying a social encounter afterwards), in 126 undergraduates, alongside verbal and nonverbal intelligence, and they controlled for test anxiety and momentary negative mood, which earlier work often ignored. Verbal intelligence was a unique positive predictor of how severe worry and rumination were. Nonverbal intelligence was a unique negative predictor of post-event processing. The links between verbal intelligence and generalized anxiety or depression symptoms became non-significant once the overlap between measures was removed.

The authors discuss possible explanations, such as stronger verbal skills allowing people to examine past and future situations in more depth. Treat that as a hypothesis. This is one correlational study of 126 students, it cannot show which way the link runs, and it does not mean worriers are smarter overall.

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Anxiety and working memory: the clearest effect on a test

The best-replicated finding concerns working memory, the mental workspace used to hold information while you use it. A 2016 meta-analysis by Moran pooled 177 samples and 22,061 people and found that self-reported anxiety is reliably related to poorer working-memory performance, with an effect size of g = -0.334. It held across the type of task:

Complex span tasks (such as operation span): g = -0.342, from 30 samples and 3,196 people.
Simple span tasks (such as digit span): g = -0.318, from 127 samples and 17,547 people.
Dynamic span tasks (such as n-back): g = -0.437, from 20 samples and 1,318 people.

The review’s proposed mechanism is that anxiety competes with the task for working-memory resources. On an IQ-style scale of 15 points per standard deviation, -0.33 is about 5 points (our conversion; these are working-memory task scores, not full-scale IQ). Working memory feeds into many IQ subtests, which is why it matters here; see memory and IQ, the digit span test and executive function vs IQ.

These data fit the idea that anxiety can depress a score on the day without changing the ability underneath, which is why every score comes with a margin of error: see the IQ score margin of error explained.

What the studies cannot tell us

Direction. A lower IQ might raise the risk of anxiety, anxiety might lower test scores, or something earlier might do both. The cohorts measured IQ first, which fixes the order of events but does not remove shared causes.
Who was studied. The veterans and conscripts were men, Dunedin is one New Zealand city, and the Mensa samples chose themselves.
How anxiety was measured. Structured interviews and hospital records in the cohorts, self-report questionnaires in most working-memory studies, and diagnosed or suspected conditions reported by members in the Mensa surveys.
Size. The associations are modest. Nobody’s anxiety can be read from an IQ score, and an IQ score cannot be read from anxiety.

If anxiety affects how you do on an IQ test

Treat one score as one reading. A score taken in a very anxious state may understate what you can do; our guide to test anxiety and IQ scores covers what helps.
Know the format first. Familiarity removes one source of nerves; how to prepare for an IQ test explains what to expect.
Check how accurate any online result is. IQ test accuracy sets out what a single sitting can and cannot show.
Separate the score from your mental health. An IQ result is not a diagnosis in either direction. Persistent anxiety that interferes with daily life is worth raising with a doctor or mental-health professional whatever your score.

When you are ready for a baseline, you can take our IQ test at a time when you feel settled, not rushed.

Quick answers

Does anxiety lower IQ? Not on the evidence reviewed here. Anxiety goes with poorer working-memory performance and can lower a score on the day, but no study here shows it lowering underlying intelligence.
Do smart people have more anxiety? In surveys of high-IQ society members, yes; in population cohorts, lower IQ goes with more anxiety. The designs answer different questions.
Is a high IQ a risk factor for anxiety? Not established. Selection into the society may explain the survey results.
Is a low IQ a risk factor? It is a modest risk marker: about 1.4 to 1.5 times per 15 points in the large cohorts above.
Does worrying mean you are intelligent? Worry tracked verbal ability in one small student sample. That is not evidence that worriers are smarter.
Can an IQ test detect anxiety? No. It measures cognitive performance, not mood or diagnosis.

Sources

Gale, C.R. et al. (2008): Cognitive ability in early adulthood and risk of 5 specific psychiatric disorders in middle age: the Vietnam Experience Study, Archives of General Psychiatry, 65(12), 1410-1418.
Gale, C.R. et al. (2010): Intelligence in early adulthood and subsequent hospitalization for mental disorders, Epidemiology, 21(1), 70-77.
Koenen, K.C. et al. (2009): Childhood IQ and adult mental disorders: a test of the cognitive reserve hypothesis, American Journal of Psychiatry, 166(1), 50-57.
Moran, T.P. (2016): Anxiety and working memory capacity: a meta-analysis and narrative review, Psychological Bulletin, 142(8), 831-864.
Karpinski, R.I. et al. (2018): High intelligence: a risk factor for psychological and physiological overexcitabilities, Intelligence, 66, 8-23.
Fries, J., Baudson, T.G., Kovacs, K. and Pietschnig, J. (2022): Bright, but allergic and neurotic? A critical investigation of the “overexcitable genius” hypothesis, Frontiers in Psychology, 13, 1051910.
Penney, A.M., Miedema, V.C. and Mazmanian, D. (2015): Intelligence and emotional disorders: is the worrying and ruminating mind a more intelligent mind?, Personality and Individual Differences, 74, 90-93.

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Bar chart comparing the twenty-point loss people claim test anxiety costs with the roughly three points the measured effect size implies

Mind & Everyday Life

Test Anxiety and IQ Scores

Almost everyone who has had a disappointing result has wondered whether nerves cost them fifteen or twenty points. The evidence says no. Test anxiety and cognitive performance correlate at roughly r = -0.20, which works out to a few points on a 15-point scale. Here is the number, and what it changes.

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Mind & Everyday Life

Depression and IQ

Does depression lower IQ? It lowers performance on attention, memory, speed and planning tasks while an episode lasts, and some executive and attention differences remain after recovery. A permanent loss of intelligence is not shown, and two large cohorts suggest the arrow also runs the other way.

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Mind & Everyday Life

OCD and IQ

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DISC Personality Model

Posted on October 7, 2026 by Mahesh

Mind & Everyday Life

DISC Personality Model Explained: The Four Styles and the Evidence

DISC sorts workplace behavior into four styles: Dominance, Influence, Steadiness and Conscientiousness. It began with a 1928 book by William Moulton Marston and became a family of training questionnaires. Here is how the model works, what the evidence says, and why it is not a hiring test.

By Alden Cross, Intelligence Research WriterPublished October 7, 2026 · 8 min readReviewed by Aarav Vardhan, Editor-in-Chief

The DISC model drawn as a circle with four quadrants. Top left, D for Dominance: driven, strong-willed, forceful. Top right, i for Influence: sociable, lively, talkative. Bottom right, S for Steadiness: considerate, patient, soft-hearted. Bottom left, C for Conscientiousness: analytical, reserved, unemotional. The vertical axis runs from fast-paced at the top to moderate-paced and cautious at the bottom; the horizontal axis from questioning and skeptical on the left to accepting and warm on the right.

The DISC personality model describes four behavioral styles: Dominance (D), Influence (i), Steadiness (S) and Conscientiousness (C). It places people on two dimensions, fast-paced versus moderate-paced and cautious, and questioning and skeptical versus accepting and warm, and it is used mainly to improve communication and teamwork at work. DISC is not one test but a family of questionnaires built on a theory from 1928, so what a DISC result means depends on who published the test. This guide covers the four styles, where the model came from, how the questionnaires work, what the evidence supports, and what DISC should not be used for.

Four styles: D (direct, results-focused), i (outgoing, enthusiastic), S (patient, dependable) and C (analytical, accuracy-focused). Most people are a blend of styles.
Origin: William Moulton Marston’s 1928 book Emotions of Normal People, in which the four letters stood for Dominance, Inducement, Submission and Compliance.
Many publishers: Marston never built a test, and many DISC questionnaires exist. The spelling with a lowercase i, DiSC, is a trademark of John Wiley & Sons, which publishes Everything DiSC.
Evidence: the leading publisher reports good reliability (a median alpha of .87 and a median test-retest figure of .86), but independent, peer-reviewed evidence that DISC predicts outcomes is scarce.
Not for hiring: a seller of Everything DiSC states that DiSC is not recommended for pre-employment screening, and that it does not measure intelligence or aptitude.

The topic sits next to two pages we already publish: the Big Five personality traits, the research model DISC is most often compared with, and IQ vs personality, which sets DISC, the Big Five, MBTI and IQ tests side by side.

What are the four DISC styles?

In the current Everything DiSC model the four styles sit around a circle. The vertical axis runs from active and fast-paced at the top to moderate-paced and cautious at the bottom; the horizontal axis runs from questioning and skeptical on the left to accepting and warm on the right. Each style occupies one quarter of that circle. The descriptions below use the publisher’s own adjectives.

The four DISC styles at a glance
Style	Where it sits	Described as	Tends to value
D: Dominance	Fast-paced and questioning	Driven, strong-willed, forceful	Results and progress
i: Influence	Fast-paced and accepting	Sociable, lively, talkative	Relationships and influencing others
S: Steadiness	Moderate-paced and accepting	Considerate, patient, soft-hearted	Cooperation and sincerity
C: Conscientiousness	Moderate-paced and questioning	Analytical, reserved, unemotional	Expertise and competency

Between the four corners, Everything DiSC also scores the blends: Di or iD (dynamic, adventurous, bold), iS or Si (trusting, cheerful, caring), SC or CS (careful, soft-spoken, self-controlled) and CD or DC (cautious, disciplined, critical), eight scales in all. A report usually shows you as a dot on the circle, placed toward the style you lean to.

Everyone uses all four styles; the profile describes the one you fall into most easily. The publisher’s own example is a strong D who can work slowly and methodically on a financial report, but needs more conscious effort to do it than an S colleague would. In its words, DiSC is “descriptive, not prescriptive.”

Where DISC came from

DISC starts with William Moulton Marston, a psychologist and promoter of the lie detector who also created the comic-book heroine Wonder Woman. In Emotions of Normal People (1928) he described four ways people express emotion in relation to their surroundings: Dominance, Inducement, Submission and Compliance. Marston never built a questionnaire to measure them.

The measurement came later. Industrial psychologist Walter V. Clarke built a checklist for selecting staff, the Activity Vector Analysis, and concluded that its four factors matched Marston’s model. In the 1970s John Geier, a University of Minnesota faculty member, founded Performax, the first publisher of a DiSC assessment; the company became Inscape Publishing and is now part of Wiley. Along the way the letters were renamed: Inducement became Influence, Submission became Steadiness and Compliance became Conscientiousness. Older material still uses Marston’s word Compliance for C, including our own comparison table on IQ vs personality.

Because Marston did not build a test of his own, many publishers have built DISC questionnaires since, each with its own items, scoring and comparison groups. That is why two DISC tests can describe the same person differently. The lowercase-i spelling, DiSC, is the trademark Wiley uses to mark its own assessments.

How a DISC assessment works

A DISC assessment is a self-report questionnaire: you respond to a series of words or statements about yourself, in a format that varies by publisher. There are no right or wrong answers, and you are treated as the expert on yourself.

The traditional Everything DiSC Workplace questionnaire takes about 15 to 20 minutes and has about 80 items; a longer version on Wiley’s Catalyst platform takes 20 to 30 minutes and about 120 items. Since 2013 these assessments have been computerized adaptive tests, which ask extra questions when earlier answers are inconclusive, so not everyone sees the same number of items.

The result is a style plus a written narrative: how you tend to work, communicate and handle disagreement, and how to work with each of the other styles. That narrative is the product. A DISC report gives no score to pass or fail.

Is DISC scientifically valid?

It depends on what you ask of it. On reliability, the figures published for Everything DiSC are good: a median internal consistency (coefficient alpha) of .87 and a median test-retest reliability of .86 across its scales. The publisher also reports that its eight scales relate to each other as a circle model predicts, and that they correlate with two established personality questionnaires, the NEO PI-R and the 16PF.

On validity, independent evidence is thin. The detailed validation studies are mostly the publishers’ own reports rather than independent peer-reviewed research, and the encyclopedia summary of the field is that the scientific validity of the DISC assessment has not been demonstrated. Psychologists have also criticized its use in recruitment.

The publisher’s manual is candid about one weakness. People rate the DiSC description of themselves as a good or excellent fit about 90% of the time, but the manual itself notes that, as documented under the Forer effect, it is not unusual for people to agree strongly with psychological test results. Agreeing with your profile is not proof that it is accurate.

Its observer study is more useful. When people’s DiSC styles were compared with observers’ ratings of their leadership behavior, the expected style had the highest average on 71% of the leadership practices and was among the top two on 88%.

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Can employers use DISC for hiring?

They are advised not to. DiSC Profile (discprofile.com), which sells Everything DiSC assessments, says that although DiSC profiles are often used in hiring and onboarding, “they’re not recommended for pre-employment screening”, because DiSC “does not measure specific skills, aptitudes, or other factors critical for a position.” The same site says DiSC does not measure intelligence, aptitude, mental health or values, and it points employers who want a selection tool to a separate assessment with personality and cognitive sections.

That fits the wider research on hiring. A 2022 reanalysis of hiring methods put structured interviews first and revised the figures for ability tests down, while still finding them useful; see what a cognitive ability test at work predicts and IQ tests in job interviews. If an employer invites you to an aptitude test rather than a DISC questionnaire, practice that format instead: our aptitude test practice page gathers timed tests such as the logical reasoning test and the Wonderlic-style practice test, and guides to the tests employers buy.

DISC vs the Big Five vs MBTI

The three answer different questions. The Big Five is the research standard for describing personality, with five continuous traits. The MBTI sorts people into 16 types from four preferences. DISC describes four behavioral styles at work and was built for training. The DiSC publisher itself says DiSC does not meaningfully measure two of the MBTI scales (judging-perceiving and sensing-intuition), while it finds some correlation with introversion-extraversion and a moderate relationship with thinking-feeling.

DISC, the Big Five and MBTI compared
	DISC	Big Five	MBTI
What it describes	Four behavioral styles at work	Five broad personality traits	Sixteen types from four preferences
What you get	A style, shown as a dot on a circle	Five scores, each on a spectrum	A four-letter type
Main use	Team building and communication training	Research; some clinical and selection use	Self-discovery and team workshops
Evidence base	Mostly publisher research	A large peer-reviewed literature	Types not supported; the scales map onto four of the Big Five

There is no official conversion between DISC and the Big Five, but the overlap is easy to see in the descriptions: the fast-paced, outspoken top of the DISC circle reads like extraversion, and the warm, accepting right-hand side like agreeableness. Our guide to the Big Five personality traits explains those traits and what they predict.

If you would like a personality profile of your own, our sister site insightmetrics.org has a 60-question personality test that takes about 10 minutes and sorts your answers into one of 16 types. Like DISC, it describes preferences and style, not ability.

Getting real value from a DISC profile

Use it to start a conversation, which is what it was built for: how you like to receive information, make decisions and handle disagreement, and how your colleagues differ.
Look at the blend and the strength, not just the letter. Two people labeled D can sit in very different places on the circle.
Expect the label to depend on the test. Different publishers use different items, scoring and comparison groups.
Do not use it to decide who is hired or promoted, or to judge how capable someone is. It was not designed for that, and the people who sell it say so.
Keep style and ability apart. A DISC profile says nothing about IQ or aptitude; for those you need an ability test.

Sources

Marston, W.M. (1928): Emotions of Normal People.
DiSC Profile: History of DiSC (Marston, Clarke, Geier, Performax, Inscape and Wiley; adaptive testing since 2013; the DiSC trademark), read 7 October 2026.
DiSC Profile: Science behind DiSC (the eight scales and their adjectives; median alpha .87 and test-retest .86; NEO PI-R and 16PF; quotations from the Everything DiSC Manual), read 7 October 2026.
DiSC Profile: How DiSC works (what DiSC does not measure; questionnaire length; relationship with MBTI scales), read 7 October 2026.
DiSC Profile: Can I use DiSC for hiring?, read 7 October 2026.
DiSC Profile: What is DiSC? (what each style tends to value), read 7 October 2026.
Wikipedia: DISC assessment (Marston’s original terms; the state of independent validity evidence).
McCrae, R.R. and Costa, P.T. (1989): Reinterpreting the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator from the perspective of the five-factor model of personality, Journal of Personality, 57(1), 17-40.

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Mind & Everyday Life

Big Five Personality Traits

The Big Five personality traits are openness, conscientiousness, extraversion, agreeableness and neuroticism: five spectrums that came out of decades of research on the words people use to describe each other. Here is what each trait means, how it is measured, what it predicts and how it changes.

October 7, 202610 min read

Taking a Test

IQ Tests in Job Interviews

An IQ test for a job interview is usually branded a cognitive ability assessment, like the Wonderlic. What it actually measures, why a 1998 meta-analysis made employers take it seriously, whether it is legal, and how to prepare.

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Mind & Everyday Life

IQ vs EQ

IQ measures reasoning; EQ measures how well you read and manage emotion. They are different constructs, measured in different ways, with different amounts of evidence behind them. Here is what each one actually predicts, which is easier to change, and where the popular claim that EQ matters more comes from.

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Big Five Personality Traits

Posted on October 7, 2026 by Mahesh

Mind & Everyday Life

Big Five Personality Traits Explained: What the Five Factors Measure

By Alden Cross, Intelligence Research WriterPublished October 7, 2026 · 10 min readReviewed by Aarav Vardhan, Editor-in-Chief

The Big Five personality traits are five broad dimensions that describe how people differ: openness to experience, conscientiousness, extraversion, agreeableness and neuroticism, often remembered as OCEAN. Each one is a spectrum rather than a type, and everyone has a score on all five. The model did not come from a single theorist. It grew out of decades of research on the words people use to describe each other, and it is now the standard framework in academic personality research. This guide explains what each trait means, how the traits are measured, what they predict, and how much they change over a lifetime.

Five spectrums: openness, conscientiousness, extraversion, agreeableness and neuroticism. Most people score somewhere in the middle of each one, not at either end.
Where they came from: studies of the trait words in everyday language, starting with a list of 4,504 trait adjectives compiled in 1936, kept producing the same five factors.
What they predict: in a classic meta-analysis, conscientiousness was the one trait linked to job performance in every occupational group, and it predicts grades largely independently of intelligence.
How heritable: about 40% of the differences between people, averaged across 62 independent estimates; twin studies alone give about 47%.
How stable: people tend to become more conscientious and emotionally stable between 20 and 40, and their standing relative to others steadies with age.
Not intelligence: of the five, only openness has a consistent link with IQ, and a modest one.

This page is about personality itself. How the five traits relate to intelligence is set out in more depth in IQ vs personality, and the four-style model used in workplace training is explained in our companion guide to the DISC personality model.

What are the Big Five personality traits?

Think of the five traits as five separate dials. They were chosen to be as independent of each other as possible, so a high score on one does not settle the others: someone can be very extraverted and very anxious, or quiet and highly agreeable. Each trait also groups narrower facets. The table uses the facet names of the Big Five Inventory-2 (BFI-2), a research questionnaire published in 2017 that splits each trait into three facets.

The Big Five traits, their facets and what the two ends look like
Trait	Facets (BFI-2)	High scorers tend to be	Low scorers tend to be
Openness to experience	Intellectual curiosity, aesthetic sensitivity, creative imagination	Curious, imaginative, drawn to new ideas and art	Practical, conventional, happier with the familiar
Conscientiousness	Organization, productiveness, responsibility	Organized, persistent, dependable	Flexible, spontaneous, less organized
Extraversion	Sociability, assertiveness, energy level	Outgoing, talkative, energetic	Quiet, reserved, content on their own
Agreeableness	Compassion, respectfulness, trust	Warm, cooperative, trusting	Blunt, skeptical, competitive
Neuroticism	Anxiety, depression, emotional volatility	Prone to worry, low mood and mood swings	Calm, even-tempered, resilient

Two of the names vary between questionnaires. The BFI-2 calls neuroticism negative emotionality and openness open-mindedness, and many researchers reverse neuroticism and report emotional stability instead. They are the same dimensions. Neither end of a trait is a fault in itself: each has costs and benefits depending on the situation.

Openness to experience

Openness describes an appetite for ideas, art, imagination and new experiences. It is the trait most closely tied to intellectual interests and the only one of the five with a consistent positive correlation with IQ, typically around 0.2 to 0.3 in the studies summarized in our IQ vs personality guide. On average it rises in adolescence and falls in old age.

Conscientiousness

Conscientiousness covers self-discipline, organization and reliability. It is the most consistently useful of the five for predicting work and school outcomes, and it overlaps heavily with grit: our grit vs IQ guide reports a correlation of .84 between the two in a large meta-analysis. Average conscientiousness rises through young adulthood.

Extraversion

Extraversion is about sociability, assertiveness and energy. Researchers often split it into a social-dominance side and a social-vitality side, and the two age differently: social dominance rises in young adulthood, while social vitality rises in adolescence and falls in old age. In the workplace data, extraversion predicted performance in management and sales.

Agreeableness

Agreeableness describes compassion, trust and cooperation. In the long-term studies it changed little until old age. A low score is not the same as unkindness: it shows up as a readiness to disagree, compete and question other people’s motives.

Neuroticism

Neuroticism is the tendency to feel negative emotions such as anxiety, sadness and irritability, and to react strongly to stress. Its mirror image, emotional stability, tends to increase between the ages of 20 and 40. Neuroticism is a measure of everyday emotional style, not a diagnosis.

Where the Big Five came from

The model rests on the lexical hypothesis: if a difference between people matters, everyday language will have words for it. In 1936 Gordon Allport and Henry Odbert went through an English dictionary and listed 4,504 adjectives for relatively stable traits. Later researchers reduced long lists like theirs with factor analysis, a statistical method that groups the words people tend to apply to the same person.

In 1961 two US Air Force researchers, Ernest Tupes and Raymond Christal, reported five recurrent factors in trait ratings. Lewis Goldberg coined the name “Big Five” in 1981, and in 1990 he showed the same five-factor structure emerging from 1,431 trait adjectives in 10 replications using different factor-analytic methods; no factor beyond the fifth held up across his samples. Paul Costa and Robert McCrae built the questionnaire most associated with the model, the NEO Personality Inventory, in which each of the five domains has six facets.

The structure travels well. When the Big Five Inventory was translated into 28 languages and given to 17,837 people in 56 nations, the five dimensions held up across all the major regions of the world.

How the Big Five are measured

Almost every Big Five test is a questionnaire of short statements about yourself, which you rate from “disagree strongly” to “agree strongly”. There are no right or wrong answers and no time pressure. That is the core difference from an ability test: a personality questionnaire asks what you usually do, while an IQ test asks what you can do at your best.

NEO Personality Inventory: the long questionnaire by Costa and McCrae used in research and clinical work, with six facets per trait.
Big Five Inventory and BFI-2: shorter research questionnaires; the BFI-2 (Soto and John, 2017) measures 15 facets, three per trait, and controls for people who tend to agree with every statement.
IPIP scales: the International Personality Item Pool, a public-domain bank of items that researchers can use without a licence.
HEXACO inventories: questionnaires for a six-factor rival model, covered below.

Because the answers are self-reports, they can be shaded. That matters little when you take a questionnaire out of curiosity and much more when a job depends on it: a candidate can lean toward the answers an employer seems to want, which an ability test with right answers does not allow in the same way. For what ability tests do and do not predict at work, see what a cognitive ability test at work predicts.

What do the Big Five predict?

Personality traits predict real outcomes, each of them modestly. A 2007 review of long-term prospective studies compared personality traits with socioeconomic status and cognitive ability as predictors of mortality, divorce and occupational attainment, and found the size of the personality effects “indistinguishable” from the other two.

Work: in a meta-analysis covering five occupational groups, from professionals and police to sales and skilled workers, conscientiousness was the one trait related to every measure of job performance in every group. Extraversion helped in management and sales, and openness and extraversion both predicted how well people did in training.
School and university: across studies with cumulative samples of over 70,000, agreeableness, conscientiousness and openness all correlated with academic performance. Conscientiousness predicted grades largely independently of intelligence, and at university it added as much to prediction as intelligence did once earlier school grades were taken into account.
Well-being: extraversion and low neuroticism are among the stronger personality correlates of happiness, a far stronger link than IQ has, as covered in IQ and happiness.

“Modestly” matters. A trait score describes a tendency across many situations. It does not say what one person will do on a given day, and on its own it accounts for only part of the differences in any single outcome.

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Do Big Five traits change with age?

Yes, in two different senses. Average levels shift: a meta-analysis of 92 samples followed over time found that people become more conscientious, more emotionally stable and more socially dominant, especially between 20 and 40. Openness and social vitality rise in adolescence and fall in old age, and agreeableness changed only in old age.

Your position relative to other people also steadies. Across 152 longitudinal studies, the correlation between two measurements about seven years apart rose from .31 in childhood to .54 in the college years and .64 at age 30, and reached a plateau of about .74 between 50 and 70. Personality is fairly stable in adulthood, but never fixed.

Is personality genetic?

Partly. Pooling 62 independent estimates covering more than 100,000 people, a 2015 meta-analysis estimated the heritability of personality at about 40%: roughly 40% of the differences between people traced to genetic differences and 60% to environmental ones. Twin studies gave higher estimates (47%) than family and adoption studies (22%), and the figure did not depend on which personality model was used. For the matching question about intelligence, see is IQ genetic?.

Big Five vs MBTI and other personality models

The Myers-Briggs Type Indicator sorts people into 16 types from four either-or preferences. When McCrae and Costa compared it with the NEO in 468 adults, they found no support for truly separate types: the MBTI measures four fairly independent continuous dimensions, and those four capture aspects of four of the Big Five. Neuroticism has no MBTI counterpart. Whether any type scores higher on IQ tests is covered in which MBTI type has the highest IQ.

Type tests stay popular because a type is easy to remember and talk about. If you would like a type-style profile of your own, our sister site insightmetrics.org has a 60-question personality test that takes about 10 minutes and sorts your answers into one of 16 types. Read the result as a type-style summary, not as a Big Five score.

The main academic rival is HEXACO, which finds six factors across languages: honesty-humility, emotionality, extraversion, agreeableness, conscientiousness and openness. Its authors argue that the six-factor model explains several things the Big Five handles poorly. DISC, common in workplace training, is different again: four behavioral styles, built for communication workshops rather than for research.

Big Five traits and intelligence

Personality and intelligence are different kinds of measurement: one describes typical behavior, the other maximal performance. The overlap is small. Openness is the one trait with a consistent positive link to IQ, while conscientiousness, extraversion, agreeableness and neuroticism sit near zero, although high neuroticism can feed test anxiety and pull a score below a person’s ability on the day. IQ vs personality sets out that evidence, and IQ vs EQ explains why many emotional intelligence questionnaires overlap so much with ordinary personality traits.

How to read your own Big Five scores

Scores are relative. A percentile compares you with the group the questionnaire was normed on, so the same answers can look different on a different test.
Look at the facets, not only the five totals. Two people with the same extraversion score can differ a lot in sociability and assertiveness.
Expect some movement. Retaking a questionnaire years later usually gives a similar profile, not an identical one.
Treat it as a description, not a verdict. No level of any trait is best in every setting.
Keep personality and ability apart. A personality questionnaire cannot tell you your IQ, and an IQ test cannot tell you your personality.

Sources

Allport, G.W. and Odbert, H.S. (1936): Trait-names: a psycho-lexical study, Psychological Monographs, 47(1), i-171.
Tupes, E.C. and Christal, R.E. (1961): Recurrent personality factors based on trait ratings, US Air Force Aeronautical Systems Division technical report.
Goldberg, L.R. (1990): An alternative “description of personality”: the Big-Five factor structure, Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 59(6), 1216-1229.
Soto, C.J. and John, O.P. (2017): The next Big Five Inventory (BFI-2): developing and assessing a hierarchical model with 15 facets to enhance bandwidth, fidelity, and predictive power, Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 113(1), 117-143.
Schmitt, D.P. et al. (2007): The geographic distribution of Big Five personality traits: patterns and profiles of human self-description across 56 nations, Journal of Cross-Cultural Psychology, 38(2), 173-212.
Barrick, M.R. and Mount, M.K. (1991): The Big Five personality dimensions and job performance: a meta-analysis, Personnel Psychology, 44(1), 1-26.
Poropat, A.E. (2009): A meta-analysis of the five-factor model of personality and academic performance, Psychological Bulletin, 135(2), 322-338.
Roberts, B.W. et al. (2007): The power of personality: the comparative validity of personality traits, socioeconomic status, and cognitive ability for predicting important life outcomes, Perspectives on Psychological Science, 2(4), 313-345.
Roberts, B.W., Walton, K.E. and Viechtbauer, W. (2006): Patterns of mean-level change in personality traits across the life course: a meta-analysis of longitudinal studies, Psychological Bulletin, 132(1), 1-25.
Roberts, B.W. and DelVecchio, W.F. (2000): The rank-order consistency of personality traits from childhood to old age: a quantitative review of longitudinal studies, Psychological Bulletin, 126(1), 3-25.
Vukasović, T. and Bratko, D. (2015): Heritability of personality: a meta-analysis of behavior genetic studies, Psychological Bulletin, 141(4), 769-785.
McCrae, R.R. and Costa, P.T. (1989): Reinterpreting the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator from the perspective of the five-factor model of personality, Journal of Personality, 57(1), 17-40.
Ashton, M.C. and Lee, K. (2007): Empirical, theoretical, and practical advantages of the HEXACO model of personality structure, Personality and Social Psychology Review, 11(2), 150-166.

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Mind & Everyday Life

DISC Personality Model

October 7, 20268 min read

Understanding IQ

Grit vs IQ

Grit is weakly to moderately linked to school achievement and overlaps almost completely with conscientiousness. See what the original grit studies, two large meta-analyses, the marshmallow test and a retracted test-motivation paper really show about grit vs IQ.

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Mind & Everyday Life

IQ vs EQ

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Humor and IQ

Posted on October 7, 2026 by Mahesh

Mind & Everyday Life

Humor and IQ: Are Funny People Smarter?

Are funny people smarter? In student studies, the ability to write funny captions correlates about .25 with abstract reasoning and .38 with vocabulary. That is a real but moderate link: a high scorer is somewhat more likely to be funny on demand, but IQ cannot identify funny people. See the odds, the evidence and its limits.

By Alden Cross, Intelligence Research WriterPublished October 7, 2026 · 8 min readReviewed by Aarav Vardhan, Editor-in-Chief

A bar chart of the correlation between humor production ability, the judged funniness of cartoon captions, and two intelligence measures in 400 students (Greengross and Miller 2011). Everyone: vocabulary .38, matrix reasoning .25. Men: vocabulary .44, matrix reasoning .27. Women: vocabulary .31, matrix reasoning .24. All six are statistically significant, and in the full sample vocabulary correlates more strongly with humor than matrix reasoning does.

Humor and IQ are related, but only moderately, and only for one kind of humor. In student studies where judges rated how funny people’s cartoon captions were, funniness correlated about .25 with abstract reasoning and .38 with vocabulary in the largest study we reviewed, which had 400 people. That means smarter people are somewhat more likely to be funny on demand, not that funny people can be identified by their IQ, and not that a good sense of humor in the everyday sense is a sign of high intelligence. This guide explains what was measured, how big the link is in plain odds, and where the evidence stops.

What was measured: humor production, meaning writing something funny on demand, such as a caption for a cartoon that has none, scored by judges. It is not the same as enjoying jokes or being thought of as having a good sense of humor.
How strong: .25 with a matrix reasoning test and .38 with a vocabulary test in a 2011 study of 400 students; a 2018 study of 270 adults estimated a large effect of general intelligence on humor production (.51 in a latent-variable model).
In plain odds (our calculation): with a correlation of .38, someone in the top quarter on vocabulary has about a 42% chance of being in the top quarter for humor production, against 25% by chance.
Verbal over abstract: vocabulary predicted humor production better than matrix reasoning, and in the 2018 study general intelligence and idea-retrieval ability carried the effect while fluid reasoning had no separate effect beyond general intelligence.
Limits: student samples, subjective judging, and correlation rather than cause. A 2025 twin study found no additive genetic effect on caption-writing scores.

Humor draws on abilities we describe elsewhere: the word-finding fluency measured in the verbal fluency test, the verbal side of verbal and non-verbal IQ scores, and the idea generation covered in creativity and IQ.

What do studies of humor and intelligence actually measure?

Almost all of the evidence concerns humor production: coming up with something funny on the spot. Researchers hand people a cartoon with the caption removed and ask for a new one, or ask for a witty reply to an absurd question, and then have judges rate how funny the answers are. Feingold and Mazzella (1991), as summarized by Greengross and Miller, did this with 147 adults in three groups, including Harvard graduate students and volunteers recruited in Central Park, and found correlations of .31 to .52 between a vocabulary test and rater-judged humor tasks.

Howrigan and MacDonald (2008) used 185 college students and tasks such as funny responses to emails, mock descriptions of stereotyped characters and funny drawings. Greengross and Miller report correlations of .12 to .23 with the Raven matrices. In the authors’ analysis general intelligence predicted judged humor even after the Big Five personality traits were counted, and extraversion also predicted it, to a lesser degree.

How strong is the link between humor and IQ?

The largest of these studies is Greengross and Miller (2011). They gave 400 university students (200 men and 200 women) a matrix reasoning test (Raven’s Advanced Progressive Matrices), a 46-item vocabulary test and a humor task in which judges rated the funniness of captions the students wrote for three cartoons. Across all 400, humor ability correlated .38 with vocabulary and .25 with the matrices, and the difference between those two correlations was statistically significant. For men the figures were .44 and .27; for women .31 and .24.

Four studies of humor production and intelligence
Study	Sample	Intelligence measure	Result
Feingold and Mazzella (1991)	147 adults in three groups	Vocabulary	r = .31 to .52 (as summarized by Greengross and Miller)
Howrigan and MacDonald (2008)	185 college students	Raven matrices (general intelligence)	r = .12 to .23 (as summarized by Greengross and Miller); general intelligence predicted judged humor beyond the Big Five
Greengross and Miller (2011)	400 university students	Vocabulary and Raven matrices	r = .38 and .25
Christensen et al. (2018)	270 young adults	Fluid reasoning, vocabulary and retrieval factors	General intelligence predicted humor production (standardized effect .51, 95% CI .32 to .70)

Those numbers are real but moderate. A correlation of .38 means vocabulary accounts for about 14% of the differences in judged funniness, and .25 for about 6%; most of what makes one person funnier than another is something else. In practical terms (our calculation, assuming both measures follow a normal curve), a person in the top quarter on vocabulary has about a 42% chance of being in the top quarter for humor production, against 25% for a random person, and about a 62% chance of being above the median. With the matrix test (.25) those odds are about 36% and 58%. That is a tilt, not a sorting rule.

Which kind of intelligence matters most for being funny?

Vocabulary mattered more than abstract reasoning in the 2011 study, which Greengross and Miller took to be unsurprising for tasks that are verbal. A 2018 study by Christensen and colleagues refined the picture. Using the Cattell-Horn-Carroll model, they measured fluid reasoning, vocabulary knowledge and broad retrieval ability (how fluently a person can generate ideas and words) in 270 young adults, along with a battery of humor production tasks. All three specific factors correlated with humor, and a model with general intelligence on top found a large effect of g on humor ability (.51). In a bifactor model, humor was predicted mainly by g and by retrieval ability, not by fluid reasoning once those were counted.

That fits the intuition that generating many candidate words and ideas quickly is a large part of being funny on demand, though the studies do not test that directly. Our guide to CHC theory explains those factors, fluid versus crystallized intelligence covers the reasoning and knowledge sides, and the verbal fluency test measures a close relative of retrieval ability.

Is a good sense of humor a sign of high IQ?

Partly, with large caveats. The studies measure the ability to produce humor, not the experience of enjoying it, and not the way friends describe someone as having a good sense of humor. A moderate correlation across a group says nothing certain about any one person: plenty of people with ordinary scores are very funny, and plenty of high scorers are not. The idea behind the research is that humor production may be an honest indicator of intelligence, and the authors tie it to mating success; correlations like these are consistent with that idea but cannot test it. We did not find, in the sources used for this page, a comparably large study of humor appreciation and IQ, so we do not claim one way or the other.

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Is humor inherited? What a 2025 twin study adds

A 2025 study of 448 pairs of identical and 196 pairs of fraternal twins from the UK twin registry (median age 66) tested whether humor production runs in families. The twins rated their own humor ability, rated their co-twin, and wrote funny captions for captionless cartoons, and they also completed a short cognitive ability test. Self-rated humor ability showed both genetic and non-shared environmental influence. The objectively rated caption-writing score showed no evidence of additive genetic effects; individual differences were shaped by shared and non-shared environment, although the authors say a small genetic effect cannot be ruled out. They conclude that humor production may be more complex and harder to assess than other cognitive abilities. To see how twin and sibling designs work, our guide to whether siblings have similar IQs explains the logic with real numbers.

Where does the evidence stop?

Five limits are worth keeping in mind:

Samples are mostly university students or volunteers, which narrows the range of scores.
Funniness is judged by raters with their own taste, and a caption task is one narrow slice of humor.
Correlations show a relationship, not a cause: a larger vocabulary may help produce wittier captions, or both may reflect something else, such as verbal experience.
Results vary between studies, from .12 to .52, because measures and samples differ.
The studies described here used English-language tasks, so vocabulary here means English vocabulary.

If you are curious how your own reasoning compares, you can take the IQ test. Humor is not scored in it, and these studies do not support the reverse inference that a lower reasoning score means a smaller sense of humor.

Quick answers

Are funny people smarter? On average, modestly. In the largest study we reviewed, the ability to write funny captions correlated .25 with abstract reasoning and .38 with vocabulary.
Does a sense of humor mean a high IQ? Not reliably. The studies measure producing humor on demand, and the link is moderate: a high scorer has a better than average chance of being funny, but IQ does not identify funny people.
Is humor related to verbal intelligence? More than to abstract reasoning: .38 versus .25 in the 2011 study, and idea-retrieval ability mattered in the 2018 study.
Is being funny genetic? A 2025 twin study found genetic influence on self-rated humor ability but none detectable on an objectively rated caption task.
Do smart people appreciate jokes more? The sources used here do not answer that; they concern producing humor.

Sources

Greengross, G. and Miller, G. (2011): Humor ability reveals intelligence, predicts mating success, and is higher in males, Intelligence, 39(4), 188-192.
Howrigan, D.P. and MacDonald, K.B. (2008): Humor as a mental fitness indicator, Evolutionary Psychology, 6(4).
Feingold, A. and Mazzella, R. (1991): Psychometric intelligence and verbal humor ability, Personality and Individual Differences, 12(5), 427-435.
Christensen, A.P., Silvia, P.J., Nusbaum, E.C. and Beaty, R.E. (2018): Clever people: intelligence and humor production ability, Psychology of Aesthetics, Creativity, and the Arts, 12(2), 136-143.
Greengross, G. et al. (2025): Heritability of humor production ability: a twin study, Twin Research and Human Genetics, 28(3), 265-272.
Our calculations: the odds of top-quarter and above-median humor production are derived here from the reported correlations, assuming both measures follow a normal curve. They are not reported in the sources.

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A bar chart of average FAS verbal fluency scores, total words in one minute for each of the letters F, A and S, among Brazilian adults aged 60 to 69 by years of schooling (Machado et al., 2009). 1 to 3 years of education: 18.3 words (14 people). 4 to 7 years: 26.1 (31 people). 8 to 11 years: 31.9 (36 people). 12 or more years: 38.7 (54 people). Education moves the score by more than 20 words.

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