Data & Rankings
Chart-led pieces on how scores are distributed across countries, states, ages, jobs and education levels — always with the caveats attached.
Average IQ of Lawyers: What the LSAT, Bar Exam and Army Data Show
Nobody has measured the average IQ of lawyers today. The popular 128 comes from a 1945 Army test scored on a scale with a standard deviation of 20, which is about 121 on today's scale. The LSAT and the bar exam are published, and neither has an IQ equivalent.
Average IQ by Country 2026: What South Korea's 106.97 Does and Does Not Show
South Korea leads the International IQ Test's 2026 country table at 106.97. The table's own sample counts show a quarter of the 1,212,714 test-takers came from Indonesia, that the rows do not average to the stated 100, and that scores moved with the size of each country's crowd.
PISA 2025 Results: Record Lows, and What They Do Not Show About IQ
The OECD average fell to 463 in mathematics and 461 in reading, the lowest it has recorded. A 22-point maths fall works out at about three points on an IQ-style scale, but that is a unit conversion, not a measurement of anyone's intelligence.
Average IQ of Pilots and Air Traffic Controllers: What Data Exist
We found no representative IQ survey of pilots or air traffic controllers. What exists is a 50-person Indian Air Force sample with a mean full-scale IQ of 114.26, an FAA statement from 1974, published selection cut-offs and validity studies, and none of it gives a single average.
How Many Words Does the Average Person Know? Vocabulary Size and IQ
The best-documented answer is about 42,000 lemmas for an average 20-year-old native English speaker, from only 11,100 word families. The number changes with what you count, and vocabulary is among the most g-loaded parts of an IQ test.
Midwit Meme Explained: The IQ Bell Curve, Its Origin and the Real Numbers
The IQ bell curve meme is built on a real shape: IQ scores are scored to follow it. What it claims about the people on it is a joke format, not a finding, and the word "midwit" first meant someone above average. Here are its origin, the real percentages and what each part of the joke gets wrong.
Do Billionaires Have Higher IQs? What the Swedish Data Shows
A 2023 study matched Swedish military conscription test scores to wage records and found that cognitive ability rises with income only up to a point. Above that point, the top 1 percent of earners score slightly lower than the bracket just below them.
Average IQ by US State: All 50 States, and What the Numbers Rest On
No state has a measured average IQ. Here are all 50 states from the most-copied table, built from 2005 school tests, beside the same arithmetic on 2024 data: half of its top ten and half of its bottom ten have changed, and the spread between typical states is about two points.
IQ and Political Party: What US Survey Data Actually Shows
Surveys going back to the 1970s tie vocabulary-test scores to party identification. The gap is small, mostly explained by education and income, concentrated in verbal ability specifically, and has partly reversed since the 1980s.
US Presidents Ranked by IQ: All 42 Estimates, and the Trump and Obama Gap
One peer-reviewed study estimated the IQ of every president from George Washington to George W. Bush. It put John Quincy Adams first at 168.8 and Ulysses S. Grant last at 120. No president was ever given an IQ test for it, and the ranges overlap far more than a ranked list suggests.
Average IQ by Occupation: What 80-Year-Old Army Data Actually Shows
Nearly every "IQ by profession" chart online traces to one 1945 study of wartime enlisted men, scored on a scale that is not even the one modern IQ tests use. Here is the real table — and what still holds up.
Twin Studies and IQ Heritability: How Much of Intelligence Is Genetic?
In 11,000 twin pairs the heritability of IQ rose from 41% at age 9 to 66% at 17, and identical twins reared apart correlate .72 in the pooled 1981 review. Heritability is a population statistic, and DNA-based studies find less than twin studies do.
The Same Model, Two Labs, Different Scores: Why AI Benchmarks Disagree
OpenAI and Anthropic published figures for the same rival models within four days of each other. They do not match, and the reasons are the ones psychometrics named a century ago.
The Relative Age Effect: Youngest in Class Scores Lower
Two children born eleven months apart can land in the same school year, and the younger one reliably tests lower on cognitive and achievement measures for reasons that have nothing to do with ability and mostly fade by adulthood.
Average IQ by Education Level: The Arrow Points Both Ways
Tables ranking average IQ by degree level circulate constantly and are read as though schooling simply sorts people. Pooled longitudinal evidence puts the correlation at about 0.56, and a meta-analysis of more than 600,000 people found that education also raises scores.
Does IQ Predict Income? The Link Explains About 5 Per Cent
The meta-analytic correlation between measured intelligence and earnings is around 0.23, which leaves roughly ninety-five per cent of the differences in pay to everything else. A 2026 analysis of two large US cohorts adds a second finding: your specific strengths carry a third to a half of the weight that general ability does.
How Rare Is an IQ of 130? The Curve Says 1 in 44, Not 1 in 50
On a mean-100, standard-deviation-15 scale, 130 sits at the 97.72nd percentile, which leaves about one person in 44 above it. Here is the rarity at every threshold — and why the figures stop describing real people long before they stop being calculable.
Country IQ Rankings Are Weaker Than the Charts Suggest
The tables that circulate as national IQ figures come from one compilation built out of whatever studies existed, in whatever years, on whatever samples. Several of the numbers were estimated rather than measured.
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Every number carries its scale
An IQ figure is meaningless without the scale it was measured on and the range around it. Every story here reports all three, or says plainly that the source did not.
Sources are listed, not implied
Each story ends with the studies, datasets and documents it draws on, named and attributed, so you can go and read them yourself.
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