The IQ Bell Curve Midwit Meme: What It Gets Right and Wrong

The meme takes a bell curve, labels the horizontal axis with IQ scores and places three cartoon figures on it. The figure at the far left, at an IQ of about 55, and the figure at the far right, at about 145, hold the same short, simple opinion. The figure in the hump between them, near IQ 100, holds a longer and more complicated one, and is labelled the "midwit". It is one of the few IQ jokes built on a real chart, which makes it easy to check.

Where the midwit meme comes from

The word came first. The earliest use we could trace is a February 2012 blog post that describes people of somewhat above-average ability as "mid-witted", with the hyphen. Know Your Meme credits users of the 4chan message board with shortening it to "midwit" in the years after. The chart came separately: according to Know Your Meme, and repeated in a 2024 Daily Dot explainer, the first documented bell-curve version appeared on 1 January 2017, when an anonymous 4chan post used an IQ distribution to argue that the two extremes share political views, a joke on the "horseshoe" idea that opposite ends of a spectrum meet.

The version most people know today, with a crying figure in the hump between a "brainlet" figure on the left and a calm, monk-like figure on the right, is dated by Know Your Meme to 11 July 2020, when an account on X posted it. The axis numbers in most versions are 55, 70, 85, 100, 115, 130 and 145: a mean of 100 in steps of 15, running from three standard deviations below to three above. Coverage such as the Daily Dot's 2024 explainer notes that the format is often used to dismiss careful arguments, which is a rhetorical use, not a statistical one.

What the meme gets right: the curve is real

Modern IQ scores, such as those from the Wechsler tests, are reported as deviation IQs. A person's raw score is compared with the scores of others of the same age in the test's norm sample, then converted so that the norm sample has a mean of 100 and a standard deviation (SD, a measure of how spread out scores are) of 15. Our explainer on deviation IQ versus ratio IQ covers why the older formula was dropped. Two things follow. The bell shape is largely built into the scoring rather than discovered afterwards, and the shape fixes the proportions of people at each score, which anyone can check.

• IQ 85 to 115 (within one SD of 100): 68.3% of people
• IQ 90 to 110: 49.5% of people, the narrowest reading of the meme's midwit
• IQ 70 to 130 (within two SD): 95.45% of people
• IQ 55 or below (three SD below the mean): 0.135%, about 1 in 741
• IQ 145 or above (three SD above the mean): 0.135%, about 1 in 741

So the meme is right about the shape. The extremes are rare and the middle is the crowd. The two tails it draws hold about 0.27% of people between them, roughly 1 in 370, while the hump it labels "midwit" holds about 250 times as many. An IQ of 145 is the 99.87th percentile on this scale, which our percentile calculator returns for any score you type in, and our piece on how rare a high IQ score is shows how fast the numbers fall away past two SD.

One caution about the curve itself. The bell is partly a scoring choice. Raw scores are converted to a normal curve when a test is normed, and a 1989 review of 440 large-sample achievement and psychometric measures found every one significantly non-normal in its raw form (Micceri, Psychological Bulletin). That finding is not specific to IQ, but it is a reason to read the bell as a convention that makes scores comparable, not a law of nature.

Wrong number one: the midwit is the definition of average

IQ 100 is not a place people fall short of. It is the middle of the norm sample by construction, so about half of all people score between 90 and 110. Calling the middle of a curve "mid" is a tautology, not an insult with data behind it. The standard labels read the same numbers more calmly: our guide to what an IQ of 110 means shows where average ends and high average begins, and the IQ classification table lists every band.

Wrong number two: on an IQ test the two ends do not agree

The joke needs the two ends to say the same thing. On an IQ test that cannot happen, because the score is a count of correct answers compared with everyone else's counts. The groups the meme places at 55 and 145 are, by construction, the groups whose scores differ most. Test designers also discard or down-weight items that people at both ends answer alike, since such an item separates no one. Whatever the meme is about, it is not about performance on the test that draws the curve.

The meme also borrows a chart it does not own. Its curve is a distribution of scores, while the Dunning-Kruger plot it is often pasted beside shows self-rated ability against measured ability. In a 2020 study of 929 adults tested on Raven's matrices, the usual quartile chart appeared, but analyses built to avoid the statistical trap behind it found the link between self-rating and tested IQ was essentially linear (Gignac and Zajenkowski, Intelligence, 2020). Self-estimates do track tested scores, modestly: r = .33 across 41 studies (Freund and Kasten, Psychological Bulletin, 2012). Our article on whether the Dunning-Kruger effect is real goes through what the IQ data show.

Wrong number three: the tails are not a punchline

An IQ of 55 is three SD below the mean, a range in which a clinical evaluation, not a meme, is the right tool; the rules that apply to such scores are set out in our piece on low IQ and disability benefits. At the other end, an IQ of 145 is not a magic setting either. Tests stop reporting reliably somewhere near 160, as our article on the ceiling on an IQ test explains, and a single score is a range, not a point, as the piece on the margin of error shows.

Where a real U-shape does exist

There is a real U-shape in psychology, but it lives in development, not in IQ groups. Children learning English often use an irregular past tense such as "came" correctly, then say "comed", then return to "came": the overregularization documented in Marcus and colleagues' 1992 monograph on language acquisition (Monographs of the Society for Research in Child Development). That is one person passing through stages, not two groups at opposite ends of a distribution agreeing. We found no study in which people at both ends of the IQ range give the same answer while the middle differs, and the earliest documented use of the chart format is a political joke.

How to use the curve instead of the meme

Two checks take a minute. Type your own score into the percentile calculator to see which slice of the curve you sit in, then look at the full IQ bell curve to see how wide each band is. If a claim about "the midwit" cannot survive the fact that the band it names holds two people in three, it was never about IQ. Our explainer on IQ z-scores shows how to turn any score into standard units and compare it with any other test.

The meme survives because it flatters whoever shares it: the left figure looks carefree, the right figure looks wise and the middle is where the reader assumes someone else stands. The curve underneath is a better story. It says most people are close to average, that the extremes are rare on both sides, and that a single score is a measurement with a margin, not a verdict. The IQ Metrics test reports the score and the percentile together for that reason.

Common questions