From the “SJW supplements science” department and the University of Central Florida.
High IQs aren’t going to be enough to stop an ecological disaster. It’s going to take social intelligence, too. That’s the conclusion of a new study co-authored by a University of Central Florida researcher and published Wednesday in the journal Nature Communications.
The findings could help identify why some groups better manage shared resources, such as water or fisheries, than others. And as Earth’s population is growing at a rate that is putting a strain on resources, finding ways to better manage them is critical.
“Especially in the case of common property, there is often an inbuilt tension between what is good for the individual and what is good for the group,” says Jacopo Baggio, an assistant professor in UCF’s Department of Political Science and lead author of the study.
“Individuals often have different cognitive abilities,” Baggio says. “For example, individuals with high general intelligence will be more able to discern patterns and dynamics of resources, and individuals with high social intelligence communicate more effectively and understand the mental state of others.”
Using a digital game to simulate a virtual ecosystem, the researchers found that when teams of people with high general intelligence, but low social intelligence faced a situation where resources became scarce, those teams depleted resources faster, harvested less potential resources and pushed the ecosystem to its limits.
But when both general and social intelligence were high, teams harvested a greater percentage of potential resources and kept the ecosystem from collapsing.
“It’s a way to really start to understand how individuals and groups interact and what type of individuals are more prone or less prone to favor group benefits over individual costs,” Baggio says.
General intelligence helped people figure out the rules of the game and how the resources, in this case digital tokens, regenerated, while social intelligence helped people cooperate to optimize performance, says Thomas Coyle, co-author of the study and professor of psychology at the University of Texas at San Antonio.
“In theory, people with higher levels of social intelligence are more effective in reducing conflict among group members and in getting people to work toward common goals,” Coyle says. “Such ‘people’ skills are important for managing shared resources.”
The work points to a need for education in diverse types of intelligence, says Jacob Freeman, an assistant professor of anthropology at Utah State University and study co-author.
“It suggests that our education systems should focus on cultivating both general and social intelligence to better equip groups to deal with complex, social-ecological challenges,” Freeman says.
Coyle says researchers are still exploring ways to improve social intelligence.
For the study, the researchers used a digital game where people collected virtual tokens in exchange for actual money. Participants were 216 undergraduates from two large universities in the Western United States. They were randomly placed into one of two experimental conditions: either a game where the conditions began improving and tokens continued to be replenished, or one where conditions began deteriorating and tokens did not regenerate fast enough.
General intelligence was represented by ACT and SAT scores provided by the universities. Social intelligence was measured using a short story test that estimated the ability of individuals to infer others’ intentions and feelings. The test is often used to predict social communication disorders, communication errors and the ability to infer the mental states of others.
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Baggio is a member of UCF’s Department of Political Science and is a core member of the Sustainable Coastal Systems Cluster and the National Center for Integrated Coastal Research. He received his master’s in development economics and doctorate in international development from the University of East Anglia. He joined UCF in 2018.
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Kind of like sociology papers about global-warming in exchange for real money? They should be experts at that game already.
A little message to “Jacopo Baggio, an assistant professor in UCF’s Department of Political Science and lead author of the study.” Study: we don’t have the IQ to prevent ecological disaster because …
We humans are not in charge, nature is!
So Jacopo Baggio, how do we prevent the next global cooling event? It is coming, it will happen.
IMO the best way to ensure the maximum people survive a natural disaster it to ignore over-educated fools in university Political Science Departments, and instead have real practical assistance ready and prepared for a rapid response.
How do you measure social intelligence objectively. Sounds like BS
Smart people will not save us but collective morons will… yeah right
“social intelligence” is how we explain people who have an IQ test that comes back “negative”.
Intelligence of the sort that figures out what 2+2 equals is what is championed in schools for one very good reason – the answers aren’t always what your gut tells you it is. We need people who can reckon without emotion.
We don’t need to rebrand good morals into social intelligence, unless this global warming farce is unravelling as intelligent people stop to think. And it will continue to unravel as long as there is self esteem in being intelligent so it looks like propaganda to make out 2+2 is 5 is just as intelligent.
A lot of very silly comments in here.
The argument is not about whether high IQ people can come up with solutions or not, it is about how societal decisions are taken to choose between a number of feasible options.
Here are some options theiretically available to Californians to manage water resources:
1. Build more dams to increase storage capacity.
The questions concern cost effectiveness, where they might be located, who pays for the infrastructure and who owns it, how people living where reservoirs will form will be compensated etc etc.
2. Creation of thousands of small scake leaky dams in the headwater regions of California’s water courses.
The questions concern how effective such systems are at moderating peak flows in rivers after heavy rainfall and during snow melt; whether regenerating riparian vegetation is achievable and desired; how often such systems would have to be replaced; how effective such flow delays are in mitigating soil erosion, promoting drainage to groundwater etc.
3. Recreating the wetlands of the Tulare basin destroyed by the European settlers 200 years ago.
The questions concern current land usage and ability to forgo such; compensating those people for forced relocation/changed land use; the value of expanding wetland wildlife; the contribution to groundwater regeneration etc etc.
4. Creating dedicated groundwater recharge sinks.
Discussions concern optimal sites and how to compensate those affected; how many sites are needed to actually make a difference; and how and where diversions from water courses are engineered to ensure required water volumes reach the sinks when appropriate.
5. Redesigning urban areas to promote water absorption and reurn to groundwater rather than torrents of mud and water slewing over roads, down gabions and generally ending up in the ocean.
Discussions concern town and urban planning processes; construction practice changes; changing urban habits of water usage, recycling and retention; promotion of climate-appropriate vegetation and trees; redesign of sidewalks etc to promote road water being used to water trees and plants found nearby etc etc.
6. Setting up regeneration projects for scarred and damaged valleys, water courses, gullies and glades to promote water retention, increased vegetation, greater length of stream flow duration, soil retention and creation, all aimed at preventing human death due to flash flood downstream consequences.
7. Setting up innovative methods to recharge groundwater in times of plenty.
Etc etc.
There is a phase of ideas/options generation which no doubt those of high IQ will be good at.
There is then a need to evaluate priorities, based on discussing what societal priorities actually are.
Thst evaluation procedure needs people skilled in communication but also those skilled in overseeing what may be charged and heated discussions between those with different priorities.
There is never one right answer, since different answers will favour different interest groups.
This is not an either/or.
Without the best available options, great communication has little value.
Politicians who try to ignore the best options may be good dissemblers, but they are not good communicators. There aim is to misinform, not to inform, after all.
You will get different opinions from the Sierra Club, wine growers, farmers in the Central Valley, Hollywood worthies in LA, VC fund managers in Silicon Valley and many others besides.
Unless you talk with all these folks, you will not know their sticking points, their red lines, their areas of compromise.
Talking is not enough though. The talking must have purpose, namely providing evidence for and against particular approaches.
The best decision-making is iterative, since 80% three times over is 99.2% there.
a “short story test”? Sounds very scientific. The social “sciences” seem to be making great progress.
I wonder though why it’s still impossible to teach anglophone news and sports announcers how to properly pronounce “Sharapova” or “Navratilova”, while they’re perfectly able to pronounce “Djokovic”? Or how francophone announcers, who normally mispronounce names in their own gallic fashion, have been persuaded to adopt the anglophone fashion in the case of (Northern) slavic names.
Could this learning defect possibly be an even better measure of “social intelligence”? I understand that Ms Sharapova has learned to mispronounce her own name à l’anglaise, and surely this shows great social intelligence on her part.
But will it save the earth?