The Mensa Paradox

One unexpected illustration of the fallibility of
intelligence testing is due to Mensa. The club, founded in
Britain in 1946, requires that applicants supply signed and
notarized (!) proof that they have scored in the top 2
percent on the Stanford-Binet or other approved intelligence
tests. Yet you often hear of a Mensa paradox. This is the
observation that many of the club's brainy members are, well,
average people in average jobs.
"There are Mensans on welfare and Mensans who are
40 How Would You Move Mount Fuji?
millionaires," reports the club's website. "Mensa has
professors and truck drivers, scientists and firefighters,
computer programmers and fanners, artists, military
people, musicians, laborers, police officers, glassblowers...."
Sneering at the middling success of some Mensa members
has become a diché of almost any magazine piece on the
society. If these people are so smart, why aren't they rich, or
famous, or Nobel-prize winners, or simply more successful at
something than they are?
The suggestion that many high-IQ people are losers is as
old as IQ testing. Lewis Terman attempted to challenge it by
organizing a famous study of 1,528 high-IQ children. He hoped
to show that such kids were not the "freaks" that some thought
and would prove to be natural leaders later in life. Eighty years
later, Terman's study is still going on. His successors at Stanford
have followed Terman's "whiz kids" throughout life and have
vowed to continue until the last one drops dead.
The high-IQ subjects ranged from a pool cleaner and a
convicted forger to doctors, lawyers, and the creator of TVs I
Love Lucy (Jess Oppenheimer). Ironically, the young William
Shockley was tested for Terman's study but didn't score high
enough to make the cut Oh, well — none of those who did
have won a Nobel prize.
I suppose the Mensa paradox says more about our
society's overweening emphasis on intelligence than about
high-IQ people themselves. From Lewis Terman to Bill
Gates, people have been trying to drum into all of us the
importance of intelligence. It's hard not to take some delight
in seeing this credo subverted. "Mensa member mucks up," ran
one recent headline in the London Independent. "A Mensa
member who turned burglar was caught when he left a trail
of muddy footprints to his own front door."
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A1968 study tried to use Terman's group to investigate
why so many intelligent people aren't successes. Melita Oden,
an associate of Terman's, identified the 100 "least successful" of
Terman's now-aging prodigies and compared them to the 100
"most successful." Okay, "success" is even more subjective than
"intelligence." Oden defined it the way that most
prospective in-laws might: The successful ones were those
who used their intellectual abilities in their jobs to achieve
something of broadly recognized-value (developing a classic
sitcom, say). The least successful were those whose jobs did
not make use of the intellectual talent they possessed (like
cleaning pools). Oden found no significant IQ differences
between the successes and failures in this already high-IQ
group. The distinguishing qualities were early parental
encouragement and factors such as confidence and persistence.
This finding is hardly more than common sense. It
nonetheless goes some way toward explaining the Mensa
paradox. It suggests that motivational factors are something
distinct from intelligence. You can have one, the other, both,
or neither. The PowerPoint slide of this would be two
overlapping circles (or really, two fuzzy overlapping circles).
One circle represents the intelligent people. Another circle is
the confident, persistent, motivated people. "Successful" people
mostly fall in the area where the two circles overlap.

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