Clever British People Get Off Their Faces More
ALICE Robb has seen research showing that children of higher intelligence are more likely to booze and take drugs:
Drawing on the results of the National Child Development Study, which tracked for 50 years all British babies born during one week in March 1958, [evolutionary psychologist Satoshi] Kanazawa found that kids who scored higher on IQ tests grew up to drink larger quantities of alcohol on a more regular basis than their less intelligent peers. He evaluated other factors, including religion, frequency of church attendance, social class, parents’ education and self-reported satisfaction with life, and found that intelligence before age 16 was second only to gender in predicting alcohol consumption at age 23.
Is booze expensive? It can be. Illegal drugs are:
In Kanazawa’s model, illicit drugs constitute another evolutionarily novel experience—and he (and others) have also found a link between high IQ and experimentation with drugs. In Kanazawa’s study, the higher a respondent’s IQ before age 16, the more psychoactive substances he or she had tried by age 42. Another study found that 30-year-old women who had earned high scores on an IQ test at age five were more than twice as likely to have smoked weed or used cocaine in the previous year; men who had scored highly on IQ tests as children were 50 percent more likely to have recently consumed amphetamines or ecstasy.
What do we make of it?
* “Normal” (90 < IQ < 110), “bright” (110 < IQ < 125), and “very bright” individuals consume more psychoactive substances than “very dull” or “dull” (75 < IQ < 90) individuals.
The NHS says:
Although the research has found a puzzling gap in drug use between people with different IQs, the research did not directly address why this gap exists. While some news sources have speculated that it could be due to increased expendable income, the availability of drugs at university or due to coping with the pressures of intelligence, the truth is we simply cannot tell from this study. It will take further research to untangle this conundrum, and also to see if the results apply to the rapidly changing drug scene of today.
Cheaper drug could alter the correlation…
Posted: 8th, December 2013 | In: Reviews Comments (6) | TrackBack | Permalink
