Clever people trust others more compared to those who are not smart, a latest study shows.
Researchers at the University of Oxford analysed the data gathered from the General Social Survey, a nationally representative public opinion survey carried out in the United States every one to two years.
The researchers explain that intelligent people judge others better and build relations with those who will not cheat them. Furthermore, the smarter folks are just better at weighing up situations, the researchers said.
The study findings also shows that people who trust others were more likely to have better health and happiness. However, the researchers did not explain the link between trust and health, and happiness and trust. The results strengthen the notion that says trust is a valuable resource for an individual, and is not simply a substitute for intelligence.
"Intelligence is shown to be linked with trusting others, even after taking into account factors like marital status, education and income. This finding supports what other researchers have argued, namely that being a good judge of character is a distinct part of human intelligence which evolved through natural selection. However, there are other possible interpretations of the evidence, and further research is needed to disentangle them," Lead author Noah Carl, from the Department of Sociology, said in a press release.
According to the authors, the findings are important as trust leads to the success of important social institutions, such as welfare systems and financial markets.
And, according to researcher Professor Francesco Billari, findings can even applied to much larger institutions such as public health, governmental policy and private charity. Governments, religious groups and other civic organizations should make the society trust them, he said. "Social trust has become an increasingly important topic for academics, who want to understand the causes of better health and greater happiness within society."
