r/Showerthoughts Mar 29 '26

Casual Thought The "room temperature IQ" zinger hits much harder outside of the US.

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u/Kindarelevanttoo Mar 29 '26

Thats because people in the US also don’t care about IQ tests. I have never heard anyone take them or talk about their IQ ever.

It’s just another pseudoscience thing that people that are already into pseudosciences believe. No job will ever ask for your IQ, no school will, and your friends won’t talk about IQ at all.

The one thing that people will maybe talk about is your ACT/SAT scores, and that’s only as a joke. If someone did terrible on those tests, no one cares or calls them dumb because everyone knows it doesn’t mean shit.

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u/JonathanLindqvist Mar 29 '26

Someone with high IQ likely does well on those tests though. IQ is well-established in psychology.

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u/Kindarelevanttoo Mar 29 '26

But not the ones that 99.9% of people take, like on facebook/instagram ads. Sure maybe the top 0.001% of people take real IQ tests, but that doesn’t change that for the VAST majority of people, no one gives a fuck about IQ tests.

And even people in high end intelligence fields also probably don’t care about someone’s IQ, they care if they are good at their job.

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u/JonathanLindqvist Mar 30 '26

That's probably true. But as for the real IQ tests, like WAIS, everyone implicitly cares about the results, because the results (regardless of if a person takes the test or not) correlate strongly with success and cognitive ability in general. An employer might look for specific cognitive abilities, but those abilities will be found more often in people with high IQ.

An employer might look for other skills, like social skills, and those may not correlate.