Group Interaction Can Lower Your Intelligence

"People who enjoy meetings should not be in charge of anything." - Thomas Sowell

 Daily Mail- Interacting within a group – such as taking part in jury deliberations or mingling at a cocktail party - can lower your intelligence, with women being particularly susceptible, according to researchers.

Scientists at Virginia Tech Carilion Research Institute used magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) to investigate how the brain processes information about social status in small groups and how perceptions of that status affect expressions of cognitive capacity.

In other words, whether ‘feeling’ less intelligent than others can affect your decision-making.

‘You may joke about how committee meetings make you feel brain dead, but our findings suggest that they may make you act brain dead as well,’ said Read Montague, director of the Human Neuroimaging Laboratory and the Computational Psychiatry Unit at the institute, who led the study.

[snip]

The women and men both had the same baseline IQ scores, but more women fell into the lower performing group.

Lead author Kenneth Kishida added: ‘Our study highlights the unexpected and dramatic consequences even subtle social signals in group settings may have on individual cognitive functioning. [...] read all here