[NATIONALJOURNAL] Fifty-five percent of Americans think that they are smarter than the average American, according to a new survey by YouGov, a research organization that uses online polling. In other words, as YouGov cleverly points out, the average American thinks that he or she is smarter than the average American.The average IQ is 100. Eighty percent of everybody falls in the middle of the bell curve, somewhere between IQ 80 and 120. That would make the forty percent of everybody (half the eighty percent) in the middle smarter than the other forty percent of everybody. Add in the ten percent at the right side of the bell curve, above 120, and that makes fifty percent, which is really not that far off the 55 percent's opinion.
A humble 34 percent of citizens say they are about as smart as everyone else, while a dispirited 4 percent say they are less intelligent than most people.
What a bunch of dumbasses. The middle of the bell curve (IQ 90-110) looks like it contains about 40 percent of everybody--I haven't looked it up so I could be wrong. That leaves a gradual drop off of twenty percent between IQ 90 and 80 and a similar drop off between IQ 110 and 120. So they're about six percent off.
Men (24 percent) are more likely than women (15 percent) to say they are "much more intelligent" than the average American. White people are more likely to say the same than Hispanic and black people.But the Hispanics know how to say it in Spanish.
So, this many smart people must mean that, on the whole, the United States ranks pretty high in intelligence, right?
My guess is the U.S. ranks somewhere in the middle.
Not quite. According to the survey, just 44 percent of Americans say that Americans are "averagely intelligent."
That's four percent more than the forty percent we were talking about. Tut tut.
People who make less than $40,000 a year are much more likely to say that their fellow Americans are intelligent, while those who make more than $100,000 are far more likely to say that Americans are unintelligent.
My guess would be that mental horsepower would have something to do with level of achievement, though it's not a 100 percent correlation. I could be wrong, though.
What the hell do I know? 55 percent of Americans think I'm a dumbass.
And everybody knows that 78.1 percent of statistical studies like this are pulled out of somebody's butt.