Curiosity and Intelligence: Are Curious People Smarter?

Curious people do tend to score somewhat higher on intelligence tests. A 2025 meta-analysis found that intellectual curiosity, measured as "need for cognition" or "typical intellectual engagement", correlates about r = .23 with general intelligence, which works out to roughly 3.5 IQ points for each standard deviation of curiosity.

The link between curiosity and intelligence is stronger for accumulated knowledge than for raw reasoning (the difference between fluid and crystallized intelligence), which fits the idea that a curious mind spends years feeding itself information. This page explains how researchers measure curiosity, how big the correlation is, what it says about cause and effect, and whether curiosity predicts school success beyond IQ.

In psychology, curiosity is a personality trait: a stable tendency to seek out ideas and enjoy thinking. Researchers measure it with questionnaires rather than ability tests, and several overlapping scales are in use.

• Need for cognition: introduced by Cacioppo and Petty in 1982, this scale asks how much a person enjoys effortful thinking, with items about preferring complex problems to simple ones.

• Typical intellectual engagement: this scale asks what people usually do with their minds in daily life, such as reading for pleasure or discussing abstract ideas. It was designed to capture habits, as opposed to peak performance on a test.

• Intellect and openness to ideas: these are parts of the Big Five trait of openness to experience. Openness as a whole has a well-documented link to IQ, covered in our article on high giftedness and personality. The curiosity scales sit inside the intellectual side of openness.

These scales overlap heavily, and in the largest synthesis their relations with cognitive abilities mostly tracked each other. For practical purposes they can be treated as a family of "intellectual curiosity" or "investment" traits.

Three large syntheses give consistent answers.

• Schweitzer and colleagues (2025): this preregistered multi-level meta-analysis found that need for cognition and typical intellectual engagement correlated r = .23 with general intelligence (N = 8,479), r = .26 with crystallized intelligence (N = 14,651) and r = .18 with fluid intelligence (N = 25,367). Typical intellectual engagement had the strongest link with crystallized knowledge (r = .35), while need for cognition was more closely tied to fluid reasoning.

• Stanek and Ones (2023): in a synthesis of 3,543 meta-analytic relations, the intellect-related traits (intellect, need for cognition, curiosity and openness to ideas) correlated about .28 on average with general mental ability. The experiencing side of openness, such as fantasy and aesthetic interests, was negligibly related to most abilities.

• Von Stumm and Ackerman (2013): pooling 112 studies and 60,097 participants, they found that investment traits were mostly positively associated with markers of adult intellect, including crystallized intelligence, grades and college entry tests. Estimates ranged from 0 to .58 and averaged .30.

To convert an r of .23 to IQ points, multiply by the standard deviation of 15. Someone one standard deviation more curious than average would be expected to score about 3.5 points higher. That is a moderate effect by personality-research standards, larger than the link for introversion or most other traits. It is still far too small to guess an individual's IQ from how curious they seem. Plenty of highly curious people score near average, and some very high scorers report little interest in ideas.

The pattern in the data suggests the arrow points both ways, and the evidence for each direction is indirect.

The main argument that curiosity builds intelligence comes from "investment theory", the idea that people with a hunger for ideas spend more time reading, asking questions and learning, so they accumulate more knowledge. The fact that curiosity correlates more strongly with crystallized knowledge than with fluid reasoning fits this account. Experimental work on memory points the same way. In a brain-imaging study, Gruber, Gelman and Ranganath (2014) found that people remembered answers to trivia questions better when they were curious about them, and even remembered unrelated material shown during those high-curiosity moments better a day later.

The reverse direction is also plausible. Thinking is more rewarding when it goes well, so people who reason easily may come to enjoy it and describe themselves as curious. Most of the studies in these meta-analyses are cross-sectional, measuring both traits at one time, so they cannot separate these possibilities. Long-term studies that track curiosity and test scores over many years are still rare.

This is where curiosity research has drawn the most attention.

• The "hungry mind" analysis: von Stumm, Hell and Chamorro-Premuzic (2011) modelled a meta-analytic correlation matrix and found that intelligence was the single strongest predictor of academic performance. Conscientiousness (as a marker of effort) and typical intellectual engagement (as a marker of curiosity) were additional, correlated predictors, and together the two personality traits rivalled the influence of intelligence.

• Need for cognition and grades: Liu and Nesbit's meta-analysis of 136 effect sizes and 53,258 participants found a correlation of r = .20 between need for cognition and academic achievement.

• Young children: in 6,200 children from the US Early Childhood Longitudinal Study, Shah and colleagues (2018) found that parent-rated curiosity was associated with higher kindergarten reading and math scores after adjusting for effortful control and other factors. The association was larger among children from families of lower socioeconomic status.

The evidence is not unanimous. Powell and Nettelbeck (2014) studied Australian university students and reported that curiosity measures added little prediction once intelligence and broad personality were accounted for. The hungry-mind authors replied that this study relied on self-reported entrance ranks recalled months to years after the fact. The exchange also showed that the curiosity estimate in the original meta-analysis rested on a small number of studies. The fair summary is that curiosity probably adds a modest amount to the prediction of grades, with conscientiousness carrying more weight. The broader question of how much personality and motivation matter next to ability is covered in our article on whether non-cognitive variables have powerful effects on academic achievement.

• Self-report: curiosity is measured by asking people about themselves. People who believe they are intelligent may also describe themselves as intellectually engaged, which can inflate the correlation.

• Education: schooling raises crystallized knowledge and may also shape intellectual habits, so years of education can link the two traits without either causing the other.

• Overlap with openness: curiosity scales share a lot with the intellect side of openness, so a "curiosity" effect in one study may be an openness effect in another.

• Type of test: because curiosity tracks knowledge more than abstract reasoning, vocabulary-heavy tests will show a larger link than matrix-style puzzles.

It is a weak-to-moderate sign. Curiosity correlates about .2 to .3 with IQ, so curious people score a few points higher on average, with wide overlap.

Large studies of question-asking and adult IQ are lacking. Curiosity questionnaires, which include items about seeking out ideas, correlate moderately with intelligence.

Curiosity is linked more strongly with knowledge than with reasoning, which fits the idea that it helps people learn more over time. There is no good experimental evidence that becoming more curious raises fluid reasoning ability.

It is a personality trait describing how much a person enjoys effortful thinking. It correlates about .2 with general intelligence and about .2 with academic achievement.

No. Intelligence remains the strongest single predictor of grades, but curiosity and conscientiousness together add meaningful prediction.

Curiosity and intelligence go together moderately, with correlations around .2 to .3 and the strongest links to accumulated knowledge. The data fit a picture in which bright people enjoy thinking and curious people keep learning, though the evidence cannot yet say which matters more. Curiosity also seems to add a little to the prediction of school success on top of IQ. If you want to know where your own reasoning ability stands, take a professionally developed IQ test and treat your curiosity as a separate strength worth having.

1. Schweitzer, F. M., Lindenberg, N. M., Fleischhauer, M., & Enge, S. (2025). The relationship of need for cognition and typical intellectual engagement with intelligence and executive functions: A multi-level meta-analysis. Journal of Intelligence, 13(11), 142. [doi.org/10.3390/jintelligence13110142](. doi.org

2. Stanek, K. C., & Ones, D. S. (2023). Meta-analytic relations between personality and cognitive ability. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 120(23), e2212794120. [doi.org/10.1073/pnas.2212794120](. doi.org

3. von Stumm, S., & Ackerman, P. L. (2013). Investment and intellect: A review and meta-analysis. Psychological Bulletin, 139(4), 841-869. [doi.org/10.1037/a0030746](. doi.org

4. Cacioppo, J. T., & Petty, R. E. (1982). The need for cognition. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 42(1), 116-131. [doi.org/10.1037/0022-3514.42.1.116](. doi.org

5. von Stumm, S., Hell, B., & Chamorro-Premuzic, T. (2011). The hungry mind: Intellectual curiosity is the third pillar of academic performance. Perspectives on Psychological Science, 6(6), 574-588. [doi.org/10.1177/1745691611421204](. doi.org

6. Liu, Q., & Nesbit, J. C. (2024). The relation between need for cognition and academic achievement: A meta-analysis. Review of Educational Research, 94(2), 155-192. [doi.org/10.3102/00346543231160474](. doi.org

7. Shah, P. E., Weeks, H. M., Richards, B., & Kaciroti, N. (2018). Early childhood curiosity and kindergarten reading and math academic achievement. Pediatric Research, 84(3), 380-386. [doi.org/10.1038/s41390-018-0039-3](. doi.org

8. Gruber, M. J., Gelman, B. D., & Ranganath, C. (2014). States of curiosity modulate hippocampus-dependent learning via the dopaminergic circuit. Neuron, 84(2), 486-496. [doi.org/10.1016/j.neuron.2014.08.060](. doi.org

9. Powell, C., & Nettelbeck, T. (2014). Intellectual curiosity may not incrementally predict academic success. Personality and Individual Differences, 64, 7-11. [doi.org/10.1016/j.paid.2014.01.045](. doi.org

10. von Stumm, S., Hell, B., & Chamorro-Premuzic, T. (2014). Facts and findings: A reply to Powell and Nettelbeck (2014). Personality and Individual Differences, 70, 252-253. [doi.org/10.1016/j.paid.2014.06.015](. doi.org

Hero image: Frontispiece of Museum Wormiani Historia (1655), public domain. Via Wikimedia Commons.