Empathy and IQ: Are Smarter People More Empathetic? | Riot IQ
Oct 9, 2026·Advanced Topics & Research
Empathy and IQ: Are Smarter People More Empathetic?
Empathy and IQ are only modestly linked: IQ correlates about .24 with reading emotions in faces, and barely at all with how much people feel for others.
Dr. Russell T. WarneChief Scientist
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People with higher IQs are slightly better at reading other people's thoughts and feelings, with a correlation of about .24 between IQ and the most widely used test of this skill. They do not, on average, care more about other people: the "feeling" side of empathy has little or no relationship with intelligence.
The answer depends on which kind of empathy you mean. Psychologists separate "cognitive empathy", the ability to work out what someone else thinks or feels, from "affective empathy", the tendency to share and respond to those feelings. This page covers the meta-analyses on each, why the best-known test of cognitive empathy leans on vocabulary, what genetic studies add, and the confounds that make the link look stronger or weaker than it is.
Two kinds of empathy, two different answers
Cognitive empathy overlaps heavily with what researchers call "theory of mind", the understanding that other people have beliefs, intentions and emotions that differ from your own. It is usually measured with performance tasks that have right and wrong answers, such as judging a character's intention in a short story or naming the emotion in a photograph.
Affective empathy is usually measured with questionnaires. People rate statements about how often they feel concern for others or get upset when they see someone in distress. Because these are self-reports, they capture how empathetic people see themselves, which is a different thing from how accurately they read others.
The two are only loosely connected. In a 2022 meta-analysis of 61 studies (8,611 people), Anne Kittel and colleagues found that scores on the main cognitive-empathy test correlated .13 with self-reported affective empathy and .14 with self-reported cognitive empathy. A person can be good at decoding emotions and not especially moved by them, or the reverse.
That split runs straight through the IQ question:
• Cognitive empathy: a small to moderate positive link with IQ, shown in several meta-analyses.
• Affective empathy: little or no link with IQ, with a few exceptions depending on how the trait is defined.
IQ and the Reading the Mind in the Eyes Test
The most common adult measure of cognitive empathy is the "Reading the Mind in the Eyes" Test, revised by Simon Baron-Cohen and colleagues in 2001. It shows 36 photographs of the eye region of a face, and for each one the test-taker picks which of four words best describes what the person is thinking or feeling.
The 2001 paper reported no correlation between the Eyes test and IQ (r = .09) and concluded that the test was independent of general intelligence. That conclusion rested on a small IQ-tested group: the IQ data came from 15 autistic adults and 14 IQ-matched controls, and the authors noted that their university student group could simply be assumed to have high IQ.
Later evidence overturned it. In 2014, Crystal Baker and colleagues pooled 77 effect sizes from 3,583 participants and found a correlation of r = .24 between intelligence and Eyes test scores. Verbal and performance (nonverbal) IQ contributed about equally. To put that in IQ terms, a person who scores 115, one standard deviation above average, would be expected to score about a quarter of a standard deviation above average on the Eyes test. IQ accounts for roughly 6% of the differences between people on the test (.24 squared), so many people with average IQs read faces very well and many with high IQs do not.
Other theory-of-mind tasks show similar links. Baker's review of earlier studies listed correlations of about .18 to .40 between intelligence and story-based or faux-pas tasks in typical samples, and .50 to .54 in samples that mixed autistic and non-autistic participants (mixing groups that differ on both measures inflates a correlation).
Why the Eyes test leans on vocabulary
Every item on the Eyes test asks you to choose between words such as "contemplative", "skeptical" or "flirtatious". If you do not know what a word means, you cannot pick it, however well you read faces. That makes vocabulary a plausible route for IQ to influence scores.
Kittel's 2022 meta-analysis supports this. The Eyes test correlated .25 with vocabulary tests, and more strongly with emotion-perception tasks (.33) than with other theory-of-mind measures (.29). The authors concluded that the test works more like a measure of emotion perception than of theory of mind. Vocabulary is a large part of what IQ tests call verbal ability, as our article on what verbal reasoning is describes.
A 2021 study by Ester Navarro, Sara Goring and Andrew Conway points the same way. In 278 US college students, a general ability factor built from ACT scores correlated .57 with a latent theory-of-mind factor that combined the Eyes test and a story task. The link ran almost entirely through the ACT's reading and English sections, while the math section contributed close to nothing. The authors read this as evidence that the theory-of-mind and intelligence relationship in their data was driven by language skills more than by a single general ability.
The fair reading is that higher-IQ people do score better on cognitive-empathy tests, and part of that advantage comes from understanding the words and stories the tests use. How much of it reflects better social perception in everyday life is still an open question.
Affective empathy and intelligence
For the feeling side of empathy, the largest evidence is Kevin Stanek and Deniz Ones's 2023 synthesis of personality and ability research in PNAS. Agreeableness as a whole correlated -.01 with general mental ability, and tender-mindedness, a facet close to sympathy, correlated -.05. In plain terms, zero.
Two narrower traits did show positive links. The "compassion" aspect of agreeableness correlated .26 with general mental ability, and "interpersonal sensitivity", which the authors equate with empathy, correlated .20. Both are defined partly by understanding and attending to others, which pulls them toward the cognitive side. How a questionnaire defines empathy changes the answer.
Genetic studies by Varun Warrier and colleagues tell a similar story. In 88,056 research volunteers, scores on the Eyes test were genetically correlated with educational attainment and measures of cognitive aptitude. In a separate study of 46,861 people, the self-report Empathy Quotient, which mixes cognitive and affective items, was not genetically correlated with educational attainment. The ability to read minds shares genetic roots with cognitive ability, and the self-described tendency to care shows no such overlap.
Several factors can make the empathy and IQ link look stronger or weaker than it is.
• Sex: women score higher than men on the Eyes test (d = 0.21 in Warrier's 88,056-person sample) and much higher on the self-report Empathy Quotient (d = 0.65 in the 46,861-person sample). Samples with unbalanced sex ratios can therefore distort the correlation between empathy and IQ.
• Education: many studies recruit university students, whose IQ range is narrow. A restricted range shrinks correlations, which is one reason small student studies such as the 2001 Eyes test paper can miss a real link.
• Autism: autistic adults tend to score lower on the Eyes test, and studies that mix autistic and non-autistic participants can produce larger IQ correlations. Lower scores on a test of reading non-autistic faces are not the same as lacking care for others, and Damian Milton's "double empathy problem" argues that misunderstanding between autistic and non-autistic people runs in both directions. Our article on IQ and autism covers how autism and intelligence relate.
Frequently asked questions
Are people with high IQs more empathetic?
They are slightly better on average at reading others' thoughts and emotions, with a correlation of about .24 on the Eyes test. They are not, on average, more caring or emotionally responsive.
Is empathy a type of intelligence?
Cognitive empathy behaves partly like a cognitive ability, since it has right and wrong answers and correlates with IQ. Affective empathy behaves more like a personality trait and is largely unrelated to IQ.
Does the Reading the Mind in the Eyes Test measure IQ?
No, but scores are modestly related to IQ, partly because the test requires knowing the meaning of emotion words. A 2022 meta-analysis found a .25 correlation with vocabulary.
Can a person have a high IQ and low empathy?
Yes. With correlations this small, many high-IQ people score low on empathy measures and many people with average IQs score high.
Are autistic people less empathetic?
Autistic adults tend to score lower on tests of reading emotions from faces, which is a narrow cognitive task. That does not show reduced care for others, and the double empathy problem suggests difficulty reading each other works both ways.
The takeaway
Intelligence helps a little with figuring out what other people think and feel, and much of that help comes through language. It does almost nothing to predict how much people care. If you want to know where your reasoning ability stands, take the RIOT IQ test, and treat empathy as a separate set of skills and traits that no IQ score captures.
References
1. Baker, C. A., Peterson, E., Pulos, S., & Kirkland, R. A. (2014). Eyes and IQ: A meta-analysis of the relationship between intelligence and "Reading the Mind in the Eyes". Intelligence, 44, 78-92. [doi.org/10.1016/j.intell.2014.03.001](. doi.org
2. Baron-Cohen, S., Wheelwright, S., Hill, J., Raste, Y., & Plumb, I. (2001). The "Reading the Mind in the Eyes" Test revised version: A study with normal adults, and adults with Asperger syndrome or high-functioning autism. Journal of Child Psychology and Psychiatry, 42(2), 241-251. [doi.org/10.1111/1469-7610.00715](. doi.org
3. Kittel, A. F. D., Olderbak, S., & Wilhelm, O. (2022). Sty in the mind's eye: A meta-analytic investigation of the nomological network and internal consistency of the "Reading the Mind in the Eyes" Test. Assessment, 29(5), 872-895. [doi.org/10.1177/1073191121996469](. doi.org
4. Navarro, E., Goring, S. A., & Conway, A. R. A. (2021). The relationship between theory of mind and intelligence: A formative g approach. Journal of Intelligence, 9(1), 11. [doi.org/10.3390/jintelligence9010011](. doi.org
5. 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
6. Warrier, V., Grasby, K. L., Uzefovsky, F., Toro, R., Smith, P., Chakrabarti, B., Khadake, J., Mawbey-Adamson, E., Litterman, N., Hottenga, J.-J., Lubke, G., Boomsma, D. I., Martin, N. G., Hatemi, P. K., Medland, S. E., Hinds, D. A., Bourgeron, T., & Baron-Cohen, S. (2018). Genome-wide meta-analysis of cognitive empathy: Heritability, and correlates with sex, neuropsychiatric conditions and cognition. Molecular Psychiatry, 23(6), 1402-1409. [doi.org/10.1038/mp.2017.122](. doi.org
7. Warrier, V., Toro, R., Chakrabarti, B., iPSYCH-Broad autism group, Børglum, A. D., Grove, J., 23andMe Research Team, Hinds, D. A., Bourgeron, T., & Baron-Cohen, S. (2018). Genome-wide analyses of self-reported empathy: Correlations with autism, schizophrenia, and anorexia nervosa. Translational Psychiatry, 8, 35. [doi.org/10.1038/s41398-017-0082-6](. doi.org
8. Milton, D. E. M. (2012). On the ontological status of autism: The "double empathy problem". Disability & Society, 27(6), 883-887. [doi.org/10.1080/09687599.2012.710008](. doi.org
Hero image: Vincent van Gogh, Shoes (1886), Van Gogh Museum, Amsterdam, public domain. Via Wikimedia Commons.
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