Does Reading the News Make You Smarter? What the Research Shows for IQ
Does reading the news make you smarter? It makes you better informed, but no study shows an IQ gain, and news knowledge is only loosely tied to reasoning.
Dr. Russell T. WarneChief Scientist
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Reading the news makes you better informed, but no study has shown that it raises IQ. News builds knowledge of current events, and that knowledge is only loosely tied to reasoning: in a two-year forecasting tournament with 743 participants, scores on a matrix reasoning test correlated just r = 0.05 to 0.08 with scores on two tests of political knowledge, and each predicted forecasting accuracy separately.
That distinction between knowing more and reasoning better runs through the research. This page covers what following the news does and does not teach you, how intelligence relates to spotting false stories, what the research says about too much news, and why the people who read the most news differ from those who avoid it.
What following the news actually teaches you
The clearest effect of news is on knowledge of the news. Barabas and Jerit compared what survey respondents knew about specific policies when those policies had received heavy or light media coverage. More coverage, and more prominent coverage, led to more policy knowledge, over and above demographic differences between respondents. That is learning in the ordinary sense of the word.
How you get the news matters. In a United States panel survey, Gil de Zúñiga and colleagues found that people who believed that important news would reach them anyway through friends and social feeds used traditional news less and became less politically knowledgeable over time. Their exposure to news on social media did not make up the difference. A preregistered meta-analysis of 76 studies with 442,136 participants found no evidence of political learning from social media in observational studies, and only small knowledge gains in experiments. Our page on social media and IQ covers the wider research on feeds and cognitive test scores.
Knowledge of current affairs is part of "crystallized intelligence", the store of facts, vocabulary and skills a person has learned, which IQ tests sample with subtests on general information and word meanings (see our explainer on what crystallized intelligence is). Following the news can add to that store. That is "near transfer", learning the material you studied. The question behind "does it make you smarter" is "far transfer", whether the habit improves reasoning about new problems. Sala and Gobet's meta-analyses of chess, music and working-memory training found that far-transfer effects fade toward zero in the better-designed studies, and no study has tested news reading for far transfer at all.
Knowledge, reasoning and predicting world events
The best direct look at news knowledge and intelligence together comes from a geopolitical forecasting tournament run by Mellers and colleagues. Over two years, 743 volunteers made more than 150,000 forecasts on 199 world events, and they took a short version of Raven's Advanced Progressive Matrices, a well-known reasoning test, plus true-or-false tests of political knowledge.
• Both predicted accuracy: Higher Raven's scores went with better forecasts (r = 0.23), and so did higher political knowledge (r = 0.18 and 0.20 for the two knowledge tests). Both still mattered when entered together with training and teamwork.
• They were nearly separate: Raven's scores correlated only 0.05 and 0.08 with the knowledge tests. Knowing a lot about current affairs was not a stand-in for reasoning ability.
• The best forecasters followed the news closely: The authors described their top performers as better at inductive reasoning and pattern detection, more knowledgeable about geopolitics, and inclined to see forecasting as a skill that required constant monitoring of current affairs.
The volunteers were above average on both measures, which shrinks correlations within the group, so the link between reasoning and news knowledge in the general population is likely to be larger than these figures. A Danish study by Rasmussen, using military draft data with good intelligence measures, found that intelligence and the personality trait "openness to experience" both predicted political knowledge, but that education remained the single strongest predictor. Education also narrowed the knowledge gap between people with higher and lower cognitive ability.
Spotting false news: where reasoning shows up
Reasoning ability matters most when news is wrong. Pennycook and Rand gave 3,446 online participants a mix of real and fabricated headlines along with the "Cognitive Reflection Test", a short set of questions with a tempting wrong answer that measures the habit of stopping to think. People who scored higher were better at telling real headlines from fake ones, including headlines that suited their own opinions. The authors concluded that falling for fake news is driven more by lazy thinking than by motivated reasoning.
A 2024 meta-analysis by Sultan and colleagues pooled 31 experiments with 11,561 United States participants. On average, people judged 68.5% of true headlines and 67.2% of false headlines correctly. Analytical thinking was a strong predictor of telling them apart, while years of formal education had no credible effect on that skill. People who said they had seen a headline before were more inclined to believe it, true or not.
Intelligence also affects how well people recover from a falsehood. In an experiment with 390 participants, De keersmaecker and Roets showed people false information about a person and then told them it was untrue. Participants with lower cognitive ability adjusted their impressions less, and their views stayed biased even after the correction. Those with higher ability ended up close to a control group that never saw the false claim.
These studies show that people who reason well get more accurate information out of the news. None of them shows that reading more news improves reasoning. The cognitive reflection test is also not an IQ test, although scores on the two overlap: in the forecasting study, the CRT correlated 0.38 with Raven's matrices.
Too much news, news avoidance and who reads
More news is not always better for the reader. After the 2013 Boston Marathon bombings, Holman and colleagues surveyed 4,675 Americans and found that six or more hours a day of bombing-related media in the following week was linked to more acute stress than being at or near the bombings themselves. McLaughlin and colleagues described "problematic news consumption", a compulsive pattern of checking the news, and linked severe levels to worse mental and physical wellbeing. In their original survey, 16.5% of respondents fell in the severe group. A two-wave replication put that share at 7.5% and confirmed the link with mental, though not physical, ill-being.
Many people respond by turning away. The Reuters Institute Digital News Report 2026 found that 42% of people across its markets sometimes or often avoid the news, up from 29% in 2017. The institute's earlier research distinguishes consistent avoiders, who typically have low interest in news and lower education, from selective avoiders, who step back at times to protect themselves from overload. There is no evidence that taking a break from the news lowers anyone's IQ.
That pattern points to the main confound. Regular news readers differ from avoiders in education, age, income and interest before any reading begins, and education itself raises test scores: Ritchie and Tucker-Drob's meta-analysis estimated a gain of about 1 to 5 IQ points per extra year of schooling. Any comparison of heavy and light news readers inherits those differences. Reading itself is a separate question, covered on our page about whether reading books raises IQ, where the evidence for gains in vocabulary is stronger than for gains in reasoning.
Frequently asked questions
Does reading the news make you smarter?
It makes you better informed about current events, which is real learning. No study has shown that it raises IQ or improves reasoning on new problems.
Are people who read the news more intelligent?
On average they tend to be more educated, and intelligence is one of several predictors of political knowledge. Education and interest in politics also matter a great deal, so a heavy news reader is not necessarily a high scorer.
Does reading the news help you spot fake news?
Not by itself. The best predictor of telling true from false headlines is the habit of thinking analytically, and having seen a headline before makes people more likely to believe it whether or not it is true.
Is it bad to avoid the news?
About four in ten people say they sometimes or often avoid the news, often because it feels overwhelming or upsetting. Very heavy consumption is linked to stress, and there is no evidence that stepping back lowers intelligence.
Is news from social media as good as reading a newspaper?
For learning, the evidence says no. A meta-analysis of 76 studies found little to no political learning from social media, and people who wait for news to find them become less informed over time.
The takeaway
Following the news is a good way to know what is happening in the world, and people who reason well get more accurate information out of it. There is no evidence that it makes anyone smarter in the sense of raising IQ, and news knowledge and reasoning are different abilities. If you want to know where your own reasoning stands, try an online IQ test built by psychometricians.
References
1. Mellers, B., Stone, E., Atanasov, P., Rohrbaugh, N., Metz, S. E., Ungar, L., Bishop, M. M., Horowitz, M., Merkle, E., & Tetlock, P. (2015). The psychology of intelligence analysis: Drivers of prediction accuracy in world politics. Journal of Experimental Psychology: Applied, 21(1), 1-14. [doi.org/10.1037/xap0000040](. doi.org
2. Barabas, J., & Jerit, J. (2009). Estimating the causal effects of media coverage on policy-specific knowledge. American Journal of Political Science, 53(1), 73-89. [doi.org/10.1111/j.1540-5907.2008.00358.x](. doi.org
3. Gil de Zúñiga, H., Weeks, B., & Ardèvol-Abreu, A. (2017). Effects of the news-finds-me perception in communication: Social media use implications for news seeking and learning about politics. Journal of Computer-Mediated Communication, 22(3), 105-123. [doi.org/10.1111/jcc4.12185](. doi.org
4. Amsalem, E., & Zoizner, A. (2023). Do people learn about politics on social media? A meta-analysis of 76 studies. Journal of Communication, 73(1), 3-13. [doi.org/10.1093/joc/jqac034](. doi.org
5. Sala, G., & Gobet, F. (2017). Does far transfer exist? Negative evidence from chess, music, and working memory training. Current Directions in Psychological Science, 26(6), 515-520. [doi.org/10.1177/0963721417712760](. doi.org
6. Rasmussen, S. H. R. (2016). Education or personality traits and intelligence as determinants of political knowledge? Political Studies, 64(4), 1036-1054. [doi.org/10.1111/1467-9248.12214](. doi.org
7. Pennycook, G., & Rand, D. G. (2019). Lazy, not biased: Susceptibility to partisan fake news is better explained by lack of reasoning than by motivated reasoning. Cognition, 188, 39-50. [doi.org/10.1016/j.cognition.2018.06.011](. doi.org
8. Sultan, M., Tump, A. N., Ehmann, N., Lorenz-Spreen, P., Hertwig, R., Gollwitzer, A., & Kurvers, R. H. J. M. (2024). Susceptibility to online misinformation: A systematic meta-analysis of demographic and psychological factors. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 121(47), e2409329121. [doi.org/10.1073/pnas.2409329121](. doi.org
9. De keersmaecker, J., & Roets, A. (2017). 'Fake news': Incorrect, but hard to correct. The role of cognitive ability on the impact of false information on social impressions. Intelligence, 65, 107-110. [doi.org/10.1016/j.intell.2017.10.005](. doi.org
10. Holman, E. A., Garfin, D. R., & Silver, R. C. (2014). Media's role in broadcasting acute stress following the Boston Marathon bombings. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 111(1), 93-98. [doi.org/10.1073/pnas.1316265110](. doi.org
11. McLaughlin, B., Gotlieb, M. R., & Mills, D. J. (2023). Caught in a dangerous world: Problematic news consumption and its relationship to mental and physical ill-being. Health Communication, 38(12), 2687-2697. [doi.org/10.1080/10410236.2022.2106086](. doi.org
12. McLaughlin, B., Gotlieb, M. R., & Mills, D. J. (2025). Problematic news consumption and its relationship to mental and physical health: A replication study. Health Communication, 40(10), 2016-2024. [doi.org/10.1080/10410236.2024.2434955](. doi.org
13. Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism. (2026). Digital News Report 2026: Executive summary (lead author J. Egan). University of Oxford. [reutersinstitute.politics.ox.ac.uk](. reutersinstitute.politics.ox.ac.uk
14. Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism. (2025). Digital News Report 2025: Executive summary. University of Oxford. [reutersinstitute.politics.ox.ac.uk](. reutersinstitute.politics.ox.ac.uk
15. Ritchie, S. J., & Tucker-Drob, E. M. (2018). How much does education improve intelligence? A meta-analysis. Psychological Science, 29(8), 1358-1369. [doi.org/10.1177/0956797618774253](. doi.org
Hero image: Pile of newspapers, by Howard Lake from Colchester, UK, CC BY-SA 2.0. Via Wikimedia Commons.
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