Is Stubbornness a Sign of Intelligence? What Personality Research Shows
Is stubbornness a sign of intelligence? No. Agreeableness and compliance are unrelated to IQ (r = .00), and smart people are just as prone to myside bias.
Dr. Russell T. WarneChief Scientist
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Stubbornness is not a sign of intelligence: in a 2022 meta-analysis of more than 160,000 people, agreeableness, the personality trait that includes cooperativeness and its opposite, oppositional stubbornness, had a correlation of .00 with intelligence. Smarter people are also no less prone to "myside bias", the habit of judging evidence by whether it supports what they already believe, so a high IQ does not protect anyone from digging in.
This article covers what large personality studies show, why being clever and being open to changing your mind are separate traits, what the evidence says about smart people updating their beliefs, and why persistence on a task should not be confused with refusing to budge on an opinion.
What personality research says about stubbornness and IQ
Psychologists do not have a single "stubbornness" scale, but the trait sits within two familiar parts of personality. The first is low agreeableness, which covers being argumentative and unwilling to defer to others. The second is low openness, which includes resistance to new ideas and a preference for the familiar.
Anglim and colleagues pooled 272 studies with 162,636 participants in Psychological Bulletin. Their results give a clear answer for most of these traits.
• Agreeableness: The average correlation with general intelligence was .00 across 196 studies and nearly 110,000 people. Agreeable and disagreeable people score about the same on intelligence tests.
• Compliance: The facet of the NEO personality inventory that comes closest to the opposite of stubbornness, compliance (deferring to others and avoiding conflict), also correlated .00 with intelligence across 26 studies.
• Modesty: Modesty had a small negative correlation (-.08). The authors' reading of the item-level data was that intelligent people are a little more likely to see themselves as better than some others, but not more likely to show extreme arrogance or narcissism.
• Openness: Openness to experience was the strongest positive correlate, at .17 (or .20 after correcting for measurement error). The facet called openness to ideas, which reflects enjoying abstract thinking and new ideas, reached .25.
A correlation of .00 means that knowing how stubborn someone is tells you nothing about their IQ. Even the openness correlation of .20 is modest: it means that open-minded people score somewhat higher on average, with a great deal of overlap. If anything, these data point away from the popular claim. The trait most connected to intelligence is curiosity about ideas, which is close to the opposite of refusing to consider them.
Our page on the personality of highly gifted people covers how people at the far upper end of the IQ distribution differ, and how small most of those differences are.
Smart people are not immune to myside bias
The most important research on this question comes from Keith Stanovich and Richard West, who have tested for many years which reasoning errors are related to intelligence. Many are. People with higher cognitive ability are better, on average, at avoiding some errors in probability and logic. Myside bias stands out because it is not.
• Natural myside bias: In two experiments with 1,484 university students, Stanovich and West asked people to rate claims connected to their own sex, smoking, drinking or religious belief. Ratings differed depending on the student's own status (smokers judged a claim about smoking differently from non-smokers, for example), and there was very little evidence that students with higher cognitive ability showed this bias less.
• A wider set of biases: In seven studies published in 2008, the same researchers found that myside bias joined a long list of classic thinking biases, including anchoring and the sunk-cost effect, that were largely unrelated to cognitive ability.
• The bias blind spot: West, Meserve and Stanovich found that people readily see bias in others but not in themselves, and that higher cognitive ability did not shrink this "bias blind spot". If anything, the blind spot was slightly larger in people with higher ability.
In a 2013 review, Stanovich, West and Toplak concluded that the magnitude of myside bias shows very little relation to intelligence, so avoiding it is a rational thinking skill that IQ tests do not capture. This is the key point for stubbornness. A high IQ gives someone more tools for building arguments, but nothing in the evidence suggests those tools are used more even-handedly.
Do smart people rationalize more?
A widely cited experiment by Dan Kahan and colleagues went further. Participants had to interpret a table of data presented either as a test of a skin cream or as a test of a gun-control law. On the skin-cream version, people high in numeracy (skill with numbers) were much more accurate. On the gun-control version, answers split along political lines, and the split was largest among the most numerate. The authors argued that skilled reasoners use their skill to reach conclusions that fit their identity.
That stronger claim has not held up well. Stagnaro, Tappin and Rand repeated the design with 2,355 adults from a nationally representative US probability panel, about twice the original sample, across five contentious topics. People were again more accurate when the data fit their politics, so motivated reasoning was present. But people with higher numeracy were more accurate whether or not the result suited them. The fairest summary is that intelligence does not cure myside bias, and the better-quality evidence does not show that it makes the bias worse either.
Do smarter people change their minds more easily?
Myside bias is about how people weigh evidence that touches their beliefs. A different question is whether people can drop an impression once they learn it was based on false information. Here cognitive ability seems to help.
De keersmaecker and Roets gave 390 adults a description of a person that included a damaging detail, then told some of them that the detail was false. Everyone adjusted their opinion to some degree. People with higher cognitive ability adjusted fully, ending up with the same view as people who never saw the false detail. People with lower cognitive ability stayed more negative even after the correction. The result held after controlling for need for closure (a preference for firm answers over ambiguity) and for authoritarian attitudes.
This fits a broader pattern. Being able to understand a correction is a cognitive skill, and intelligence helps with it. Wanting to be corrected, especially about a belief tied to one's identity, is a matter of disposition. The willingness to admit you might be wrong is studied under the name intellectual humility, which is a separate trait from IQ.
Persistence is not the same as stubbornness
Part of the appeal of "stubborn people are smart" comes from stories of great scientists and artists who refused to give up. The research behind those stories concerns persistence on tasks. Refusing to change one's mind is a different matter.
In 1926 Catharine Cox, working with Lewis Terman at Stanford, estimated the childhood IQs of 300 eminent historical figures and rated the personality traits of a subset of them. When she compared the most eminent people with those who had the highest estimated IQs, the most eminent rated higher on perseverance in spite of obstacles. Her conclusion was that "high but not the highest intelligence, combined with the greatest degree of persistence, will achieve greater eminence than the highest degree of intelligence with somewhat less persistence."
Cox's method relied on historical records and raters' judgments, so her numbers are rough. Her point still stands: persistence is a separate ingredient in achievement that does not come bundled with a high IQ. Sticking with a hard problem is a virtue. Sticking with a conclusion after the evidence has turned against it is not, and neither habit reveals someone's intelligence.
There is also a selection effect in the stories people remember. History records stubborn people who turned out to be right, and forgets the far larger number who were stubborn and wrong.
Frequently asked questions
Is stubbornness a sign of intelligence?
No. A meta-analysis of more than 160,000 people found essentially no correlation between intelligence and agreeableness or its compliance facet, which capture the opposite of stubbornness.
Are smart people more stubborn?
Not on average. They are just as prone to myside bias as everyone else, and better-quality studies do not show that they are more biased, but a higher IQ does not make someone more willing to change their mind.
Do intelligent people change their minds more easily?
They are better at updating after a clear correction of false information, according to at least one experiment. Changing a belief tied to identity depends more on dispositions such as intellectual humility than on IQ.
What personality trait is most linked to intelligence?
Openness to experience, especially openness to ideas, which correlates about .20 to .25 with intelligence. That is close to the opposite of closed-minded stubbornness.
Is persistence linked to IQ?
Persistence and IQ are largely separate traits that both contribute to achievement. Cox's 1926 study of eminent figures suggested that persistence helped explain why some highly intelligent people achieved more than others.
The takeaway
Stubbornness tells you little or nothing about a person's intelligence. Large personality studies show no link between IQ and agreeableness or compliance, and smart people fall into myside bias as often as anyone else. The trait most connected to IQ is openness to ideas. Persistence on hard problems is valuable, but it is a different trait from refusing to update a belief. If you want an accurate measure of your reasoning ability, try an online IQ test built by psychometricians.
References
1. Anglim, J., Dunlop, P. D., Wee, S., Horwood, S., Wood, J. K., & Marty, A. (2022). Personality and intelligence: A meta-analysis. Psychological Bulletin, 148(5-6), 301-336. [doi.org/10.1037/bul0000373](. doi.org
2. Stanovich, K. E., & West, R. F. (2007). Natural myside bias is independent of cognitive ability. Thinking & Reasoning, 13(3), 225-247. [doi.org/10.1080/13546780600780796](. doi.org
3. Stanovich, K. E., & West, R. F. (2008). On the relative independence of thinking biases and cognitive ability. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 94(4), 672-695. [doi.org/10.1037/0022-3514.94.4.672](. doi.org
4. West, R. F., Meserve, R. J., & Stanovich, K. E. (2012). Cognitive sophistication does not attenuate the bias blind spot. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 103(3), 506-519. [doi.org/10.1037/a0028857](. doi.org
5. Stanovich, K. E., West, R. F., & Toplak, M. E. (2013). Myside bias, rational thinking, and intelligence. Current Directions in Psychological Science, 22(4), 259-264. [doi.org/10.1177/0963721413480174](. doi.org
6. Kahan, D. M., Peters, E., Dawson, E. C., & Slovic, P. (2017). Motivated numeracy and enlightened self-government. Behavioural Public Policy, 1(1), 54-86. [doi.org/10.1017/bpp.2016.2](. doi.org
7. Stagnaro, M. N., Tappin, B. M., & Rand, D. G. (2023). No association between numerical ability and politically motivated reasoning in a large US probability sample. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 120(32), e2301491120. [doi.org/10.1073/pnas.2301491120](. doi.org
8. 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
9. Cox, C. M. (1926). The early mental traits of three hundred geniuses (Genetic Studies of Genius, Vol. 2). Stanford University Press. [archive.org](. archive.org
Hero image: Anton Romako, Der störrische Esel (The Stubborn Donkey), Belvedere, Vienna, public domain. Via Wikimedia Commons.
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