Talking to Yourself and IQ: Is Self-Talk a Sign of Intelligence?
Talking to yourself is not a proven sign of high IQ. No study links adult self-talk to IQ scores, though speaking aloud can help with some specific tasks.
Dr. Russell T. WarneChief Scientist
Share
Talking to yourself is not an established sign of high intelligence, because no study has measured adults' self-talk and their IQ scores and found a meaningful correlation. What research does show is narrower: in a sample of 2,156 children aged 5 to 17, self-talk went with better problem solving only in the youngest children, and in adults, saying a target's name aloud can speed up a visual search by a small amount.
The popular claim usually rests on a real body of work on "private speech," the talk children and adults direct at themselves while they work. That work is interesting and well done. It simply answers a different question from the one in the headline. This article covers what self-talk is, what it does for thinking, why it gets linked to intelligence, and when hearing a voice is a different matter altogether.
What researchers mean by talking to yourself
Psychologists separate two things that people lump together. Private speech is speech said out loud but addressed to yourself, such as a child narrating a puzzle or an adult muttering "left, then right" while assembling furniture. Inner speech is the silent version, the voice in your head that rehearses a phone number or argues with itself about what to cook.
The Russian psychologist Lev Vygotsky proposed in the 1930s that private speech is a stage on the way to inner speech. Children first use language with other people and then use it out loud to guide themselves, before eventually internalizing it. A major review by Ben Alderson-Day and Charles Fernyhough in Psychological Bulletin summarizes the evidence that broadly supports this sequence: private speech peaks around age 5, a pattern reported in a 1968 set of studies by Lawrence Kohlberg and colleagues, and then declines as inner speech takes over. It does not disappear: the review notes that private speech persists into adulthood as a self-regulatory and motivational tool.
Inner speech is common but less constant than people assume. Using a careful method called Descriptive Experience Sampling, in which people describe their experience at the moment a random beeper sounds, Russell Hurlburt and colleagues found inner speaking in only about 20% to 25% of samples. Earlier questionnaire-style sampling studies produced much higher estimates. People differ widely, and some report very little inner speech at all. Silent words also run through a great deal of daydreaming and mind wandering, when thoughts drift away from the task at hand.
Is talking to yourself a sign of intelligence?
There is no direct evidence for it. I could not find a single study that measured how often adults talk to themselves and then correlated that with a full-scale IQ score. Claims that self-talkers are "geniuses" are extrapolations from studies of task performance, which is a different thing.
The closest large dataset comes from children. Adam Winsler and Jack Naglieri studied 2,156 children aged 5 to 17 as they worked on problem-solving tasks, recording whether they talked to themselves aloud, partly aloud, or silently. Self-talk moved from overt to covert forms with age, as Vygotsky predicted. Self-talk was associated with better performance among the youngest children. For older children, it was unrelated to how well they did. In other words, the one large study that could have shown a link between self-talk and ability found no such link in older children.
The adult experiments are about specific tasks.
• Visual search: Gary Lupyan and Daniel Swingley asked adults to find pictures of everyday objects among many others, sometimes while saying the target's name aloud. Speaking the name helped, especially when the name and the object were strongly associated. When the name fit the object poorly, speaking it began to hurt performance.
• Third-person self-talk: Ethan Kross and colleagues ran seven studies with 585 participants in total. People who reflected on themselves using their own name or "you," instead of "I," before a stressful task such as a speech showed less distress, and objective raters judged their performance better.
• Sport: A meta-analysis by Antonis Hatzigeorgiadis and colleagues pooled 32 studies of self-talk training in sport and found a moderate average benefit (effect size 0.48). Self-talk helped most with fine motor skills and with tasks people were still learning.
These are real effects, but they describe a strategy that helps people perform particular tasks. They say nothing about whether people with higher IQs use the strategy more. Anyone of any ability level can say "keys" aloud while looking for their keys and probably find them a little faster.
Why the "sign of intelligence" claim spreads
Two features of the research make the leap tempting. One is that private speech is tied to self-regulation and planning, which sound like intelligence. Alderson-Day and Fernyhough describe studies in which children did worse on the Tower of London planning puzzle when they were made to repeat words aloud, a technique called articulatory suppression that occupies the speech system. That shows inner speech helps with planning. It does not show that children who use more of it are brighter.
The other is the press. Coverage of the Lupyan and Swingley study in 2012 ran under headlines such as "Talking to yourself could have mental benefits," and later articles turned that into self-talk being a mark of intelligence. The paper itself was about how words shape perception during search.
A related source of confusion is that inner speech overlaps with working memory. Rehearsing a list silently uses the same verbal loop that working memory tests tap, which is explained in our guide to what working memory is. Because working memory correlates with IQ, it is easy to assume that anything involving verbal rehearsal must too. That chain of reasoning skips the step where someone measures it.
There are also confounds that any future study would need to handle. Age is the biggest, since overt self-talk changes so much across childhood. Task difficulty matters as well: people talk to themselves more when a task is hard for them, so in a single study, more self-talk can go with lower performance simply because the task was harder for those individuals. Habits such as living alone shape how often people talk aloud too, and they have little to do with intelligence.
When hearing a voice is different
Talking to yourself is an ordinary, deliberate activity. You know the words are yours, and you can stop. Hearing a voice that seems to come from someone else, when no one is speaking, is a different experience called an auditory verbal hallucination. The Alderson-Day and Fernyhough review notes that voice-hearing is associated with schizophrenia but also occurs in a significant minority of the general population, and that one leading theory treats it as inner speech that is misattributed to an outside source.
If you or someone close to you hears voices that feel like they belong to someone else, or the experience is distressing or getting in the way of daily life, the right first step is a primary care doctor, who can refer you to a psychiatrist or clinical psychologist for assessment. The relationship between psychotic disorders and cognitive test scores is a separate topic, covered in our article on IQ and schizophrenia.
Frequently asked questions
Do smart people talk to themselves more?
There is no good evidence that they do. No published study has correlated how often adults talk to themselves with their IQ scores.
Is talking to yourself normal?
Yes. Private speech is close to universal in young children and continues into adulthood for many people, especially during difficult or unfamiliar tasks.
Does talking to yourself make you smarter?
It can help with particular tasks, such as finding an object or staying calm before a speech, but there is no evidence that it raises intelligence. The benefits reported in experiments are specific to the task being done.
Is it better to talk to yourself in the third person?
In a series of seven studies, people who used their own name or "you" when reflecting on a coming stressor felt less distress and performed better under social pressure. That is an effect on emotion regulation, not on IQ.
Why do some people have no inner voice?
People vary a great deal in how often they experience inner speech. Experience-sampling research finds it in roughly a fifth to a quarter of random moments on average, and some people report it rarely.
The takeaway
Talking to yourself is normal and sometimes useful, and it is not a sign of high or low intelligence. The research on private speech and inner speech shows that words help people steer their attention and manage stress on specific tasks. The one large study of self-talk and children's problem solving found that the link to performance disappears after the early school years, and nobody has shown a link between adult self-talk and IQ. If you want to know where your reasoning abilities actually stand, a habit is a poor guide; a professionally developed IQ test is a better one.
2. Hurlburt, R. T., Heavey, C. L., & Kelsey, J. M. (2013). Toward a phenomenology of inner speaking. Consciousness and Cognition, 22(4), 1477-1494. [doi.org/10.1016/j.concog.2013.10.003](. doi.org
3. Winsler, A., & Naglieri, J. (2003). Overt and covert verbal problem-solving strategies: Developmental trends in use, awareness, and relations with task performance in children aged 5 to 17. Child Development, 74(3), 659-678. [doi.org/10.1111/1467-8624.00561](. doi.org
5. Kross, E., Bruehlman-Senecal, E., Park, J., Burson, A., Dougherty, A., Shablack, H., Bremner, R., Moser, J., & Ayduk, O. (2014). Self-talk as a regulatory mechanism: How you do it matters. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 106(2), 304-324. [doi.org/10.1037/a0035173](. doi.org
6. Hatzigeorgiadis, A., Zourbanos, N., Galanis, E., & Theodorakis, Y. (2011). Self-talk and sports performance: A meta-analysis. Perspectives on Psychological Science, 6(4), 348-356. [doi.org/10.1177/1745691611413136](. doi.org
7. Kohlberg, L., Yaeger, J., & Hjertholm, E. (1968). Private speech: Four studies and a review of theories. Child Development, 39(3), 691-736. [doi.org/10.2307/1126979](. doi.org
Hero image: The Thinker (Le Penseur) by Auguste Rodin, Musée Rodin, photograph by Jebulon, CC0. Via Wikimedia Commons.
Take our professional IQ test
Want to know your IQ? Try the first ever professional online IQ test.
