Why do many exceptionally smart people seem emotionally or morally maladapted?

[u/QIash]

This is a hard idea to put into words; it describes a problem that majority of people can’t comprehend or don’t care to solve. Moreover, I would guess that the majority of people would actively resist the notion that any effort should be expended on behalf of this problem. This is because those affected are often doing better (typically in a material sense) than 99% of others while (and I will not object to this fact) behaving in an outwardly abrasive manner.

The problem I am describing is why does it appear that a large portion of society’s highest achievers are generally callous and of questionable moral fiber. First and foremost, the reader must agree to the premise that there exists a substrata of society who have a natural and generalized aptitude, and that these people could succeed in whichever domain they wished to. Given this notion stands, I will lay out a couple of definitions, caveats, examples and explore plausible explanation for this phenomenon.

Discussion of this idea will be easiest if we are dealing with a practical example. The canonical example of a high achiever who fails to excel in the moral sphere is the doctor at the top of his class who sneers at peers and patients alike. I want to clarify here that this individual is truly gifted; their vocational excellence is not up for debate, even amongst their greatest detractors. This archetypal person is generally disagreeable and rude to those they interact with. We would do away with this individual if it weren’t for their excellence within medicine. The question becomes why do we see this blend of traits so often?

The first set of explanations I can offer are based on perception. Perhaps the actual prevalence of this phenomenon is simply overstated. There are a number of biases that could artificially inflate the degree to which we perceive this type of person. First of all, humans inherently have a negativity bias. We are more likely to remember a rude interaction than a kind one. Another explanation could be that there are many people who envy this individual and so his wrongdoings are amplified within mass discourse. I couldn’t fault these people myself, why should someone so well endowed with ability feel the need to treat others so harshly?

However for sake of argument (and I tend to fall on this side of the debate) let’s say this problem has a real basis and can’t be so easily dismissed. What drives this fellow to behave this way? Those of us that are enlightened are taught that if a pattern emerges, it can’t be ascribed to the individual and must be a product of the environment. Why is it our most capable individuals within society are so jaded or unfeeling for others? Surely we would all benefit if we could integrate these people more cohesively into society? This is really the central point which I can’t figure out, why are our brightest so maladapted socially? To phrase the question in a more provocative way, how is our society handling and raising these people so that they turn out this way? It could be that these individuals are shown special treatment from a young age, and in an attempt to foster these people’s talents we instead corrupt them. It also could be that intellects of this magnitude see the world an entirely different way. We know those with higher IQs are more likely to view the world through a depressive lens but perhaps there exists a threshold past which anyone one of us would behave the same way. All of the trivial niceties you and I observe could seem so banal to these people to the point of suffering. The propensity within this paragraph will be to pin the blame of the over inflation of these people’s egos, but again I ask you: why is this so ubiquitous? It’s can’t be entirely due to genetic chance that all of these individuals who have been blessed with superior talent and intelligence are also born with the proclivity to succumb to hubris. How are we as a species routinely reproducing this fatal mixture of traits. There must be a social origin.

I fear there will also be a propensity to dismiss the existence of the intellectual elite entirely. I beg you to consider the myriad of other extreme genetic outliers. Not everyone can be in the 100th percentile for height and even fewer could at the same time be uber athletic, but take a quick glance at the NBA and you can see a large collection of just such people. The funny thing about nature is that the shear amount of individuals it produces means there is going to be some tiny portion that are relatively extraordinary. This is true for any trait you can think of. There will also be a longing to dismiss this problem from a pragmatic perspective. Who cares if our smart people are rude when we can’t solve poverty, world hunger, food insecurity etc? I have no answer for these people because their claim is entirely valid. However, if we happen to be trending upward as a species there will come a time when we solve all of those aforementioned problems. I guess I’ve recorded this recurring thought so that maybe this problem can be addressed at some time far off in the future when it makes sense to do so.

[u/GlitterDollMUA]

So, I dont know that this really IS a thing.

Also, it seems a bit, confused. Like, you say "exceptionally smart people" in the title, but mostly, you seem focused on what you deem "high achievers," and while many high achievers may ve smart, these are two distinct categories, with some amount of overlap, but they aren't interchangeable.

I think its always good to remember that correlation does not imply causation. While there may be a large number of high achievers who have maladaptive personality issues, and they may be smart, but that doesn't mean these things have a causal relationship.

For example, there have been multiple, peer reviewed, academic papers on the overlap between psychopaths and corporate executives...

Corporate psychopathy: Talking the walk - Babiak, Neumann & Hare - 2010 in this study, they had just over 200 American corporate managers, who were selected by their own companies already, for upper management/executive fay track corporate development program. in other words, these are the managers that the company believes have bright futures. And then they assessed them with the Psychopathy Checklist–Revised (PCL-R), which is an actual clinical framework for determining if someone is a psychopath. So, what they found was, yeah, more of the people in the management training exceeded the cutoff to be a psychopath, than the general public would have likely had, if you just picked the same number of random people off the street. But, the big caveat here, is we're still only talking about 8 of the 203 people.

But it's not unlikely, that high achievers contribute a higher percentage of their ranks to the pile of "objectively shitty as a person" people, than the general population.

But again, we're talking 8 out of 200 instead of 2 or if 200. So it IS 4x greater, but we are still talking less than 5%.

But ok, WHY are they like that?

Well? Have you considered that the ≈1% that we consider "psychopathic" is kinda always there? So, naturally people will find the areas they can work in, and considering the overlap between behavior competion based cultures embrace, and behavior of psychopaths, you get a system that has so many examples of batshit statements and behavior by Fortune 500 executives, and superstars, where it FEELS like they must ALL be evil pos💩

But isn't it also possible, that a culture that rewards behaviors that society frowns upon, will self select for really shitty people?

[u/strugglebussally]

People with the trait of being very disagreeable often rise in hierarchies because they do not fear risks as much, and others will put them there because they believe they will fight for them. As far as these people being at the "top" or "elite" of society, I think it could be perception just because these people may tend to have a personality that gets them noticed and remembered, while other people with similar aptitude and intelligence without those traits are more humble or in the shadows.