In certain conversations, you sometimes have the impression of going too quickly: your ideas follow one another and the other person struggles to keep up. The problem ? When this gap recurs regularly, it can reflect a difference in the way of reasoning or processing information.
Five subtle signs that can reveal your intelligence
First sign: you often have to reformulate your ideas. What seems obvious to you is not necessarily obvious to the person you are talking to. You then break down your reasoning, look for a comparison or simplify your vocabulary to make yourself understood. The Desired.de site describes this gap as a form of translation between two levels of abstraction.
Another clue: you ask a lot of questions to make sure you understand correctly. The website Mystischerrabe.de presents this attitude as a form of active listening. Rather than assuming what the other person means, you seek to clarify their thoughts.
You are also capable of letting silences settle in without immediately trying to fill them. According to Mystischerrabe.de, these breaks can help you organize your ideas and give the other person time to process the information.
Another sign: you accept gray areas. You can acknowledge that you can’t decide or admit that two points of view can each contain an element of truth. Finally, you are able to doubt yourself constructively and change your opinion when a solid fact calls it into question.
What these behaviors say about intelligence
These different signs match what Alice Boyes describes. For this psychologist, intelligence is found in particular in metacognition and intellectual creativity, that is to say the ability to observe one’s own thinking, to identify one’s biases and to adjust one’s reasoning.
Asking questions, accepting uncertainty or recognizing an error then demonstrates a desire to understand rather than seeking to be systematically right.
Research conducted by the University of Michigan also associates this flexibility with greater open-mindedness and less dogmatism.
Intelligence and superiority, two very different things
However, these signs are not enough to determine a person’s level of intelligence. Stress, fatigue, social anxiety, language spoken or even cultural differences can also change the way you communicate.
The objective is therefore not to feel superior to your interlocutor. It’s more about adapting your way of speaking and listening to allow everyone to follow the exchange and get their ideas across.