At Last: We Find Out Why Stupid People Usually Die Young
In 2001 researchers in Great Britain were surprised to discover that people with low IQs live shorter lives. But a more startling finding came this year with a report that reaction time proved an even stronger predictor of life span than IQ.
Ian Deary, a psychologist at the University of Edinburgh, and Geoff Der, a statistician at the MRC Social and Public Health Sciences Unit in Glasgow, suspected that higher IQ might lead to healthier habits like not smoking or healthier environments like safer office jobs. So they looked at data on 898 people first tested at about age 56, and then tracked their survival until age 70. They found that the link between IQ and mortality held strong even after adjusting for education, occupation, social class, and smoking.
But the group had also taken button-pressing reaction-time tests, which ...
