Which Type Has the Most Geniuses?

I was told by the membership director of Mensa that IQ and MBTI are not correlated. Many people have seen the following chart, which seems to suggest the opposite:

IQ by MBTI Type

Also, having grown up being part of the Advanced, Honors and Gifted Program in the American Public Schools, I have noticed a peculiar phenomenon among many of the friends I have kept touch with over the years. Many of them seem to be INFP or ENFP personality types. My friends in school seemed to over-represent certain personality types compared to the general population (ISTP females, ENTJs, ENTPs, etc.). Very, very few of my friends in school were ESFJs. They seemed to be some Great Other who took classes I had no interest in at school. I’m not saying that all people on one side of the chart are stupid – when I think of ESFJs, actually, the first person I think of is one of my friends from my advanced Latin classes in high school, but I just did not know many in school. So what is actually going on? Are there more geniuses among one type? Does that chart mean that INTPs are twice as smart as ENTJs, or that ESFJs have really low IQs?

No.

So I shall break down exactly what those statistics mean, and how many smart people there are based on them.

First of all, it just means that, based on IQ test results, if you have a group of 100 INTPs and a group of 100 people of all types, the INTPs will probably have four geniuses in the group when the other group has two. Conversely, if you have 100 ESFJs in the group, chances are, none of them will have an IQ above 129.

For more about how IQ works, read this.

Three levels of Standard Deviation above Average

Based on statistics that I posted in a previous blog (which were based on a number of different sources) and the bar graph above, here are the statistics for how many people place in the top 2% by IQ  based on each personality type:

The Bar Graph combined with “How Special is Your Snowflake?”

Finally, I sorted the data based on the total amount of geniuses to find out who has sheer numbers in the genius category.

ENFPs taking over the world

It turns out, in terms of sheer numbers, a person with a genius IQ is most likely to be an ENFP.

In a meeting room with 100 members of Mensa, you will probably run into sixteen ENFPs, eleven INTPs, eleven ISTJs, and ten INFPs. (This explains the reason why you must state in advance whether or not you are into hugging!)

Someone asked me last night exactly how rare our type (female ENTJ geniuses) would be (about two out of the five ENTJs) in the theoretical Mensa meeting. To fill up a meeting with 100 geniuses would require 5000 people, considering that the required IQ is the top 2% of the population. That’s about enough to fill two medium sized high schools.

Finally, there are other levels of intelligence that need to be measured in order to determine a person’s success in life. This bar graph from Business Insider provides an important contrast to the previous one:

From a Business Insider article on September 16, 2016

Emotional Intelligence (EQ) is another measure of one’s ability to fit into society and exhibit empathy. A score between 30 and 80 is considered normal. A score lower than 30 is considered to be on the autism spectrum and cause for concern. Newer IQ tests generally do not incorporate these tests into IQ scores, although they do have positive effects, such as prevention of bullying in schools and at the workplace. My own Stanford-Binet test in Seventh Grade did include sections for evaluation of leadership abilities and hobby interests. I do remember that the school district changed over to a different test within several months by the time my younger sibling was tested.