Are Nerds Really Smart–or Just Nerdy?

I am not a nerd. I mean, I am allergic to certain types of pollen and I have an active pull list at Comic Book College and a deep statistical understanding of WHIP, OPS, and other baseball acronyms, but I swear I’m not a nerd. I can talk to, you know, people. So I didn’t really know what my boss was getting at when he assigned me this essay. My task was to decide “Are nerds intelligent or are they just nerds?”

To splice the definition of Tolstoy’s unhappy family with the Supreme Court’s definition of pornography: Every nerd is nerdy in his own way, but you know one when you see one. The boss’ question was an interesting one, but I felt as though I stood accused. I’d been pegged as the office “nerd expert.” How did this happen? I set out to find an actual expert—preferably someone with a sophisticated, empirical understanding of all forms of intelligence.

I called PDRI, a firm that specializes in “psychometrics.” Founded in 1975, the company helps determine the ideal personality profile for employees of three branches of our armed services and measures job performance through video IQ and personality tests for other large governmental agencies, such as NASA, and corporations (Best Buy, Verizon). PDRI’s website proclaims, rather ominously, that the company has never “failed a legal challenge.”

PDRI occupies a small cluster of beige downtown Minneapolis offices, brightened only by a couple of ornate Persian rugs. It looks like a full-sized version of the office in Being John Malkovich. Only sixteen people work there, thirteen of them with PhDs. I met with Robert Schneider, a senior research scientist specializing in social intelligence who has a PhD in something called industrial/organizational psychology from the University of Minnesota.

“I confess,” Schneider began, “I haven’t done a professional study of nerds, but I assume you mean somebody with a high cognitive IQ and a low social intelligence.” Evidently, the study of social intelligence is almost as old as Alfred Binet’s study of cognitive intelligence or IQ. The term social intelligence was actually coined by John Dewey in 1909, before being seriously studied by the psychologist E. M. Thorndike in 1920. Initially, the correlation between IQ and social intelligence was very high, “but when you took away the pencils and paper,” Schneider says, “that correlation fell apart very quickly.” In other words, a guy dressed up as a Stormtrooper at a comic book convention could have a high IQ and low social intelligence or a low IQ and high social intelligence—and no actual Boba Fett DNA.

I explained that my understanding of nerd was based, like many Americans’, on a 1984 movie starring Robert Carradine, Anthony Edwards, and Ted McGinley. He was, of course, familiar with it. Revenge of the Nerds was a mildly radical agitprop picture advocating nerd rights and freedom from the fascist cabal of jocks and “the beautiful.” It wasn’t so much about the nerds’ IQ scores—they had a robot and somehow had access to a pharmaceutical compound able to neutralize alcohol’s impairment of tricycle riding—but, for the most part, they were picked on because they were geeks: the gay guy, the Japanese guy, the thirteen-year-old, the guys with thick glasses, high-waisted slacks, and uncooperative hairdos, and a guy nicknamed “Booger.” In fact, the movie explicitly associated the nerd’s plight with that of the black man’s (Lambda Lambda Lambda was, remember, a black fraternity), culminating in the impassioned plea of Gilbert (Anthony Edwards) at Adams College’s homecoming rally: “No one is really going to be free until nerd persecution has ended.”

For the most part, that persecution has ended. The two decades since have seen the rise of the Digital Age and the apotheosis of nerds Bill Gates and Quentin Tarantino. Previously, the nerd had been defined by the pursuit of esoteric knowledge at the expense of engaging in more popular activities. As Schneider says, “In order to achieve social competency, you have to socialize.” But today, the Internet has genuinely helped nerds with their social skills. The Web has given them forums and networks to plug into and engage in broader-based socialization, both on IM and in person, at gigantic national conventions. Also, high schools are now so competitive, so filled with type A’s vying for admission to elite colleges, that the stigma of nerd-dom has abated. (I’m not overlooking the sex appeal of Tarantino’s millions and Bill Gates’s billions.) 

Still, there was my good name, so I took Schneider’s social competency test.

And I aced it.

What are you looking at, nerd?