What do you think of when you imagine the act of thought? Western culture’s quintessential image of intelligence—Auguste Rodin’s sculpture The Thinker—depicts one man alone with his thoughts. A more accurate portrait of human intelligence might be called “The Thinkers”: two minds in dialogue. Human intelligence is a team sport. Great ideas are produced in conversation, by minds sharpening one another, reconciling differing perspectives, and sustaining focus longer than any one person can alone. Indeed, all intelligence is social intelligence.
Human cognition arose from our social nature. Among evolutionary anthropologists, there is general consensus on the social brain hypothesis, which posits that the human brain expanded to process complex social information as social group sizes increased. However, this hypothesis cannot fully explain why social intelligence is generalizable to all kinds of intelligence, such as tool use, memory, or abstract thought. The cultural brain hypothesis addresses this problem by suggesting that sociality did not simply make us better at socializing, but that it allowed us to exchange information about the nonhuman world that was essential to our survival. This hypothesis is supported by neurocognitive evidence showing that newborn infants have an innate neurological capacity for social learning. Individual knowledge accumulates across generations in a repository of knowledge: which mushrooms kill you, what the stars mean, how to thresh grain. Put simply, what makes humans the smartest species on the planet is our unique ability to pool our brainpower.
Psychologists Andy Clark and David Chalmers describe the ability to pool brainpower as ‘active externalism’: a process through which humans extend their cognitive systems outside their skulls using portable “modules” like notebooks and calculators. But before technology, our first mind expansions were other humans—they hypothesize that the brain evolved to facilitate this exact process. Perhaps this is why we can focus on abstract ideas for longer when we have an interlocutor as opposed to when we are alone: Playing catch is easier than juggling. This may also explain why the influence of language on human cognition is so well documented: Your thinking is shaped by the quirks of the language you were socialized into.
That intelligence is social is immediately obvious in nonliterate oral societies where almost all knowledge comes from other people. It is taught using mnemonic devices like stories and songs or learned by apprenticeship and repetition. Information transfer necessarily builds a relationship between student and teacher. These processes point to the necessity of human connection for intelligence. Many Native American philosophers, for example, view intelligence as the discovery of one’s place in a cosmological network of relationships, requiring moral character and social harmony to achieve. In an oral society, the man with no friends is an ignorant man because he has no way to learn except by his own experience.
If intelligence is inherently social, then how did modern Western culture come to view it as an individual trait? Certainly, there is no singular cause, but a structural one worth highlighting is the gradual shift from orality to literacy. If language is key to human cognition, so is its medium. In nonliterate societies, it is impossible to forget that knowledge is social, because if you want an answer, you have to question the expert face-to-face. Literacy is fundamentally different. It allows us to think in solitude, and while the written word is still technically socially transmitted, the reader usually does not have a direct relationship with the writer. The social and relational aspects of intelligence are still present in a literate society, but they are vastly deemphasized. As a result, intelligence is associated less with the other and more with the ego.
During the dawn of literacy in the first millennium BCE, orally transmitted knowledge was written down for the first time. As stories moved from tongues to tablets, literature shifted away from didactic legends about humans and gods to introspection of the individual psyche. Philosophy shifted as well: While Socrates, Confucius, and Jesus had delivered oral dialogues to be recorded by their students, their successors wrote alone. Anthropologists David Graeber and David Wengrow argue that to ancient philosophers achieving independent thought as an isolated individual was only considered achievable for the great mystics, but today, we assume everyone thinks in solitude.
This shift continued during the Enlightenment, when Western philosophers sought to replace the dogma of institutions in favor of the reasoning of the individual. As public education made literacy near-universal, Enlightenment reforms completed the West’s transition away from orality. Where the church and monarchy had previously held a monopoly over knowledge, the gospel of the Enlightenment held that every individual should become a self-directed thinker, whether in science, politics, or ethics. For example, philosopher Immanuel Kant defined enlightenment as breaking free from “the inability to use one’s own understanding without the guidance of another.” The problem is that Kant, and thinkers like him, threw the baby out with the bathwater. The Enlightenment thinkers were right to promote thinking critically against authority, but by conflating dependence on institutions with dependence on other minds, they dismissed the social foundation of cognition altogether. The result was the myth of a self-sufficient, egocentric thinker.
The Enlightenment’s egocentric model of intelligence is still influential today. Our cultural image of the genius is an exceptional, “gifted” man who is often aloof and antisocial—embodied in fictitious characters such as Sherlock Holmes and Sheldon Cooper or real-life technocrats such as Mark Zuckerberg and Elon Musk who move fast and break things. Intelligent people are imagined to be disharmonious rulebreakers, exemplified in phrases like “smart aleck” or “too smart for her own good.” When children misbehave in school, adults sometimes suppose that it is because they are too smart for school and feel bored. We presume that intelligence sets children apart from their peers, rather than drawing them closer.
What is to be done with such minds? Elevate them to the top of the meritocracy, of course. Our educational and economic system purports to identify the smartest minds in early adolescence and grant them access to elite colleges and jobs. Even if meritocracy does not always work this way in practice, most people view it as an equitable ideal: 70 percent of Americans believe that college admissions should be solely based on merit opposed to affirmative action. Technocracy—government by experts rather than elected officials—also has majority support in many countries worldwide. Whether or not these systems work as advertised, their value rests on the unquestioned premise that intelligence is an individual trait. But if intelligence is social, shaped by language, culture, and relationships, it is strange to think that one could uproot students from the social environment from which they derived their intelligence, place them like interchangeable widgets into entirely different social environments, and expect the same results. The reality is that even our ideal meritocratic system selects for a very narrow type of intellectual ability that comes from a very narrow set of social environments.
This conflation is not accidental: Rather, it is built into gifted and talented programs, which are mandated in 37 states, supported by pediatricians and nonprofits, and favored in the college admissions system. Standardized tests, which remain one of the most important metrics for college admissions, test the ability of individual students to think in isolation. Tests are also inherently designed to divide students—if everyone got a 1600, the SAT would be useless to admissions officers. Aside from misunderstanding the nature of intelligence, there is a real world danger that comes with teaching generations of children that their genius sets them apart from others: producing an arrogant class of übermensch (Nietzsche’s term for a “superman”) cognitive elites who believe they deserve their wealth and power.
But intelligence never stopped being social. Millions of years of human evolution have wired our brains to think in tandem with others. Humans cannot think without the guidance of others—as Kant suggests—for our cognition is shaped by the language and schemas of our culture. In the words of Isaac Newton, every genius has stood on the shoulders of giants. Brilliant science is meaningless if it is inaccessible to others; excellent music is worthless if nobody hears it. As the Apostle Paul said, “If I have the gift of prophecy and can fathom all mysteries and all knowledge, and if I have a faith that can move mountains, but do not have love, I am nothing.”
Intelligence is not a quality held just by individuals but by groups of minds large and small—from a jazz trio to a research lab to worldwide projects like Wikipedia. A well-constituted group is smarter than the sum of its parts, just as a group of intelligent minds can be surprisingly stupid when egos get in the way. You are not intelligent primarily because of your knowledge and ability: You are smart because you have a network of people around you who understand your thoughts and use them to act in the world. Intelligence is driven just as much by human connection, social harmony, and moral character as it is by logical reasoning.