5 Social Signs of High Intelligence

Have you ever been at a party and wondered who the smartest person in the room is? Here’s what to look out for.

Photo of a feminine person with deep toned skin smiling and holding her index finger to her lips as she makes eye contact with the camera by Bjorn Pierre on Unsplash.

When you spend time in rooms full of adults, particularly the 25-and-up club, you start to notice certain patterns pop up, even across socioeconomic and some other cultural conditions.

Some of those patterns belong to intelligent people. While it can be difficult to directly compare one individual’s intelligence to another’s, it is possible to get a general sense of someone’s intelligence level. In particular, there are five types of clues that a highly intelligent person will give you when you interact with them socially.

1 — They talk less.

A smart person can learn, over repeated social interactions, that they tend to look better and be more successful if they are less talkative.

Brevity is the soul of wit. — William Shakespeare, Hamlet

When an intelligent person does speak, it’s almost never to utter a cliché, unless they’re participating in brief, scripted small talk. The thoughts they share add to the conversation and are gently unusual.

I find that this primarily holds true in group contexts, such as meetings or parties, because…