Paragons of intelligence: Who gets nominated and why.

Abstract

Implicit theories of intelligence were investigated by collecting both nominations and rankings of ideal exemplars. Study 1 involved a 5-wave survey of student judges (N =1174) asked to nominate a famous example of an intelligent person. Although the nominations were diverse, the set of most-frequent nominees was relatively stable across 16 years with Albert Einstein as the top nominee in every wave. Among living exemplars, the current u.S. President and Canadian and British Prime Ministers were consistently strong. It appears that four clusters of cultural exemplars persist over time. To control salience in Study 2 (N = 245), a fixed set of nominees were ranked. The highest ranked individuals virtually duplicated the popular nominees in Study 1. A number of idiosyncratic factors (familiarity, liking, occupational similarity, attitudinal similarity, sex-match) were shown to be associated with high nomination rates. The nomination process includes a tendency to select familiar and liked others as exemplars of intelligence.