Gavin Vance

That was of the four subcomponents in the measure that was the best one at predicting, you know, lower frequency of those negative behaviors and, you know, more relationship commitment.

Well, it absolutely could be something more complex, but I think your intuition is probably correct.

I know that there is research linking intelligence to greater impulse control.

I know

I'm getting a little bit out of my depth here, but I know, you know, greater prefrontal cortex development is associated with higher executive functioning, which sort of encompasses impulse control.

So, you know, the frontal region of your brain that's able to tamp down some of those more negative impulsive behaviors that probably is playing a role here.

Oh, it's interesting because I gave some answers to the guy who did the SciPost article recently.

Yes.

And one of the things I said, and I didn't exactly realize I was going to be direct quoted in his write-up, one of the things I said to him was that, you know, I think...

saying that intelligent men make better boyfriends is misleading because if you're using lower frequency of verbal abuse and sexual coercion toward your partner as criteria for good boyfriend, that may be sort of like a low threshold, depending on your criteria for what constitutes a good boyfriend or a good partner more generally.

So I think that that would be my main sort of pushback.

Yeah.

Yeah, I think that is a great takeaway.

Just general sort of ability to listen.

encounter new situations within the relationship and navigate them in a way that, you know, doesn't involve resorting to insults, controlling behaviors, things like that.

So if you read the introduction or the background literature to the paper, we do talk about some work that suggests, and it's largely, if I understand correctly, theoretical work saying that because intelligence evolved to deal with novel problems, so things that our ancestors would not have dealt with regularly or didn't evolve to deal with,

then general intelligence ability or intelligence shouldn't have any bearing on things that we did encounter regularly in our ancestral environment.

So things like navigating relationships, that would have been like one of those sorts of things.

So according to that theory, intelligence shouldn't have any relationship with relationship behaviors.