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Some sites claim that people with higher intelligence tend to go to bed later.

For example:

People with higher IQs are more apt to be nocturnal night-owls. Those with lower IQs tend to restrict their activities primarily to daytime. People who prefer to go to bed early, and who are early-risers, demonstrate "morningness," whereas those whose sleep patterns are shifted later demonstrate "eveningness." Researchers say eveningness tends to be a characteristic of those with higher IQs.

Recently, scientists discovered a quirky side effect to having a high IQ: You tend to stay up until later hours and get up later in the morning.

With marginal 'evidence' and no reason why this is like this (except for a nonsense reason along the lines that humans are not nocturnal; so to change that habit you must have some intelligence. To me, this sounds like a terrible explanation).

In my own circle of acquaintances, I've noticed that the more intelligent people tend sleep later than other people. The most common reason I heard is something along the lines of "I think too much at night." Of course it's well known that people with problems/depression have more trouble sleeping, because of this reason (they think about the problems too much).

Do intelligent people sleep later; and why?

OmnipresentAbsence
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  • What "sleep later" means? – Carlo Alterego Mar 02 '13 at 21:10
  • I think it means, "intelligent people" are more nocturnal than people not considered intelligent. I think it might partially be because standard stereotype of "intelligent people" tend to be introvert, and during night there is not any other people around which allows them to be alone. This is just speculations though. I have two questions about the question. "What is intelligent?" "What is later?" – Wertilq Mar 02 '13 at 21:13
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    Because the early worm deserves the bird? – dmckee --- ex-moderator kitten Mar 02 '13 at 23:04
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    This is one of those questions where we can just quote your own references back at you. The Winnipeg Free Press article quotes from several scientists that have confirmed the correlation. The Cracked article links directly to a PDF that explores several of the explanations that have been suggested, conducts an experiment which provides support for the Savanna–IQ Interaction Hypothesis, but calls for more study as it isn't conclusive. Have you looked at these already? – Oddthinking Mar 03 '13 at 02:33
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    Can we change the wording from *intelligent people* to "people with high IQ"? I do not think the two necessarily coincide. – nico Mar 03 '13 at 09:25
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    @nico I don't think that would be a good idea. While one can argue that the IQ-test is not a perfect measurement of intelligence, (almost) no test is a perfect measurement of what's tested. You also never hear people say '*X* is good at math tests' instead of the simple '*X* is good at math'. – OmnipresentAbsence Mar 03 '13 at 14:46
  • OmnipresentAbsence, I think [this](http://en.wikiversity.org/wiki/Howard_Gardner%27s_Nine_Types_of_Intelligence) is what @nico is referring to – Benjol Mar 05 '13 at 10:24
  • @Benjol Well, that seems extremely stupid and pseudoscientific. I'd much rather just keep it *intelligent*, which would roughly mean the logical-mathematical intelligence or whatever it is called in that article. Come on. – OmnipresentAbsence Mar 05 '13 at 13:41
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    @Benjol: no, not really referring to that. The problem is that you can clearly define "being good at math" as "being able to easily solve math problem", while a clear definition of "being intelligent" seems to be lacking. – nico Mar 05 '13 at 13:54
  • @OmnipresentAbsence: analogy would rather be *"X is good at counting"* vs *"X is good at math"*. You don't see Rainman solve differential equations :-P IQ does correlate with various definitions of intelligence, but by far it's not 100% correlation. – vartec Mar 06 '13 at 10:14
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    I've definitely seen studies supporting something of the sort: more high IQ individuals tend to be night owls, and high IQ individuals, on average, go to sleep later than the rest of the populace (I wonder if this is because they're more introverted). I don't have the time to dig out the study, however. – josh Mar 06 '13 at 16:30
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    *"people not considered"* Whenever I see this word used in the abstract this way I want to grad the offender and shout in his or her face "Who is doing the considering, already?!?" As far as I am concern it is a channel marker for wooly thinking. And yes, I'm looking at you Dr Dijkstra. Can we do something about this sloppy usage here? – dmckee --- ex-moderator kitten Dec 09 '13 at 02:29
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    @nico Perhaps the right metric and dataset (SO users?) would make this into a testable hypothesis – Abe Jan 11 '14 at 07:15
  • I find it hilarious that people still think 'being good at math' is the measure of intelligence. – Waterseas May 15 '14 at 17:23

1 Answers1

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There are several papers which support this claim:

420 participants performed two self-report inventories assessing circadian type, as well as measures of intelligence from two psychometric batteries: CAM-IV and the ASVAB. The results indicate that, contrary to conventional folk wisdom, evening-types are more likely to have higher intelligence scores. This result is discussed in relation to current theories concerning the nature of human cognitive abilities.

Source: Roberts RD, Kyllonen PC. Morningness-eveningness and intelligence: early to bed, early to rise will likely make you anything but wise! Pers Individ Dif. 2000;27(6):1123-33. PubMed PMID: 11542922.

The psychophysiological data derived in this study suggests that evening types typically outperform morning types in various measures such working memory capacity and verbal intelligence simply because they invest more cognitive resources than morning types.

Source: Nowack K, van der Meer E. Impact of chronotype and time perspective on the processing of scripts. Int J Psychophysiol. 2014 May;92(2):49-58. doi: 10.1016/j.ijpsycho.2014.02.004. PubMed PMID: 24548429.

Cornelius
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