From: fuller@athena.cs.uga.edu (James P. H. Fuller)
Newsgroups: rec.org.mensa
Subject: Re: Being ashamed of being in Mensa
Date: 12 Aug 92 21:46:53 GMT
Organization: University of Georgia, Athens


I wrote:

>     The cliche of the poor maladjusted genius is just that, a cliche, a
> stock figure of second-rate comedies.  Historically the great majority of
> the most gifted people have moved through ordinary society without any dif-
> ficulty -- and in particular have had fewer, rather than more, problems
> than usual in locating and forming longstanding friendships with their
> peers.



werme@alliant.com (Ric Werme) replies:

 > Do you know of studies that show that?  I suspect historical sources
 > tend to record more gifted people who fit into society than those who
 > don't.  I've met a lot more maladjusted people in Mensa than I have in
 > the Granite State Wheelmen or the Souhegan Valley Chorus. 



And (considerably more rudely) cjdcosta@eos.ncsu.edu (CHRISTOPHER J DCOSTA)
pipes up:
 
 > You forgot to add: "....'Cos I sez so!"
 >
 > Or, "It's a known fact" ..or "Everybody knows that " .. 
 >
 > Would you care to document the sources on which you base your assertion?

   
   
    Certainly.  The basis of most modern generalizations about gifted 
persons is the immense longitudinal study of one thousand gifted California
children by Lewis M. Terman and his colleagues at Stanford, begun in the 
1920s and followed up at intervals throughout a large portion of the rest 
of the century.  Findings were published by Stanford University Press in a 
multivolume series with the overall series title _Genetic Studies of Genius_.
(Volume II is a special survey of historical personalities; Descartes, Con-
dorcet, Pitt, Chatterton, Burke, hundreds more.) The individual volumes, in
sequence, are:
 
 
       TITLE:  Mental and physical traits of a thousand gifted children   
               BF412.G328 V.1
      AUTHOR:  Terman, Lewis Madison                        
   PUBLISHED:  Stanford, Calif. Stanford University Press, 1925.             
               
               
       TITLE:  The early mental traits of three hundred geniuses
               BF412.G328 V.2
      AUTHOR:  Catherine M. Cox
   PUBLISHED:  Stanford, Calif. Stanford University Press, 1926
   

       TITLE:  The promise of youth: follou-up studies of a thousand 
               gifted children
               BF412.G328 V.3
      AUTHOR:  Burks, Barbara Stoddard; Jensen, Dorotha Williams; and
               Terman, Lewis Madison
   PUBLISHED:  Stanford, Calif. Stanford University Press, 1930
                                 
                                                                               
       TITLE:  The gifted child grows up : twenty-five years' follow-up of a 
               superior group  
               BF412.G328 V.4
      AUTHOR:  Terman, Lewis Madison                             
   PUBLISHED:  Stanford, Calif. Stanford University Press, c1947.            
       
       
      TITLE:  The gifted group at mid-life : thirty-five years' follow-up of
              the superior child 
              BF412.G328 V.5
     AUTHOR:  Terman, Lewis Madison                             
  PUBLISHED:  Stanford, Calif. : Stanford University Press, 1959.           
                                                                              
   
   Some conclusions of this study concerning the social and physical
characteristics of the mentally gifted:
   
    "The deviation of gifted children from the generality is in the upward
direction for nearly all traits; there is no law of compensation whereby the
intellectual superiority of the gifted is offset by inferiorities along
nonintellectual lines." (vol. V, introduction)

    "The examining physicians, notwithstanding occasional disagreement in
their results, were in complete accord in the belief that, on the whole,
the gifted children of this group were physically superior to unselected
children.
    The combined results of the medical examinations and the physical
measurements provide a striking contrast to the popular stereotype of the
child prodigy so commonly depicted as a pathetic creature, over-serious and
undersized, sickly, hollow-chested, stoop-shouldered, clumsy, nervously
tense, and bespectacled." (ibid.)

    "Many different types of data converge in showing that if the typical
member of our gifted group differs at all from the average child in his
social traits it is probably in the direction of superiority." (vol. III
p. 172)

    "Children above 140 IQ are not as a group characterized by intellec-
tual one-sidedness, emotional instability, lack of sociality or of social
adaptability, or other types of maladjusted personality.  Indeed in prac-
tically every personality and character trait such children average much
better than the general school population." (ibid., p.473)

    "It is to be hoped that the superstitions so commonly accepted relative
to intellectually superior children have been permanently swept away by
the factual data these studies have presented.  It is simply not true that
such children are especially prone to be puny, over-specialized in their
abilities and interests, emotionally unstable, socially unadaptable, psy-
chotic and morally undependable." (ibid., p.474)



   The findings of Terman et al. have been replicated and supported again 
and again.  Below are a few of the hundreds of such references that exist:

   ** Lightfoot, G. P., Personality Characteristics of Bright and Dull
        Children.  _Contributions to Education_ no. 969, Bureau of Publica-
        tions, Teachers College, Columbia University, New York, 1951
     
        (Superior traits of the gifted were comparable to Terman's earlier
         findings.)
       
       
   ** Liddle, Gordon, Overlap among Desirable and Undesirable Characteristics
        in Gifted Children.  _Journal of Educational Psychology_ v.49 (1958)
        pp.219-223
     
        (Intellectual talent found to be significantly correlated with
         other talents and negatively correlated with maladjustment.)
         
         
   ** Barbe, W. B., Characteristics of Gifted Children.  _Educational Admin-
        istration and Supervision_ v.38 (1952) pp.148-152
        
        (Bright children were better liked and were more frequently chosen
         by average children as friends than slow learners.)
         
         
   ** Grace, H. A., and Booth, Nancy L., Is the Gifted Child a Social
        Isolate? _Peabody Journal of Education_ v.35 (1958) pp.195-6)
        
        (Of 294 children, grades 1 through 6 in urban schools, 8 of
         the most popular were among the most gifted; none of the most
         popular were among the least gifted.  The gifted child did not
         prove to be a social isolate in elementary school.)
         
         
   ** Williams, M. F., Acceptance and Performance among Gifted Elemen-
        tary School Students.  _Ohio State University Educational Re-
        search Bulletin_ v.37 (1958) pp.216-220,224)
        
        (A study of social acceptance of gifted children, showing a
         positive correlation between group acceptance and academic
         performance.)
         
         
   ** Hildreth, G. F., _Introduction to the Gifted_  McGraw-Hill,
        New York 1966 p.97
        
        (At Public School 115, Brooklyn, New York, children in the top
         two classes of a giftedness scale were chosen overwhelmingly as
         associates by children in other classes.)
         
         
         
    I could go on and on but I won't.  However, it is a simple fact that
(as I wrote) the cliche of the poor maladjusted genius is just that, a 
cliche, a stock figure of second-rate comedies.  This is an extremely well-
researched and thoroughly documented finding and I would have thought it
known to any educated person, let alone a Mensan.

   Of course this doesn't prove that there aren't *any* unpopular dorks
and dweebs with high IQs.  Of course there are -- but if such people are
unpopular it isn't merely because they're smart, it's because they've found
other methods of being unpleasant.  (And work these methods overtime, as
like as not.)



   Finally, one more reference which I hope will be especially useful to
cjdcosta@eos.ncsu.edu (CHRISTOPHER J DCOSTA):

       TITLE:  Teaching gifted elementary pupils how to do research      
               LB1555.T67                                                                
      AUTHOR:  Torrance, E. Paul and Myers, R. E.                         
   PUBLISHED:  Minneapolis, Perceptive Publishing Company, c1962.            
                                                                               


                                                   -- jf
                                                   
                                      (non-Mensan interloper)


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