> My hypothesis is that being socially maladjusted is no more prevalent in gifted kids than it is in average kids.

I'm becoming more and more convinced that the problem with gifted kids, or those of higher intelligence in general, is indeed not that they're more likely to have certain problems, but rather their rational awareness of the problem, combined with a stronger reliance on that rational side of their brain. This can make problems worse for them.

I've had a number of friends who are not very intelligent. And I started noticing that it's primarily their response to problems that differs from mine and other more highly-educated friends of mine. I notice a general lack of awareness, introspection, and analysis of the problem.

This applies to fitting in socially, but also to many other 'typical' problems we humans tend to have: career paths, breakups, fights, work stress, difficult friendships, and addiction.

For better (and also worse), I notice that the less intelligent a person is, the more likely they are to just feel bad, confused, angry, fearful, and then shrug it off and move on. The upside is that they're less likely to get caught up in over-analyzing and identifying with their problem (which in my experience doesn't solve anything). But the downside is that they might never face and try to fix or learn to handle such a problem.

I used to think that this downside is a very big one, and 'intellectual awareness' is mostly a good thing. But now I'm not so sure anymore. Ignorance can be bliss, and it's really, really difficult to think clearly and objectively about our own problems anyways. Perhaps our 'awareness' is really just a more elaborate and ultimately ineffective way to deal with these problems.

Intelligent people are better, in general, at rational thinking (pattern recognition?). But underneath that we still have all the subconscious, irrational machinery, primitive urges and 'lizard brain' emotions. Perhaps the problem is that smart people overdevelop the rational side, which perhaps is also culturally encouraged, and never learn to just feel bad and move on.

For example, the friends that I would consider clearly less intelligent are more likely to just yell or get mad in a fight. They'll vent about what the other did wrong, how they were treated unfairly, etc. They might ignore this person, or engage in various forms of meanness. And then one day they're okay again, and they act as if nothing happened. They don't need to understand exactly what happened, and they seem on average less likely to carry grudges.

The more intelligent of my friends will engage in long conversations diving into the psychology of the situation: freudian underlying causes, patterns of behavior in this other person, past events and what they mean, future implications, labelling ('Well, I think she's kind of bipolar'), the contextual factors ('Well, he's going through some tough things at work').

On an intellectual level we now understand the situation and even sympathize or empathize with the person who did something bad to us. We feel pretty good about how reasonable we are. Our rational side is happy. But emotionally we're just mad, or scared, or upset and confused. Because we don't give these feelings space (unless we understand them, which is often difficult), we don't learn how to just have those feelings, and we build up complex coping mechanisms that appear to work, but easily lead to all kinds of bigger problems.

It reminds me a lot of the mechanics of addiction. The solutions are relatively simple (not easy though!), but in my experience those who stay stuck in addictions the longest are those who are overly rational about it. They might even have deep understanding of addiction, but paradoxically that knowledge seems to make it easier to remain addicted.

(As an aside, since this is a long-ass comment already, I can strongly recommend David Foster Wallace's biography. Reading it was confronting and enlightening, as it highlighted how a brilliant dude with exceptional knowledge of human behavior and addiction could nonetheless stay addicted and rationalize his behavior in some very dumb ways.)