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The No. 1 Hobby Most Highly Intelligent People Have, By A Psychologist
Forbes • • technology
Key Points:
- Research shows that the hobby most reliably associated with high intelligence is not demanding activities like chess, but rather ordinary leisure reading, which many adults tend to abandon.
- Unlike skills gained from focused cognitive training that rarely transfer beyond specific tasks, reading builds crystallized intelligence by steadily increasing knowledge and vocabulary over time.
- Studies indicate that print reading has a stronger link to comprehension than screen reading, and that volume and variety of reading matter more than the seriousness of material or format, with audiobooks also providing benefits.
- The underlying trait connected to this habit is "need for cognition," a stable tendency to enjoy effortful thinking, which drives people to read out of curiosity rather than to improve themselves.
- The key insight is that intelligence develops through sustained engagement with new information across a lifetime, making reading a low-effort but highly effective intellectual habit that many people stop practicing.
