2 ‘Weird Ticks’ Only Intelligent People Have, By A Psychologist

InnovationScience2 ‘Weird Ticks’ Only Intelligent People Have, By A PsychologistByMark Travers,Contributor.Forbes contributors publish independent expert analyses and insights. I write about relationships, personality, and everyday psychology.Follow AuthorMay 30, 2026, 04:15pm EDT--:-- / --:--This voice experience is generated by AI. Learn more.This voice experience is generated by AI. Learn more.Here’s why the most intelligent person you know sometimes acts like they don’t know or understand the fundamentals.gettyThere is a version of intelligence most people find easy to recognize: the person who is decisive, measured and rarely rattled by things outside their control. They make choices without visible struggle. They respond to difficult situations with proportionate calm. This image is intuitive. It is also, in large part, wrong.Research on high cognitive ability has produced a more complicated picture — one in which some of the habits most associated with intelligence look, on the surface, like the opposite. Two of these stand out because both tend to attract social friction and are routinely misread. And both have considerably more going on beneath the surface than the shorthand labels.1. Intelligent People Struggle To Let Things Go Until They Make ‘Sense’In my work as a psychologist, I regularly hear some version of the same complaint — not from the person experiencing it, but from the people around them. A conversation ends, a decision is made and most people move on. But one person at the table keeps returning to it: an explanation that did not quite add up, an argument that was closed without being resolved, a comment that sat strangely but nobody else seemed to notice. To those around them, it looks like an inability to let things go. To the person themselves, it often feels the same way.What is actually happening has a name in the psychological literature: need for cognition. It describes the dispositional tendency to seek out, engage in and enjoy effortf...