Game Theory - Among Us, Your 900 IQ Means NOTHING!

Episode Date: August 29, 2023

Join Game Theory Host MatPat as he discusses just how BIG brain Among Us can get! Credits: Writers: Matthew Patrick and Justin Kuiper   Editors: Dan "Cybert" Seibert, Tyler Mascola, Pedro Freitas, and Shannon (Bomb0i) Assistant Editor: AlyssaBeCrazy Sound Editor: Yosi Berman

Alright, tell me what happened here. It all happened so fast. One minute I was standing with Pink and Electrical, just the two of us, all alone. I turned around to fix some wires, and when I turned back around the body was sitting right there. Green, what you see? Look, I just saw Red and Pink go into Electrical together, and that's it. No one else came in or out. So our possible list of killers is... You, Red. It wasn't me? You've gotta believe me. I didn't see what happened. Think I've heard enough. Green, you can go. Wait for me at security.

It wasn't me, I swear. I didn't kill Pink. I didn't. Shh, not so loud. I know you didn't kill Pink. I know you're innocent, Red, but I had to talk to you alone without green hearing. Why? So I could do this. Oh, internet. Welcome to Game Theory. The show that aims to make you a big-brained gamer. And speaking of big-brain moves, in the past year, no game has become more famous for Big Brain plays than Among Us.

I'm gonna cross YouTube, the IQ escalation for Among Us has been unreal. And of course, no one can compare to Disguise Toast, who back in August was pulling off 200, IQ strats, but has gradually leveled up his skills to the 5,000 plus range. That, my friends, is what we call power creep. Something that Toast as a hearthstone player should know a thing or two about. Also, fun fact, did you know that the name Disguised Toast is actually a reference to a line from a hearthstone card? Ha, this guy's Toast. More you know.

But for as much of a meme as High IQ plays and among us have become, does High IQ actually matter in the game? Is IQ really the thing that's gonna help you win something that's all of a really? about social deduction and deception. And if it's not, then what do we need to win? That, my friends, is our big-brained question of the day. And to untangle the knot, we first need to understand what exactly IQ is measuring in the first place. IQ is short for intelligence quotient and is designed to measure human intelligence.

No doubt, right? Everyone knows that. But do they understand that? Because IQ isn't actually what a lot of people assume it is. Examples of questions that you might encounter on an IQ test are things like this. Which number should come next in the following pattern? 4, 10, 22, 46. If you recognize that each number in the sequence is multiplied by two and then added to two, congratulations, a winner is you.

The answer is 94. Here's another one. Book is to reading as fork is to, the answer here is eating. It's a basic analogy, like the type you'd see on a standardized test, like the SATs. You use a book to read, you use a fork to eat. Now, if questions like these strike you as incredibly basic, almost the kind of thing that a grade schooler could do, well, it's kind of the point. For example, questions like, what year was the Declaration of Independence signed or

what city is the capital of Poland don't really test how good you are thinking. They're mostly measures of whether you memorized a fact well enough to regurgitate it. It's pure trivia. Likewise, during an IQ test, you're probably not going to get quizzed on the quadratic formula or the chemical composition of table salt. IQ's aim is to be a measure of human intelligence, not necessarily human knowledge or experience. The idea is that while people accumulate knowledge throughout their lifetime, intelligence is innate problem-solving. It's believed to be something that you just have and something that remains relatively consistent throughout your life.

And research actually supports this. IQ researchers have found that people who are tested for IQ when they're young tend to maintain similar scores as they get older. And studying also doesn't seem to help all that much. A 1995 study found that subjects who underwent rigorous test prep did score higher on IQ tests, but the improvement was relatively small, between two and six points. It's not a whole heck of a lot when you consider that IQ is measured on a scale that goes up to around 200. And if you're wondering why I said it goes up to around 200 points, it's because the scale is constantly getting recalibrated.

100 is meant to be the baseline, representing the average IQ, and 68.26% of people fall between 85 and 115. But what that score of 100 means has actually shifted over the years. A study comparing children's test scores in 2008 to test scores in 1942 found that moderate, were scoring an average of 14 points higher than their old school counterparts. If you're looking for an explanation as to why, one explanation that researchers came up with was that during the 20th century, people were powering their cars with leaded gasoline. And it turns out that lead is, go figure, really toxic and causes permanent brain damage.

The US didn't ban the sale of leaded fuel until 1996. 1996, man, wow. It got banned in the EU even later in 2000. We've also gotten better about banning things like leaded paint. So it turns out that when people aren't breathing in neurotoxins, they happen to score better on tests designed to measure brain function. Who would have guessed? Anyway, to give a few reference points for what high IQ actually means, a score of 120 indicates that someone scored higher than 90% of people. Well, an IQ of 125 indicates that he scored higher than 95% of people. 135 IQ puts you in the top 1%, 146 IQ puts you at the top 0.1% and someone with 2, 2, 200 IQ would be smarter than 99.99999997% of humanity. In fact, as of right now, it is literally impossible to score 250 IQ on the test,

because it's a measure of how much smarter you are compared to other people. To be precise for all the stat nerds out there, it's based on how many standard deviations separate you are from the mean. Which means that there literally aren't enough people on planet Earth to get you to a score that high. So, Disguise Toast actually had it right the first time. 200 IQ, smart play, but still within the realm of possibility. And every video title after that has just been clickbait. We're included in that category, too, to be honest. True story, we actually debated whether or not we wanted to keep it accurate to true IQ scores,

but we decided not to and just play along with the memes. Meanwhile, we all just need to tremble in fear, considering that Al-A-Kazam, the Pokemon, apparently, according to the Pocatex, has an IQ of 5,000. So that's a little bit about IQ, but can having a higher IQ actually make you better at video games? Yes. Or, to be more precise, better at certain kinds of video games. In a series of studies, researchers at University of York found that among both League of Legends and Dota 2 players, the higher you go in matchmaking rank, the higher the average IQ of the player becomes. The thought is that because League of Legends and Dota are at their core real-time strategy games involving lots of complex decisions and short time frames,

having a turbo-powered brain really helps out. On the other hand, the same researchers looked at data from first-person, shooter players and found different results there. Apparently, when it comes to FPS games, the biggest predictor of good performance isn't IQ, it's actually age. People who did best were younger players whose more nimble fingers and quicker reflexes put them at an advantage. So how does Among Us fit into all this? Well, the most important part of Among Us is the team meeting, where the main skill being tested is social deduction, how good you are at deceiving people as an imposter, and how good you are at spotting lies as a crew member. So do the high IQ players really have the

advantage when it comes to that part of the game. As it turns out, yeah. Research shows that a higher IQ tends to come bundled with better theory of mind. Basically, theory of mind is your ability to understand what other people are thinking. You're able to predict or intuit the thoughts and reactions of other people, which in turn lets you model your behavior based on how they're going to respond. It's basically in a strategy game when you're thinking three moves ahead, or those moments when you say, ha!

I knew you would do that. That's why I laid my trap there. It's pretty critical to any game that involves trying to outsmart another player. It's sort of putting yourself in the other player's shoes. A sort of, if I do X, then knowing what I know about that person, I can predict that they would most likely respond by doing Y. In a game of Among Us, this could be as simple as realizing that Pokey Main was suspicious of Toast the entire game. Which means that if I kill and report a body in a place near where Toast is hanging out,

Pokemon will most likely try to vote Toast into the lava. And in turn, Poki could apply theory of mind in response to that, realizing, wait a minute, if the imposter knows that I've been suspicious of Toast the entire game, they might try to frame him in the next kill. So I should probably be a bit skeptical of anyone who reports a body near Toast. That kind of game of cat and mouse is all about understanding how other people think and using that to predict their behavior, aka Theory of Mind. So what does this all tell us?

Well, it seems that the high IQ players might truly be the elite among us in Among Us. Except there's one other group that may be able to beat them. The only thing stronger than being smart is being a wizard. You're a wizard, Harry. Seriously, let me introduce you to the strange science of truth wizards. Yes, this is a real scientific thing, and yes, the academic name is Truth Wizard. So on a previous episode of Game Theory all about the strategy of Among Us, I mentioned that people, on average, are really bad at detecting lies.

In a test where people were asked to judge a series of statements as truth or lies, they guessed correctly 54% of the time, barely better than the 50% you'd expect from random chance. So humans are bad at detecting lies, in general. Further research on the subject found that a few people are absolute wizards when it comes to spotting lies. Quote from the study, wizards of deception detection are rare individuals who achieve scores of 80% or higher. Most people's accuracy on these tests is about 50%, as would be expected by chance alone. Of more than 15,000 people tested, only 47 have been classified. Basically, these people are natural-born lie detectors.

Now, being a wizard comes with a few caveats. These rare individuals have a harder time evaluating strangers. They also tend to work better if they're able to use facial expressions, because a lot of their abilities come with recognizing micro-level changes to vocal and physical cues. The better grasp these wizards have on a person's normal speech patterns, the easier it is for them to tell when they're that person's speech is different from normal. It might come in real handy if you find yourself sitting across the table from a possible liar,

but in a typical game of Among Us, you're not going to have any chance to read a person's facial expressions. At best, you have yourself the voice chat. So, am I saying that you either have to be super smart or a literal wizard to be good at Among Us? Of course not. For instance, if you want to do better at an IQ test, one of the most effective ways is to simply try harder. Yep, in a study done on IQ scores, it found that when people were offered incentives, like receiving,

leaving money as a reward for higher scores, it resulted in an average score increase of as much as 10 points, better than when they heavily studied like we talked about earlier. Which means that the single best way to get good in an IQ test is by, you know, playing with Mr. Beast. Winners get $10,000 if they beat me in a game of rock, paper, scissors. But in all seriousness, the biggest and most important factor is practice. You could take the biggest brained genius in the world and put them in front of a computer, and they're probably not going to do too hot at their first game of Among Us, especially compared to someone who who's had like even a dozen games under their belt.

Consider a game like chess, which seems like the ultimate thinking man's game. You'd think that high IQ players would have an advantage in chess, and you'd be right, but only to a certain point. As it turns out, raw intelligence is no match for experience. Research found that practice accounted for 34% of the variance in skill levels between chess players, while difference in intelligence only accounted for 5%. Much like being born naturally tall doesn't automatically make you a good basketball player, Being born with naturally high intelligence doesn't automatically make you good at games like chess or among us.

You may start with an advantage with a higher IQ, but how you choose to apply it makes all the difference in the world. As it turns out, raw intelligence is no match for experience. But hey, that's just a theory. A game theory. Thanks for watching.