Several large studies have found that people with higher childhood intelligence or more education tend to drink alcohol more often as adults, and that brighter people are more likely to prefer wine. But "drink more" usually means more frequent or slightly higher overall drinking, not alcoholism, and nobody has shown that intelligence causes drinking. Income, social life, curiosity and culture all play a part. And whatever the correlation, alcohol is no friend to the brain.
What the main studies found
The idea that clever people drink more comes from a handful of studies that made headlines in the 2010s. Here is what each actually found.
British and American children followed into adulthood
In 2010, evolutionary psychologist Satoshi Kanazawa and Josephine Hellberg of the London School of Economics published a paper in the Review of General Psychology using two large, long-running datasets: the UK's National Child Development Study, which has followed people born in one week of 1958, and the US National Longitudinal Study of Adolescent Health (Add Health). Children were grouped by tested intelligence into five bands, from "very dull" (IQ below 75) to "very bright" (above 125).
In both countries, higher childhood intelligence predicted more frequent and heavier alcohol consumption in adulthood. In the British data, the brightest group drank noticeably more than the lowest group in their 20s, 30s and 40s, and the authors reported that the link held after controlling for factors such as social class, parents' education and adult income. Intelligence also predicted more smoking in the US sample and more illegal drug use in the UK sample.
Kanazawa's charts from the British data show the gap growing with each step up the intelligence scale, with the "very bright" group drinking substantially more than the "very dull" group.
The American Add Health data showed a similar pattern for frequency of drinking and binge drinking among young people.
Education and drinking in the 1970 British Cohort
A separate LSE study, by Francesca Borgonovi and Maria Huerta, appeared in Social Science & Medicine in 2010. It used the 1970 British Cohort Study, which follows people born in a single week of 1970, and looked at them at age 34. Higher education and higher childhood test scores were linked with greater odds of daily drinking and problem drinking, and the link was much stronger for women. Press reports at the time said college-educated women were almost twice as likely to drink daily as women with less education. For men, the association with qualifications was weak or absent.
Finnish twins who talked early
One weakness of studies comparing different people is that families differ in countless ways. A Finnish team led by Antti Latvala tackled that by studying thousands of twins from the FinnTwin12 and FinnTwin16 cohorts, published in Alcoholism: Clinical and Experimental Research in 2013–14. Within twin pairs, the twin with better early verbal development (talking or reading earlier, or stronger language skills at school age) went on to drink more often and get drunk more often in adolescence and young adulthood.
Importantly, most of that drinking did not meet the criteria for an alcohol use disorder. The verbally advanced twins also had more friends who drank and reported more sensation seeking. As Latvala put it: "Peer associations and the tendency to seek novel experiences may in part explain the link."
Danish men and the taste for wine
In 2005, Laust Mortensen and colleagues reported in the journal Addiction on 1,799 Danish men whose IQ had been measured as young adults. Higher IQ was linked with a later preference for wine over beer and spirits, in a dose-response pattern. The association weakened, though it did not vanish, once the researchers accounted for social and economic position. Crucially, IQ was not associated with heavy drinking.
Why might brighter people drink more?
Kanazawa explains his results with what he calls the Savanna-IQ Interaction Hypothesis. The argument runs like this: general intelligence evolved to help our ancestors solve new, unfamiliar problems, so more intelligent people are more likely to adopt "evolutionarily novel" behaviours. Alcohol, tobacco and drugs are recent in human history, so, he argues, smarter people are more open to them.
It is a provocative idea, but it is far from settled. Kanazawa's work has been heavily criticised by other researchers for over-reaching interpretations, and in 2011 he became the subject of a major controversy over a blog post about race, after which the LSE barred him from publishing in non-peer-reviewed outlets for a year. That does not make his alcohol analysis wrong, but it is a reason to treat the evolutionary explanation as one hypothesis among several.
Other explanations are more down to earth:
- Curiosity and sensation seeking. The Finnish twin study points to novelty seeking and social circles.
- Money and lifestyle. Better-educated people often earn more, socialise more over drinks and work in cultures where after-work drinking is normal.
- University culture. Many people's drinking habits are shaped at college, where heavy social drinking is common.
- Taste and status. Wine preference in particular tracks education and income, which the Danish study partly confirmed.
A short history of humans and alcohol
Humans have probably been encountering alcohol for as long as we have eaten fruit. Wild yeasts ferment the sugars in ripe and fallen fruit into ethanol, usually at low concentrations of a few percent at most. Some scientists think our ancestors' attraction to the smell of ripening fruit may have primed us to enjoy alcohol long before anyone brewed it deliberately.
Intentional brewing is ancient. Chemical traces from pottery at Jiahu in China suggest a fermented drink of rice, honey and fruit around 7000 BC, and beer and wine were well established in Mesopotamia and Egypt thousands of years ago. Distilled spirits came much later; distillation of alcohol became widespread in the medieval period.
Typical strengths today: most beers contain about 4–6% alcohol, most wines 11–15%, and most spirits around 35–50%, with a few specialist products much higher. So, in evolutionary terms, regular access to strong drinks really is new, which is the part of Kanazawa's argument that is not in dispute.
Common myths about intelligence and drinking
Myth: drinking makes you smarter. The studies run the other way: intelligence measured in childhood predicts later drinking. Nothing suggests alcohol raises intelligence, and heavy drinking is linked with memory problems and brain damage over time.
Myth: smart people are more likely to become alcoholics. The evidence here is mixed. The Danish study found no link between IQ and heavy drinking, and the Finnish twins mostly did not develop drinking disorders. Some other research links lower cognitive ability with alcohol-related injuries and deaths.
Myth: wine drinkers are healthier because of the wine. Part of the apparent health advantage of wine drinkers seems to come from who they are: on average better educated, wealthier and psychologically healthier. That is a classic confounder.
Myth: correlation tells you about individuals. These are averages across thousands of people. Plenty of brilliant people never drink, and drinking a lot says nothing good about anyone's intelligence.
What this means for you
If you recognise yourself in these findings, the practical takeaway is not to feel flattered, but to pay attention. Curious, sociable, high-achieving people can drift into frequent drinking because it is woven into work events, dinners and celebrations.
- Know the guidelines. The UK's Chief Medical Officers advise drinking no more than 14 units a week, spread over several days, and the World Health Organization has said there is no level of drinking that is completely safe for health.
- Watch the frequency. The studies above are mostly about drinking often. Several alcohol-free days a week is a simple safeguard.
- Feed curiosity in other ways. If novelty seeking is part of the story, new hobbies, travel, sport and learning can scratch the same itch.
- Ask for help early. If you are worried about how much you drink, talk to a doctor. Early support is far easier than tackling a problem later.
Intelligence may shape the choices people make, but it does not protect anyone from the effects of alcohol. The smartest move is still to drink with your eyes open, or not at all.
Sources: Kanazawa & Hellberg, Intelligence and substance use, Review of General Psychology (2010); Borgonovi & Huerta, Education, alcohol use and abuse among young adults in Britain, Social Science & Medicine (2010); WIA Report on the LSE study; ATTC: Childhood verbal skills linked to later drinking (Latvala et al.); TIME Healthland on the Finnish twin study; Mortensen et al., Intelligence in relation to later beverage preference and alcohol intake, Addiction (2005); Wikipedia: Satoshi Kanazawa. Charts from Satoshi Kanazawa's analyses of NCDS and Add Health data. Original report: I Heart Intelligence.
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