Is it possible to determine if someone is intelligent or uneducated based solely on their speech without any prior knowledge of their background?

Determining the level of education from speech

The short answer to this question is that, in most cases, you can gain a good insight into a person’s level of education from their speech; however, assessing their intelligence is a greater challenge. Most of our judgements about the educational attainment or intelligence of others are intuitive. The more we observe our friends and colleagues, the more we intuit their educational and cognitive levels. Since those assessments are often made subconsciously, it is not always clear to us what criteria we’ve used in making these judgements. However, I’ll attempt to describe some general prominent criteria.

There is a dramatic difference in the way that most highly educated people express themselves compared to others. Imagine two males of different educational levels reporting to their friends about their visit to the mall to determine whether there was a special Black Friday offer on cellphone plans.

Male #1: So, I goes up to the chick at the cellphone booth and ask, “Do you got a special price for Black Friday?” She goes, “Ya, we got a 30% discount”, and I says “Awesome.”

Male #2: I went to the Ajax kiosk at the mall and asked the attendant whether they had a Black Friday special. She indicated that they were offering a 30% discount.

Which of these two males is the more educated? You will notice a distinct difference in phraseology, vocabulary and grammatical structure. Yet the more highly educated person did not need “big words” to express himself. His education was evident in his mode of expression.

This efficiency and clarity of expression comes from reading a lot of high quality prose such as found in great literature, research articles and books that are assigned in college courses. We learn language through assimilation. Those who are immersed in quality reading and associate with other highly educated people, acquire an articulate mode of expression through osmosis and convey this through their speech. Read your emails carefully and you will receive some scams that are easily identified by scrutinizing their grammar. Many of the scammers reveal their lack of education in the way they word their pitch.

Determining the level of intelligence from speech

Assessing a person’s intelligence from their speech is more difficult than assessing their level of education because intelligence has several dimensions. Psychologists assert that intelligence is the “sum” of two components: fluid intelligence (mainly hereditary) and crystallized intelligence (mainly acquired). Since crystallized intelligence is strongly correlated to educational attainment, it is relatively easy to assess a person’s crystallized intelligence through their speech (as described above).

However, assessing fluid intelligence from a person’s vocabulary, grammar or mode of expression is more difficult. There are many highly educated people of modest fluid intelligence and many people of high fluid intelligence who have limited educational attainment. Consequently, to obtain an assessment of their fluid intelligence, we have to investigate the content of their speech, i.e., the process by which they formulate their opinions, and the topics on which they focus.

Those with the greatest fluid intelligence are usually independent thinkers who challenge existing dogma and reach their own conclusions. They are the great scientists, entrepreneurs and literary giants. At the other end of the fluid intelligence spectrum are those who adopt their opinions from family and friends of the tribes to which they belong. To assess their fluid intelligence, ask them about their opinions on various issues. Probe their basis of certainty to determine how they reached that opinion. What kind of evidence do they marshal to support their position, or is it merely “gut feeling” or an osmotic absorption of popular opinion on that issue?

Then observe the content of their interests. Are they interested in the existential issues of the universe or entirely absorbed in the day-to-day issues. People of high fluid intelligence are usually fascinated by questions such as, “Can artificial intelligence ever become sentient?”, “By what process did the universe unfold?” and “What processes in human cell division cause cells to become cancerous?” Others often regard such questions as irrelevant to their lives.

A famous quote, attributed in various forms to Socrates, historian Henry Thomas Buckle and Eleanor Roosevelt captures a rough characterization of human intelligence by the content of their speech:

“Men and women arrange themselves into three classes or orders of intelligence; you can tell the lowest class by their habit of always talking about persons; the next by the fact that their habit is always to converse about things; the highest by their preference for the discussion of ideas.”