It may well be that higher anxiety people are more likely to join Mensa.

I'd honestly be surprised if there weren't a correlation between distressed/disordered thinking of some kind and joining Mensa.

That sounds counterintuitive to me. "People with anxiety are more likely to join a community."

Not really, people with anxiety are often looking for self-validation and self-affirmation. Joining a community that screams "we're more intelligent than 99% of the population" sounds like a fair way to go with that anxiety.

You would be amazed in this instance. Mensa has a reputation for being very 'superior', very 'elitist', and that's the type of organization that is more likely to attract the more typically anxious or neurotic personalities.

Why? Communities allow people to work together to deal with shared problems -- like anxiety or not fitting in elsewhere.

Ehh, as someone with anxiety, it’s not that straightforward. Maybe you join it to socialize and improve your self esteem.

Granted, the members I know just really like puzzles.

>Secondly, I have concerns about the sample. This wasn’t a study of high-IQ people. It was a study of Mensans, a self-selected subgroup of high-IQ people

Sounds like a BS reason to dismiss the findings.

Any reason to believe that this "self-selection" has any impact on the people involved regarding "regular" non-mensa high IQ people?

>In other words, Mensans make up about 0.8% of high-IQs, and Karpinski et al. have data from less than 10% of Mensans, so the sample is seriously unrepresentative.

Again, BS.

0.08% can still be a perfectly valid sample.

The only valid reason to dismiss it would be not its size, but whether Mensans are for some reason widely non-representative of hi-iq people at large.

No, the "methodology" of using a very self-selected group to represent the whole is certainly and unambiguously complete methodological bullshit. The problem is known as "confounding variables" or "common latent cause". For example, people with anxiety and depression may be more likely to join a club like Mensa.

There's certainly interesting questions to explore here, but we shouldn't settle for this extremely weak sort of study. The authors are doing the best they can, but we should take this paper as a indication that further research in this area would be fruitful, not as an accurate measurement of the nature of reality.

>For example, people with anxiety and depression may be more likely to join a club like Mensa.

I already covered that though -- and said that if there was a reason to suspect a problem with the selection, then that would be an argument (and would have to be explicitly brought forth as such).

Alone that Mensa is a small subset of the high IQ population (as was put forth) is not.

> Any reason to believe that this "self-selection" has any impact on the people involved regarding "regular" non-mensa high IQ people?

Insecure people could prefer to counter their insecurity by hard to obtain status symbols such as Mensa membership.