High IQ equals low piracy rate, study finds, but SA bucks trend

A new study has found “strong support” that a high national IQ often results in low piracy rates.

The study, titled ‘Intelligence and Crime: A novel evidence for software piracy‘, used IQ and piracy data from 2011 for 102 countries. So what did the researchers find?

“Our findings offer strong support for the assertion that intelligence is inversely related to the software piracy rates,” read an excerpt of the paper.

“After controlling for the potential effect of outlier nations in the sample, software piracy rate declines by about 5.3 percentage points if national IQ increases by 10 points.”

Who are these “outlier” nations though? None other than South Africa and China.

The researchers found that South Africa had a low national IQ and a low piracy rate. The opposite was the case for China though, which had a high national IQ and a high piracy rate.

The study concluded that a high national IQ has a “statistically significant negative impact” on piracy rates.

“…This should not be taken as universal evidence that (a) society with (a) higher intelligent quotient is a requirement to alleviate software piracy,” the researchers explained.

“Our findings indicate that if (the) ruling elite enforces policies to decrease software piracy, intelligence provides a credible proxy of the degree of consent of such policies.”

Featured image: nrkbeta via Flickr