Are you messy and disorganized? Do you stay up late most nights? Last one—Would even a sailor be surprised at your mouth? Well now, you can tell your family that it’s not that you’re ‘unladylike’ (whatever that means), it’s that you’re intelligent! Studies show that these traits—being a night owl, cursing and messiness—are associated with more creativity and higher IQs, according to Business Insider.
Universities are obviously full of smart people who love learning, so it makes sense that late nights are a staple of college life. There isn’t an explanation yet as to why night owls have might tend toward higher IQs—Most studies, like this one from Psychology Today, just show that the more intelligent a child is, the more nocturnal they'll be as an adult.
While many still associate a dirty mouth with a lack of vocabulary, studies are proving that theory wrong. Psychologists from Marist who studied the subject actually suggest that people who know more dirty words are more intelligent. In the study, people were asked to name all the curse words they knew. Based on what the researchers knew about their vocabulary size, they found the larger the vocabulary, the more curse words the subject knew. It actually goes more like this: The more curses you know, the more words you probably know overall.
Best of all, messy desks are not a show of weakness but of a highly creative thought process. A study by the University of Minnesota shows that messier desks are more likely to inspire new ideas. Researchers put people into rooms and asked them to come up with new uses for ping pong balls, some with neat desks, others in messy ones. The groups came up with around the same number of uses but when rated, the ones with messier desks were seen to have more creative ideas. Studies also show messier people also score higher on verbal IQ tests and have broader ranges of interest.
Thank you, science. Now I can finally tell my grandmother that all my flaws are just signs of my high intelligence!