Intelligence and Suggestibility

Abstract

The article deals with the mechanisms of suggestibility in connection with psychometric intelligence. The author hypothesises that the connection between intelligence and suggestibility is mediated by the structure of personal representations. In terms of cognitive theories, the person's representations of the world are a net or a space that includes numerous elements linked to each other in various ways. It can be expected that more intellectually gifted people would have a wider range of causal connections. If this is true, in the higher intelligence cases, altering one element of the representation system would cause changes in a more distant element of the system. On the opposite, in the cases of a relatively low intelligence, altering one element of the representation system would cause changes of closer elements. The study has been conducted to test this hypothesis.