Am I gifted?

For each statement, choose how well it describes you. There are no right answers, and nothing is stored. A statement counts as a match when you pick “Mostly” or “Very me”.

Being "gifted" as an adult usually means an IQ of about 130 or higher, which is roughly the top 2% of people. The only way to know your IQ is a supervised test given by a psychologist. A quiz about traits cannot tell you, because how you describe yourself relates only weakly to how you score.

What a trait quiz can do is show how much you recognise yourself in the description researchers give of gifted adults: fast learning, deep curiosity, intensity and a sense of being out of step. That is a useful thing to know, and it is a different thing from an IQ.

There is no single definition. The most common one is a score of about 130 or higher on an IQ test, roughly the top 2.3% of people. Mensa sets its bar at the top 2%, which works out at about 131 on the standard scale.

Researchers also argue that IQ is not the whole story. Joseph Renzulli's three-ring model says the giftedness that leads to achievement is where above-average ability, commitment to a task and creativity overlap. François Gagné separates natural ability, which he calls giftedness, from the developed skill, which he calls talent, and says both depend on opportunity and effort. Others describe giftedness as uneven development: advanced in some ways, ordinary or behind in others.

The 20 statements are original wording, written from the themes that appear across the research and clinical literature on gifted adults. Linda Silverman's Giftedness in Adults Rating Scale lists traits such as fast problem solving, a large vocabulary, strong memory, sensitivity, perfectionism and feeling out of step. Dabrowski's work on overexcitability, later turned into the Overexcitability Questionnaire, describes intense intellectual, emotional, imaginative, sensual and physical energy.

We grouped the statements into five areas so you can see where your strongest matches are. We did not use anyone's scale or scoring rule. Silverman's scale has a rule of thumb about how many items to rate highly, but no published norming ties it to IQ, so we do not borrow it.

Self-assessment is a weak guide to measured intelligence. A meta-analysis of 41 studies by Freund and Kasten found that people's self-estimates of their intelligence correlate about .33 with their test scores. A newer analysis of 36,833 people by Patzl and colleagues found .30, and .25 in general-population samples. A correlation of .30 means self-report explains under a tenth of the variation.

A quiz about traits is one step further away, because it asks about styles of thinking and feeling, not about ability. Someone with a very high IQ can score low on it and someone with an average IQ can score high. So please read your result as a description of how you experience yourself.

Several of the traits above, such as intensity, sensitivity, absorbed focus, a need to question and feeling out of step, can also appear in people with ADHD, autism or anxiety, and in people with none of those. Clinicians who work with gifted people describe cases where gifted traits were mistaken for a disorder, and cases where a real condition was missed because giftedness masked it.

The table shows what share of people score at or above each IQ, on the standard scale where the average is 100 and the standard deviation is 15.

Tests are less reliable at the top, because few people were in the groups used to norm them. Figures above about 145 are extrapolations from the normal curve, not measurements.

• A supervised IQ test. The WAIS-5 or the Stanford-Binet 5, given by a psychologist, gives a Full Scale IQ with a confidence interval. See the guides to the WAIS and the Stanford-Binet.
• Mensa. Mensa's supervised test tells you whether you are in the top 2%, and costs far less than a full assessment. The Mensa practice test guide explains the options.
• A score you already have. If you took an admissions test, the score converters estimate an IQ from it, with a range.
• An online reasoning test. Useful for a first look at how you handle puzzles, as long as you treat the number as an estimate.