Smartest Guy in the Room Syndrome

[Doktor Howl]

A Smartest Guy in the Room often has an advanced degree, and believes that it qualifies him as an expert on any topic.

Then there's the po'bucker SGitR, who dismisses all higher education as "book learning with no common sense", without ever considering that there's things that his limited education didn't teach him, and thinks that there are amazingly simple answers to very complicated problems.

This particular type of SGitR also avoids situations and people that challenge his beliefs with an astounding tenacity, and reacts as if to a threat to health and safety if he finds himself cornered by someone who can rationally out-argue him. Confronted with facts and reason, he promptly escalates into shouting and threats of violence.

Actually, I've found that they tend to seek out those situations, so they can bellow their beliefs in everyone's face.  The fact that most people are too polite to tell them to go shit in their hats is then mistaken for agreement.

[AFK]

I think there is a corollary to this as well which is the person who is unwittingly perceived as the Smartest Guy or one of the Smartest Guys in the room.  And it usually is someone who is certainly a very capable person in any given field or area of expertise, but not someone who holds themselves as the Ultimate Guru of Everything.  And then that person gets laden with everyone else's work. 

[Doktor Howl]

I think there is a corollary to this as well which is the person who is unwittingly perceived as the Smartest Guy or one of the Smartest Guys in the room.  And it usually is someone who is certainly a very capable person in any given field or area of expertise, but not someone who holds themselves as the Ultimate Guru of Everything.  And then that person gets laden with everyone else's work.

Yeah, but that's not the syndrome at all.  That's other people's perceptions.

Life must be rough on someone like that.  Kids in Africa don't have it as bad.

[AFK]

Well, no, the point just being that there are external forces that sometime feed the syndrome. 

ETA: e-primed

[Mesozoic Mister Nigel]

I think there is a corollary to this as well which is the person who is unwittingly perceived as the Smartest Guy or one of the Smartest Guys in the room.  And it usually is someone who is certainly a very capable person in any given field or area of expertise, but not someone who holds themselves as the Ultimate Guru of Everything.  And then that person gets laden with everyone else's work.

Yeah, but that's not the syndrome at all.  That's other people's perceptions.

Life must be rough on someone like that.  Kids in Africa don't have it as bad.

Also, I think that just sort of happens naturally if you're competent. The incompetent flock to you in the hope that A: you will solve their problems for them, or B: your competence juju will rub off on them. The best defense is the word "no" and a rolled-up newspaper.

[Mesozoic Mister Nigel]

The Smartest Guy in the Room frequently flirts with/hits on members of the interesting sex in ways that are deeply inappropriate. He believes that his intelligence and wit make him charming and debonaire, and has no grasp on the dismay and/or amusement his actions generate.

The Smartest Guy in the Room never does anything wrong; any negative consequences of his behavior is somebody else's fault or the result of an unfair policy, or possibly even of a conspiracy.

Because the higher-ups feel threatened by his influence.

[P3nT4gR4m]

Smartest Guy in the Room syndrome is related to Dunning/Kruger Effect, and affects men and women equally.

The Smartest Guy in the Room is smart enough to know that he's smarter than most people, but not smart enough to recognize when other people are smarter. He defaults to the belief that because he is smarter than the majority of the population, he must be smarter than the people he's talking to, and tends to look no further or deeper than whatever initial assumption he has made or conclusion he has come to.

I like this. I know this guy. I've been this guy, on occasion but the first sentence doesn't quite ring true. SGitR strikes me as being smart in some areas but dumb as shit in others. I sometimes feel like I'm the smartest guy in the room, when I probably am but if there's someone smarter than me there or even some dumb fuck who knows more about something than me, it doesn't fuck up my delicate ego to recognise this. SGitR on the other hand seems to be blindly oblivious to even the possibility of this and that's just plain dumb in my eyes.

Kinda like an atrophied limb or something - SGitR usually seems to be amongst the dumbest guys in the room.

[Nephew Twiddleton]

Sgitr is the guy with the unreasonably high iq. People dont question this since they dont understand how iqs work. When he doesnt have an advanced degree theres always some reason for it like his professors were idiots. All of them. When he actually does go to a class he overlaps into that guy territory.

[Cain]

That Guy?

[Nephew Twiddleton]

Sgitr excels at bullshit. When he doesnt have the facts he can make them up on the fly. And even he believes the bullshit. His confidence in the correctness of the wrong answer leads others to accept it. He doesnt need to skew the facts when he can just make them up as he goes.

[Nephew Twiddleton]

That guy is the guy who always answers. To the point where the professor starts to ignore him so he can gauge how the other students are faring. That guy needs to not only be at the head of the class but the center of it too. The class is only there for his benefit and no one elses.

[AFK]

If there was a Venn diagram, there would be some serious overlap between The Smartest Guy in the Room and The Loudest Guy in the Room

[LMNO]

The more I read, the more I'm convinced a large part of my life was spent being the SGitR.

[Nephew Twiddleton]

It should be noted that not all that guys are sgitr. That guy can admit error and is more likely to say "i agree but what about..." than "youre wrong"

[Cainad (dec.)]

The more I read, the more I'm convinced a large part of my life was spent being the SGitR.

Same here. This was not helped by the fact that I spent roughly 6 years of my childhood in the larval stage: The Smartest Little Shit In The Room.

When you're the statistical outlier in a class of three dozen kids for the whole grade, and your reading level is three times everyone else's, it's hard not to be more knowledgeable about nearly everything than your peers. It's especially difficult to grow out of when your identity among your peers and teachers is built up as "The Smart Kid", and you're just likable enough that no one calls you out on being a SGitR.

Then I started being wrong more often, once the things we were expected to know got more complicated. I also decided that I preferred being liked to being The Smart Kid.