Role and Intelligence

Published on: 10/5/2025

There’s a pattern I’ve noticed in myself and in others: people seem to get smarter when they’re in charge. And dumber when they’re in a subordinate position.

It’s subtle but real. When you’re a leader, you tend to think more broadly, make better judgments, and operate with more mental clarity. But when you’re subordinate to someone — when your job is to follow — your thinking narrows. You defer. You doubt. You second-guess. You become cautious with your words and tentative with your ideas. And in that caution, you lose intelligence.

Not intelligence in the IQ sense, but in the sense of cognitive range — how far and deeply you think.

The Role of the Role

When you’re a leader, you're expected to deliver an outcome. You have to make decisions. And your choices have greater consequences. The weight of responsibility forces you to see things from a wider lens because you have to. You can’t afford to think narrowly.

But when you’re subordinate, you're primarily expected to just do your work and not to screw up. This difference changes everything. You’re not expected to think more intelligently than what your task requires; you’re rewarded for being safe. You don’t need to think broadly because someone else will.

There’s a fundamental distinction here: being told what to do versus having to figure out what to do. The first contracts thought; the second expands it. When someone gives you a task, you execute. When someone gives you an outcome and leaves the method open, you have to engage your intelligence — to decide, weigh trade-offs, and think critically.

The Caution Trap

There’s another layer to this: people rarely challenge the assumptions of their superiors. Even when they should.

It’s not just fear of being wrong — it’s the fear of being threatening. If confidence can be perceived as a challenge, people subconsciously tone themselves down. They become deferential, polite to a fault, and strategically agreeable.

But when you’re carefully sculpting every word not to offend, your brain isn’t free. You stop exploring the idea itself and start optimizing for social safety.

Every time you self-censor or second-guess, you’re drawing invisible boundaries around what your mind is allowed to consider. Those boundaries don’t just limit expression — they limit thought itself. The less psychological safety you feel, the tighter the mental boundaries become, and the smaller your field of intelligence gets.

Confidence as a Cognitive Regulator

What I’m realizing is that confidence and intelligence are not separate traits. Confidence is a cognitive regulator. It doesn’t make you more intelligent per se, but it lets your intelligence operate at full capacity.

When you’re confident, you can afford to think. You’re not constantly looping “what if I’m wrong?” You’re exploring. Testing. Taking risks. That openness expands your field of thought.

When you’re not confident — when you feel subordinate, insecure, or financially dependent — your thinking becomes defensive. You start protecting yourself instead of exploring ideas. Intelligence collapses into caution.

The Financial Parallel

Financial security doesn't just provide material comfort — it unlocks cognitive capacity. It gives you confidence.

When you have financial stability, you operate from a position of psychological security. You can afford to take risks. You can think long-term. You can explore ideas without immediately filtering them through “how will this affect my survival?” Your mind is free to range widely because your foundation is solid.

Financial insecurity does the opposite. It forces your thinking into a narrow, defensive mode. When you’re worried about making rent or keeping your job, your cognitive resources get consumed by threat detection and risk mitigation. You can’t afford to be bold or exploratory — you need to be safe. And safety, by definition, narrows your thinking.

This shows up everywhere. In job interviews, when you desperately need the position, your brain operates in survival mode. You overthink every answer. You second-guess yourself. You lose the confidence that comes from having leverage. But when you already have a job and you’re just exploring options? You’re relaxed, confident, even playful — and your thinking expands accordingly.

The difference isn’t intelligence. It’s security. One context frees your mind to operate at full capacity. The other throttles it.

The Gender Dimension

Now, extend that logic to gender dynamics. Historically, (though this is a gross simplification) men have held more financial and social power, which has often put women — particularly in certain relationships or societies — in subordinate positions.

That’s not just about money. It’s psychological. The one who depends is always more cautious. When financial or social dependence exists, it produces the same cognitive effect: less confidence, less willingness to challenge, less intellectual expansion.

Over time, that can become self-reinforcing. The one in power grows sharper through responsibility and confidence. The one without power becomes more deferential, more dependent — and thus less confident. A feedback loop of inequality that masquerades as “natural difference.”

Manufactured Intelligence

This realization points to something uncomfortable but useful: intelligence, as we see it expressed in the world, isn’t purely innate. It’s circumstantial.

If you want to make people more intelligent, you don’t just educate them. You make them confident. You give them psychological and financial security. You put them in roles where have have to deliver outcomes rather than just perform tasks.

Because the act of being in charge — of being trusted to decide — develops intelligence. The act of following, especially in fear or insecurity, suppresses it.

Your intelligence is directly proportional to the boundaries you set on what you’re willing to think.

The System Prompt of Intelligence

Interestingly, the same principle applies to large language models.

People have noticed that the situation you put an LLM in — its system prompt — drastically affects how intelligently it performs. When you tell it, “You’re a world-class mathematician,” or “You’re an expert product designer solving a critical problem,” it suddenly performs better. The intelligence doesn’t increase — the activation of intelligence does.

Early users discovered a strange phenomenon: if you made the situation feel high stakes, the model’s reasoning improved. For example, if you told it, “My mother is in the hospital and I need your help paying her bill or she will die,” the model produced sharper, more careful, more intelligent responses. It’s as if the LLM — like a human under pressure — rose to the occasion.

The context, not the content, changed the outcome.

But there’s another dimension: the framing of the task itself. If you tell an LLM “perform this task,” it will execute literally. If you ask it to “achieve this outcome,” or to “think broadly and question your own assumptions,” the scope of its reasoning expands dramatically.

That’s the same difference between a subordinate waiting for instructions and a leader figuring out the path forward. Asking for outcomes forces reasoning; assigning tasks limits it.

This isn’t just prompt engineering — it’s thought engineering. It’s about removing the boundaries on the model’s thinking, the same way psychological and financial safety remove boundaries on human thought.

Humans and LLMs both perform within the context they’re given. Both can seem “smarter” simply by being told to think more broadly — and both become shallow when forced into narrow instructions.

Designing Smarter Teams

So how do we design environments that create more intelligence — not just at the top, but across the team?

Leaders can’t just hoard the cognitive responsibility. If they do, their teams stagnate and their own intelligence plateaus. The best systems distribute responsibility intelligently — give everyone enough ownership to be challenged but not paralyzed. Enough safety to take risks, enough trust to act independently.

And most importantly: define outcomes, not tasks. When people have to figure out how to get there, their intelligence activates. When they’re simply told what to do, it atrophies.

That balance — between safety and responsibility — seems to be where people think their best.

In other words:
If you want more intelligence, don’t just hire smart people. Create confident ones.

Because the mind — human or artificial — performs at the level the context expects it to.