Key points

Gifted minds tend to have superior pattern recognition, making common narrative devices easy to spot.

People with high IQ tend to crave narratives with nuanced feelings, values, and layered stories.

People with high IQ also tend to favor narratives with ambiguity and moral complexity.

Dark humor and satire land better with high-IQ audiences due to incongruities causing higher cognitive load.

This is Part III in a four-part series. To read from the start of the series, see Part I .

In Parts I and II of this series, we looked at the appeal that The Real Housewives of Orange County ( RHOC ) holds for high-IQ individuals such as Mensans, who score in the world’s top 98th percentile for IQ. In Part I, we explored how the show does this by engaging our love for c

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