Higher test scores cost women help from teammates in two studies, but the effect is small and correlational

Four weeks into a semester, 432 undergraduates on business-school consulting teams sat a Wonderlic test, the short cognitive ability quiz that employers use to screen job applicants. Nobody told their teammates the scores. That detail matters, because seven weeks later those same teammates were rating who on the team seemed hostile or angry, and the women who had scored highest drew the worst ratings.

That is one of two studies in a paper published May 18, 2026 in the Journal of Applied Psychology, co-authored by Nitya Chawla, an associate professor at UCL School of Management according to the school's release. A write-up of it by PsyPost was among the most upvoted posts on r/science this weekend, which is how it reached this desk. The pattern it reports is easy to flatten into a slogan, so here is what the numbers support and what they do not.

What the two samples showed

In the student study, higher scores predicted higher hostility ratings for women, and those hostility ratings predicted more victimization, which the paper measures with items like having information withheld. The women also reported getting less help. For men, test scores had no relationship to hostility, help, or victimization.

The second study moved to a workplace. It followed 394 full-time employees in small teams at a financial company in China, scored on the cognitive test every job candidate there takes during hiring. Women with higher scores were again rated as more hostile, reported more victimization, and received less task and personal help. They were also rated as less communal, meaning less warm and cooperative, which the authors call a double bind: seen as cold and hostile at once.

Among the men in the company sample, the arithmetic ran the other way. Higher scores predicted lower hostility ratings, less victimization, and more help from teammates. The same ability, in other words, bought one group goodwill and the other group friction.

“We tend to think of intelligence as an unambiguously positive quality at work”

Where the evidence gets thin

Start with the size of the effect. The paper describes it as small, with average hostility and victimization ratings in the student sample sitting near the bottom of five-point scales. The authors argue the gender difference still clears common benchmarks for meaningful effects in workplace research, but nobody here is describing a workplace where smart women are routinely shunned.

The student result is also fragile in one specific way. The researchers excluded two students with extremely low test scores. When those two were put back in, the statistically significant gender difference disappeared, though higher-scoring women were still rated as more hostile. A pattern that hinges on two data points out of 432 deserves a raised eyebrow, and the authors report it themselves.

There are bigger limits. The data are correlational, so they cannot show that teammates' perceptions caused the mistreatment. Help and victimization were self-reported rather than observed. The researchers never measured whether colleagues saw these women as especially intelligent, and since scores were hidden from teammates, the paper cannot say whether intelligence itself or something that travels with it, like a communication style, drove the reaction. Ratings of being domineering did not explain the gap, which rules out one obvious suspect.

Both samples were also screened settings, a competitive business school and a company that tests applicants. The authors note that a narrow range of scores usually makes effects harder to find, so their results may be conservative. They did not examine race or ethnicity, and they suggest cultural norms may matter, particularly in the Chinese company. I could not find a base rate for how common this kind of penalty is across workplaces, so this paper should be read as two samples rather than a measurement of the whole labor market.

What the authors want employers to look at

The behaviors involved are small. UCL's release gives examples such as leaving someone out of informal conversations or holding back support on a task, and says their impact can accumulate over time. Chawla puts the mechanism this way: "the social meaning attached to competence can differ depending on who displays it."

The authors argue that employers should pay closer attention to how perceptions of likeability and teamwork get formed, especially on high-pressure teams where a little less help can matter a lot. That is a recommendation, not a finding, and the study did not test any fix.

The cleanest next experiment is the one this design could not run: show teammates the same scores and see whether the penalty follows the number or the person. Until someone does, the honest summary is that a hidden test score predicted who got help, and for women it predicted it in the wrong direction.