Research Spotlight: The Hidden Support Needs of Highly Intelligent Adults

That tension sits at the heart of the report “A Study of Unmet Needs Among Highly Intelligent Individuals,” a large study requested by the Mensa Foundation and conducted with researchers at the William & Mary Center for Gifted Education. The report asks a deceptively simple question, what kinds of support do highly intelligent adults say they needed, but did not always receive, across school, work, relationships, and mental health?

We spoke with the authors, Jennifer Riedl Cross, Research Professor at the University of Louisiana at Lafayette, Tracy L. Cross, Dean of the College of Education & Human Development at the University of Louisiana at Lafayette, and Anyesha Mishra, a recent doctoral graduate from William & Mary, to learn more about unmet needs among highly intelligent adults.

High intelligence is often treated as a built-in advantage, and in many ways it can be. Yet the report shows that ability alone does not guarantee appropriate challenge, supportive relationships, sound career guidance, or mental health care that feels trustworthy and informed.

For educators, counselors, employers, and families, the study offers a more nuanced picture of giftedness and high intelligence. It suggests that support should not be reserved only for visible struggle, because some participants described long histories of unmet need hidden behind strong performance.

Jennifer Riedl Cross reflected on the broader significance of the study: “The study was undertaken to help the Mensa Foundation identify ways they could address the needs of their membership and potential future members. We were able to recommend specific actions based directly on the responses of more than 3000 highly intelligent adults. The first was to focus on improving attitudes toward high intelligence, as this was a core aspect of unmet needs, particularly in their relationships. There is research to support ways this can happen. Providing academic and career guidance and supports, including financial supports for opportunities in both academics and career development, would go a long way in helping highly intelligent individuals meet their needs. Fostering social connectedness through social skill development and providing opportunities to interact with similar others can support social and emotional development. An organization like Mensa could provide training or maybe certification to mental health care providers in working with highly intelligent clients. Many participants commented on the difficulties they had in finding a counselor who understood them. Developing a network that shares information about mental health providers with specialized training would be beneficial to this community. These actions could change the landscape for individuals of all ability levels, with unique benefits to those with high intelligence. Thinking about the application of our findings (see Appendix D of the report) was one of the most rewarding aspects of this project. Things can change for future generations.”

Across survey responses and interviews, the report points to three major contributions that are especially relevant for anyone supporting highly intelligent people across the lifespan.

Mentoring and academic skill development emerged as core academic needs. In both kindergarten through grade 12 and college, mentors in participants’ areas of interest were the highest rated academic need, while lessons in academic skill development, such as time management and study skills, were also highly rated.

Career and social development were closely connected to guidance, belonging, and autonomy. Formal lessons in career planning, career advice, workplace support, social skill development, self regulation, and opportunities to meet intellectually similar or interesting peers all appeared as important areas of unmet need.

Mental health support depended on trust and understanding. The highest mental health needs in younger years included a counselor who understood the participant, a trusted person to help with mental health concerns, and effective strategies for dealing with anxiety, depression, distress, frustration, and failure.

Looking across the findings, one of the most important questions is what surprised the authors most. Jennifer Riedl Cross noted: “I was definitely surprised by the serious impacts felt by some of our participants from their experiences of unmet needs. Their social experiences seemed to be the most impactful. Many gave examples of being misunderstood and rejected by classmates, teachers, co-workers, supervisors, and even family members. Opportunities for interaction with others like them mattered, but so did opportunities for deeper or specific learning experiences. Some felt they could never reach their potential because they had not had certain experiences, specifically those that required resources, such as expensive out-of-school programs or travel. Financial hardship made it difficult for many to pursue their dreams. They also needed guidance about academic options or career planning. I was also surprised by how many participants reported a late diagnosis of ADHD or autism that helped them understand some of their difficulties earlier in life. It is a shame they couldn’t have had the supports they needed when they were young.”

The study used an online questionnaire completed by American Mensa members and other highly intelligent individuals around the world. After exclusions for missing age or missing domain responses, the final survey dataset included 3,443 participants, and 10 Mensa members representing five age groups participated in interviews.

The research combined quantitative and interpretive methods. The survey included demographic questions, the Flourishing Scale, a personality inventory, and custom items on academic, career, social and emotional, and mental health needs, while analysis included descriptive statistics, exploratory factor analysis, correlations, analysis of variance, latent profile analysis, and thematic analysis of open-ended survey responses and interview comments.

The researchers used Evidano to analyze the 12 open ended survey items, with instructions requesting emerging themes and supporting quotes from participants’ responses.

Appendix C describes a careful workflow in which response files were prepared in batches, uploaded to Evidano, and analyzed more than once so the outputs could be compared. The authors then manually reviewed the outputs, checked whether quotes appeared in the data, checked whether each quote fit the theme, combined similar themes, separated themes when needed, and refined explanations based on the patterns they found.

As the report states, “The final themes were a result of AI and human analysis.” Jennifer Riedl Cross also noted how AI tools can support careful research workflows when used responsibly: “We realized we needed the help of AI when we received far more responses than we expected. We had more than 19,000 open-ended comments in response to the survey. There was no way we could analyze that in a traditional way, especially given the timeline for the project and the resources at our disposal. Tracy had the idea to pursue an AI option. Anyesha discovered Evidano when looking for an affordable LLM with strong privacy protections. While we agree for the most part with the authors of a recent position paper explaining why their journal (Qualitative Psychology; Levitt, 2026; see also Jowsey et al., 2025) prohibits AI use in the analysis of qualitative data, we could not have met our goals without Evidano’s functionality.

“Anyesha managed the process by breaking the data into smaller datasets and running them through the analysis multiple times. She manually checked the results and identified themes that appeared across multiple datasets. We did not want an analysis that was produced entirely through an automated process, but we needed that automation to manage our voluminous data. We did our best to confirm the validity of the output ourselves. None of us believed we should allow the AI tool to analyze the data without human oversight. Researchers can work together with Evidano, but they have a responsibility to stay in touch with the data and take steps to confirm the output is accurate and unbiased. It would be easy to just run the analysis on the full corpus and walk away with a ‘finding.’ We didn’t want to leave it at that. We consider this an initial step and still expect to do more human analysis with the results from it.”

Anyesha Mishra comments, “Evidano was a useful starting point for identifying possible patterns across thousands of responses, while careful human review remained central to verifying the supporting data, interpreting and refining the themes, and making the final analytic decisions. The process was a collaboration between AI-assisted pattern identification and researcher judgment.”

For schools and universities, the report encourages a broader view of academic support. Highly intelligent students may need intellectual challenge, but they may also need explicit instruction in learning skills, access to mentors, peer connection, and adults who understand that advanced ability can coexist with uncertainty, frustration, or loneliness.

For researchers and practitioners, the study also points to the value of listening directly to people whose experiences are often flattened by stereotype. Tracy L. Cross offered this takeaway for readers: “This was a unique study in its look at experiences across the lifespan, highlighting how highly intelligent people are both the same as and different from others. The experiences and perceptions reported by our participants tell the stories of what it means to be highly intelligent. Some aspects of their lives are common and do not have anything to do with their level of intelligence per se; a family’s economic circumstances, for example. Others are unique to them, such as their experiences of stigma related to being perceived as more intelligent than those around them. This can manifest as feeling constantly they are a source of threat to their peers or colleagues – not an experience the average person has. As this was a study of self-reported, retrospective experiences, we must maintain an awareness that unmet needs are decided by the people themselves. Another outcome of this study is that it revealed variation in the experiences of cohort groups from different time periods. The experience of ‘need’ differed based on one’s time in history. We hope this study will support future generations by increasing awareness of the experiences highly intelligent people reported.”

Ultimately, the report makes a humane case for taking high intelligence seriously as both a strength and a context for need. If institutions can provide challenge, guidance, social connection, and informed mental health support, they can help more highly intelligent people move from merely coping to flourishing.