Top Dog, Underdog

by Martha Beck

How to Deal with a Know-It-All

You can begin training the person to be a calm, loyal companion by employing one or more of the following responses:

1. Fight to win.
If you're in a feisty mood and you're confident you can beat the know-it-all at the intellectual dominance game, you may decide to argue your rival into submission. This is what we're trained to do in school, but I use it only as a last resort, since it tends to leave both contestants growling, angry, and bleeding from wounds to the ego. Choose another method for know-it-alls you want to remain part of your immediate pack. If you do decide to exert dominance, say something like: "Laplace? Mechanist determinism? Oh, please. Unless you plan to ignore all of postmodernism, as well as both Heisenberg and Kant, it's incontestable that uncertainty and subjectivity are experiential absolutes. Ergo, I stand by my position: You never know what's going to happen."

2. Change the stakes.
If you want a know-it-all to stay in your pack, there's a better way to deal with a dominance challenge than wading into the IQ challenge. Approach your know-it-all at the level of EQ. Know-it-alls are weak as puppies in this area, so be gentle. In a soft, nonaggressive tone, say: "Pat, I think you're showing off your brain to get social acceptance. The thing is, that really doesn't work. Think how you'd feel about a rich person who wouldn't stop harping about their net worth."

The know-it-all will respond, "Don't you mean 'a rich person who wouldn't stop harping about his or her net worth'?" Say, "Pat, you're doing it again."

If a few such prompts have no effect on the know-it-all's behavior, you may have to consider an appropriate shelter, such as a research institute or a Tolkien convention, where the organization helps place know-it-alls in better homes. But don't do this without trying the next technique.

3. Put your know-it-all to work.
I've seen this gentle social training succeed on others and, more to the point, on me. That's right: By breed I am a know-it-all. But ever since a kindly teacher took me aside and explained that my behavior was the social equivalent of leprosy, I've tried hard to overcome my genes. Sadly, I passed on many know-it-all traits to my children—even my son with Down syndrome, who, when I corrected him for skipping numbers on a kindergarten counting assignment, gave me a withering look and said, "Hello, I was counting by fives." My kids and I are "useless factoid" know-it-alls. We rarely dress ourselves correctly, but we know all about, say, the mating rituals of penguins. It's not that we mean harm; it's just that we're a working breed, like German shepherds or bulldogs. What we want most is to be of service.

You can see this nerdy yearning in books like Jurassic Park or The Da Vinci Code, which are about know-it-alls who wind up in ridiculously contrived circumstances where their knowledge of dinosaur behavior or Catholic symbology actually comes in handy. Such opportunities are rare in the real world. For instance, my family cherishes the know-it-all euphoria we felt when I discovered a small but terrifying creature in our basement and my daughter correctly identified it as a Costa Rican tailless whip scorpion. (Of course, we had no clue what to do with it. We named it Vivian and placed it under 24-hour surveillance until someone thought of sucking it into the vacuum cleaner.)