>>938199760As someone who has lived in both Oklahoma and Massachusetts, I can tell you emphatically that if that graphic is accurate, it's a matter of intense metric bias. I can honestly say that there's not a lot of difference between the people academically.
Having grown up in Massachusetts through most of my formative years and finishing high school in Oklahoma, I was certain that I was going to be smarter than damn near everyone, since it was always parroted to me that Massachusetts had some of the best education in the country if not the world, but my class placement and GPA were about the same despite the change in environment.
I've come to realize that the things being measured there are mostly "shoulders of giants" phenomena. In the absence of hundreds of additional years of population, infrastructure, and reputation, Oklahoma has fewer schools, fewer hospitals, fewer amenities, and fewer job opportunities, and that's the primary reason for the measured disparities.
The people are not dumber by any means. Even the turbo-hicks in the ass-end of Oklahoma aren't any dumber than some of the lifelong-welfare recipients I'd met in Massachusetts, and Massachusetts definitely had more of them, having a larger population in a smaller and more concentrated area.
In the end, I'll take literally anybody from Oklahoma over a narcissist from Boston. I swear, people who have a high opinion of themselves because they grew up in that armpit of a city are almost as bad as the ones from Jersey.