Virgil Griffith has a lot of time on his hands. A lot.

Where he finds the time is a mystery: he’s a grad student in Computation and Neural Systems (uh huh) at CalTech by day, something that probably keeps him late at the lab while the rest of us are playing Wii. When he’s not doing that, Griffith is, like the rest of us these days, fascinated by what gets thrown onto social networking sites, Facebook in particular. Being of a scientific bent, Griffith posed to himself a question:

Ever read a book (required or otherwise) and upon finishing it thought to yourself, “Wow. That was terrible. I totally feel dumber after reading that?” I know I have. Well, like any good scientist, I decided to see how well my personal experience matches reality.

Here’s how he tried to answer that question:

1. Get a friend of yours to download, using Facebook, the ten most popular books at every college (manually — as not to violate Facebook’s ToS). These ten books are indicative of the overall intellectual milieu of that college.

2. Download the average SAT/ACT score for students attending every college.

3. Presto! We have a correlation between books and dumbitude (smartitude too)!
Books Colleges Average SAT Scores

4. Plot the average SAT of each book, discarding books with too few samples to have a reliable average.

Very interesting, indeed. Griffith’s graph, which he refers to tongue-in-cheek as a list of Books That Make You Dumb, reveals some fascinating results. The books listed most frequently as favorites by students on Facebook at schools with the highest average SAT scores are below the jump, as well as the most popular books at some of D.C.’s universities and colleges.