Do you make much more money than others because you’re smarter?

We often envy top earners with their seven-figure salaries and wonder what we’re doing wrong. Some of us even have the wrong impression that it comes down to intelligence, or that they’re the most deserving.According to a new study published in the ‘European Sociological Review’, the biggest earners aren’t that much smarter than the average person. A research team led by Sweden’s Linköping University found that people in the top 1 % of the pay scale scored lower in cognitive ability tests than those in the income tier below.

There’s a strong correlation between cognitive ability and higher earnings, until you reach the very top of the income ladder. Intelligence among the top 5 % of earners levels off, and even decreases slightly. “Strikingly, we find that the relationship between ability and wage is strong overall, yet above €60,000 per year ability plateaus,” wrote the authors in the study.

The researchers analysed the cognitive ability of over 59 000 Swedish-born men aged 18 or 19 and their earnings during an 11-year period between the ages of 35 and 45. The cognitive ability test included verbal understanding, technical comprehension, spatial ability and logic.

“This data trove permits us to test, for the first time, whether extremely high wages are indicative of extreme intelligence,” explained lead author Marc Keuschnigg, associate professor at The Institute for Analytical Sociology at Linköping University in a news release. “To do so, we needed reliable income data that covers the entire wage spectrum. Survey data typically miss top incomes, but the registers offer full income data on all citizens.”If high salaries aren’t necessarily linked to overall intelligence and superior ability, then what is? “[W]e find no evidence that those with top jobs that pay extraordinary wages are more deserving than those who earn only half those wages,” elaborated the authors in the journal paper. “[E]xtreme occupational success is more likely driven by family resources or luck than by ability.”

This brings us to inequality, and who deserves top wages the most. The super-wealthy are getting richer and richer, while exerting great influence on everything from politics to the global economy. History shows these aren’t the smartest people around.

“The decisions that top earners make are consequential for a lot of people,” Prof. Keuschnigg stated in Fortune. “So we as a society might want to have the right people in these top positions.”

So remember, cognitive ability can only take you so far. Next time you see lots of zeroes on someone’s salary information, it doesn’t mean they’re smarter or more deserving.