Study Finds That The Fewer Friends You Have, The Smarter You Are
Your idea of hell might be other people if you are smart enough.
This is according to a fascinating research published in the British Journal of Psychology. The evolutionary psychologist Satoshi Kanazawa of the London School of Economics together with his colleague Norman Li of Singapore Management University investigated the question of what a well-lived life is.
They found that the denser the population in the environment is, the less happy its people are. And the more interactions with close friends a person has, the happier they are.
However, more intelligent people are an exception. The researchers found that people with higher IQ were actually less happy and satisfied with their life when they engaged in social activities with their friends more often.In other words, smart people don’t find happiness in socializing with friends.
Moreover, the researchers discovered another interesting fact. Namely “residents of rural areas and small towns are happier than those in suburbs, who in turn are happier than those in small central cities, who in turn are happier than those in large central cities.”
However, the question arises, “Why would high population density make people unhappy?” If you want to know the answer just think about an hour-long ride home from work on a very crowded rush-hour. How does it make you feel?
Moreover, another reason why smart people are happier when they don’t socialize often is that more intelligent people tend to focus on more important things in their life and they don’t want to waste their time socializing. They think their time could be much wisely used by focusing on their goals.
Li and Kanazawa theorize that our ancestors’ hunter-gatherer lifestyle has formed the base of our definition of happiness.
“Situations and circumstances that would have increased our ancestors’ life satisfaction in the ancestral environment may still increase our life satisfaction today,” the researchers write. “Our ancestors lived as hunter–gatherers in small bands of about 150 individuals. In such settings, having frequent contact with lifelong friends and allies was likely necessary for survival and reproduction for both s*xes.”
However, human life has evolved and changed since then. Smart people now are better at resolving evolutionary novel problems making it easier for them to reconcile with the modern world, while at the same time getting annoyed with the over-population of their environment.
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