Why smart people are better off with fewer friends

Nom Chompsky

Nom Chompsky

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Fascinating article - https://www.washingtonpost.com/news...e-better-off-with-fewer-friends/?tid=pm_pop_b

Hell might actually be other people -- at least if you're really smart.

That's the implication of fascinating new research published last month in the British Journal of Psychology. Evolutionary psychologists Satoshi Kanazawa of the London School of Economics and Norman Li of Singapore Management University dig in to the question of what makes a life well-lived. While traditionally the domain of priests, philosophers and novelists, in recent years survey researchers, economists, biologists and scientists have been tackling that question.

Kanazawa and Li theorize that the hunter-gatherer lifestyles of our ancient ancestors form the foundation for what make us happy now. "Situations and circumstances that would have increased our ancestors’ life satisfaction in the ancestral environment may still increase our life satisfaction today," they write.

They use what they call "the savanna theory of happiness" to explain two main findings from an analysis of a large national survey (15,000 respondents) of adults aged 18 to 28.

First, they find that people who live in more densely populated areas tend to report less satisfaction with their life overall. "The higher the population density of the immediate environment, the less happy" the survey respondents said they were. Second, they find that the more social interactions with close friends a person has, the greater their self-reported happiness.

But there was one big exception. For more intelligent people, these correlations were diminished or even reversed.

"The effect of population density on life satisfaction was therefore more than twice as large for low-IQ individuals than for high-IQ individuals," they found. And "more intelligent individuals were actually less satisfied with life if they socialized with their friends more frequently."

Let me repeat that last one: When smart people spend more time with their friends, it makes them less happy.

...

I posed this question to Carol Graham, a Brookings Institution researcher who studies the economics of happiness. "The findings in here suggest (and it is no surprise) that those with more intelligence and the capacity to use it ... are less likely to spend so much time socializing because they are focused on some other longer term objective," she said.

Think of the really smart people you know. They may include a doctor trying to cure cancer or a writer working on the great American novel or a human rights lawyer working to protect the most vulnerable people in society. To the extent that frequent social interaction detracts from the pursuit of these goals, it may negatively affect their overall satisfaction with life.

But Kanazawa and Li's savanna theory of happiness offers a different explanation. The idea starts with the premise that the human brain evolved to meet the demands of our ancestral environment on the African savanna, where the population density was akin to what you'd find today in, say, rural Alaska (less than one person per square kilometer). Take a brain evolved for that environment, plop it into today's Manhattan (population density: 27,685 people per square kilometer), and you can see how you'd get some evolutionary friction.

Similarly with friendship: "Our ancestors lived as hunter–gatherers in small bands of about 150 individuals," Kanazawa and Li explain. "In such settings, having frequent contact with lifelong friends and allies was likely necessary for survival and reproduction for both sexes." We remain social creatures today, a reflection of that early reliance on tight-knit social groups.
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Keep telling yourselves that.

Let me repeat that last one: When smart people spend more time with their friends, it makes them less happy.
Click to expand...

The plight of insufferable genius.
 
It depends on who your friends are. I for one (not claiming to be smart whatsoever) think that as long as your friends are on the same page as you regarding outlook, shared interests, etc - you would be fine as you would also push and prod each other as necessary. But when your friendship circle includes what 'you' perceive as insufferable oafs then you perhaps pull back.

For me, I find as I get older, my friendship circle(s) adapts to what common interests I have. So for example, my cousins who I grew up with and I thought were my best buds for ever and ever, are still good people to know but they don't wish to push themselves to be better or try new things. It's movies, drinking, and food that rocks their boat. So with them, I do movies and food (once a month). For my hobbies, e.g. riding mountain bikes , I have another set of friends who I then do that activity with - and it goes on like that. I get the best of both worlds. What is interesting now that I reflected on it, is that the members of various social circles I have mean never end up meeting one another ...
 
No Chris, intellect is not a substitute for losing your virginity. It's possible to have both brains and a sex life.
 
oohh now I know why I do not have friends... it has nothing to do with my blunt reactions to their BS....
 
I am not inferring that I am intelligent, but I prefer not to have friends. I don't trust people at all, and I feel like I must live up to certain expectations I'm not always willing to meet.

Basically, I feel like I'm being put in awkward situations.
 
Interesting to see where family sits in here?

I enjoy spending time with my family, but I don't have a desire to spend time with friends.
 
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