People tend to think that the more friends they have, the happier their lives will be. Well, this is not the case for everyone, most specifically for more cerebral people, as a recent study revealed.
Evolutionary psychologists Satoshi Kanazawa of the London School of Economics and Norman Li of Singapore Management University conducted a survey of 15,000 respondents aged 18 to 28 to ultimately find out what people think is a life well lived.
The most exceptional finding of the research, which was recently published in the British Journal of Psychology, is that more intelligent people are less satisfied with frequent social interactions.
"The effect of population density on life satisfaction was therefore more than twice as large for low-IQ individuals than for high-IQ individuals," the researchers said in their study, as quoted by The Washington Post.
"More intelligent individuals were actually less satisfied with life if they socialised with their friends more frequently," they added.
Why exactly would smarter people prefer less interaction with their close acquaintances?
Carol Graham, a Brookings Institution researcher who studies the economics of happiness, provides an explanation: More intelligent individuals want to spent time fulfilling their dreams.
"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 socialising because they are focused on some other longer-term objective," Graham also told The Washington Post.
Kanazawa and Li, however, have a more evolutionary explanation. They think smarter people do not need much social interaction, because they already know how to survive without the help of others.
"More intelligent individuals, who possess higher levels of general intelligence and thus greater ability to solve evolutionarily novel problems, may face less difficulty in comprehending and dealing with evolutionarily novel entities and situations," the researchers explained in their study.
This same research also affirmed earlier findings that a person's happiness decreases as the population density in the area where he or she lives increases.
"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," the researchers stated.
