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posted by janrinok on Monday December 19 2016, @05:27PM   Printer-friendly
from the appealing-to-a-community-of-loners dept.

A story at Inverse, covers research that concludes that Evolution Made Really Smart People Long to Be Loners:

Psychologists have a pretty good idea of what typically makes a human happy. Dancing delights us. Being in nature brings us joy. And, for most people, frequent contact with good friends makes us feel content.

That is, unless you're really, really smart.

In a paper published in the British Journal of Psychology , researchers Norman Li and Satoshi Kanazawa report that highly intelligent people experience lower life satisfaction when they socialize with friends more frequently. These are the Sherlocks and the Newt Scamanders of the world — the very intelligent few who would be happier if they were left alone.

[...] To come to this conclusion, the researchers analyzed the survey responses of 15,197 individuals between the ages of 18 and 28. Their data was a part of the National Longitudinal Study of Adolescent Health — a survey that measures life satisfaction, intelligence, and health...

Intelligence is believed to have evolved as a psychological mechanism to solve novel problems — the sort of challenges that weren't a regular part of life. For our ancestors, frequent contact with friends and allies was a necessity that allowed them to survive. Being highly intelligent, however, meant an individual was more likely to be able to solve problems without another person's help, which in turn diminished the importance of their friendships.

[...] That certainly doesn't mean that if you enjoy being around your friends that you're unintelligent. But it does mean that the really smart person you know who spends much of their time alone isn't a sad loner — they probably just like it that way.

In my estimation, the community here is above-average in intelligence so I am curious: How many of you are loners? Do you prefer the company of yourself to the company of others?


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  • (Score: 2, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Monday December 19 2016, @07:35PM

    by Anonymous Coward on Monday December 19 2016, @07:35PM (#443278)

    I don't know -- what I see (skimming the paper) is that one small result from a complex study is being hyped in news coverage simply because it's the most newsworthy, thus misrepresenting the study's conclusion. I'm not real impressed with the "savannah theory of happiness" (it strikes me as the sort of framework on which one can hang justifications for almost any result), but I think you're conflating the two parts of the study dealing with substantially different variables.

    The first part, Study 1A, shows that, as you say, population density is negatively correlated with happiness, and that this correlation is stronger for lower IQ. They also pull out the interesting result (in Figure 1, which you linked) that high-IQ people are happier than low-IQ in cities, while high-IQ people are less happy than low-IQ in rural areas (but still happier than high-IQ urbanites), in something like these numbers:
    IQ| Urban| Rural
    --+------+------
    H | 4.15 | 4.21
    L | 4.12 | 4.26

    Study 1B, on the other hand, moves on to socialization, which is distinct from population density, and in this study was measured with the question:

    In the past 7 days, how many times did you just "hang out" with friends, or talk on the telephone for more than 5 minutes?

    The overall result is, unsurprisingly, that there is a general positive correlation between frequency of socialization and happiness. However, the interesting bit (and the part that makes headines) is that this correlation is not merely stronger at low-IQ and weaker at high-IQ (like the population density <-> happiness inverse correlation from 1A), but is very strong at low-IQ and flipped for high-IQ -- those who have high IQ and frequent socialization are less happy than those who have high IQ and infrequent socialization.

    Since this study only shows correlation, they're careful to point out that it doesn't prove that happiness is an effect of socialization frequency (as their savannah theory suggests). Moreover, their data shows that, despite the (negative, for high-IQ) correlation between socialization frequency and happiness, high-IQs have higher socialization frequency than low-IQ individuals (for whom the correlation is positive). Given a causal link, one might expect low-IQs to engage in more socialization, and high-IQs less, each to maximize their own happiness. The explanations offered are that people may not be aware of the presumed causal link* and that people may not have complete control over their socialization frequency.

    * If this is true, then TFAs claim that "really smart people long to be loners" is not strictly true -- more like "really smart people would be happier as loners but are too really not-smart to realize it". I'm being flippant, but it's certainly conventional wisdom that one cannot become happy by seeking happiness, which is another way of saying we as individuals don't understand what aspects of our lives are causing unhappiness, or how any changes we might make would affect our happiness. IMO a big part of this is in a sense down to dynamic range -- so many things are characterized by a short-timescale "spike" effect on happiness, which makes it very hard to see whether the post-spike response decays to zero, positive, or negative.

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  • (Score: 2) by ikanreed on Monday December 19 2016, @07:47PM

    by ikanreed (3164) Subscriber Badge on Monday December 19 2016, @07:47PM (#443284) Journal

    A fair deeper analysis, but it's still pretty much bullshit to attribute that, sans evidence, to genetics, and the genetics, in turn, to a dual-mode selective pressure.

  • (Score: 2) by VLM on Monday December 19 2016, @10:16PM

    by VLM (445) Subscriber Badge on Monday December 19 2016, @10:16PM (#443394)

    talk on the telephone

    Its not 1970 anymore and I suspect legacy analog phone use is not flat across socioeconomic strata or flat when corrected for IQ.

    Hopefully a simplification of something more elaborate and less precise but more useful, like google hangouts, facetime, the twitter periscope if thats still around, whatever the facebook video thing is called, etc.