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Bobs [soylentnews.org] writes:

"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."

Interesting theory.
It seems to boil down to 2 main points:

• Smarter people can adapt to the new, more congested environment better.
• Smarter people are more likely to sublimated desire for social interaction with desire to spend more time working on something more important.

"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."
...
"If you're smarter and more able to adapt to things, you may have an easier time reconciling your evolutionary predispositions with the modern world. So living in a high-population area may have a smaller effect on your overall well-being -- that's what Kanazawa and Li found in their survey analysis. Similarly, smarter people may be better-equipped to jettison that whole hunter-gatherer social network -- especially if they're pursuing some loftier ambition."

Caveats:

• "this is an argument Kanazawa and Li are proposing and that it's not settled science."
• "one potential flaw in their research is that it defines happiness in terms of self-reported life satisfaction ("How satisfied are you with your life as a whole?"), and doesn't consider experienced well-being ("How many times did you laugh yesterday? How many times were you angry?" etc.). Survey researchers know that these two types of questions can lead to very different assessments of well-being."
• One of the authors, Kanazawa, "is no stranger to controversy. In 2011 he wrote a blog post for Psychology Today entitled "Why Are Black Women Less Physically Attractive Than Other Women?" The post ignited a firestorm of criticism and was swiftly taken down.
  • Dr Satoshi Kanazawa - findings of internal review and disciplinary hearing [lse.ac.uk]
  • "a group of 68 evolutionary psychologists issued an open letter titled "Kanazawa's bad science does not represent evolutionary psychology"
• "flaw in the reporting of this story, if not the research being reported upon, is a clear and concise definition of "smart people," e.g., IQ>130."

From: https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/wonk/wp/2016/03/18/why-smart-people-are-better-off-with-fewer-friends/ [washingtonpost.com]

I have some opinions / personal anecdotes I will add to the conversation below.

Original Submission