“A new paper on which has some results on life satisfaction, intelligence and the number of social interactions one has has generated some mainstream buzz....The figure above shows the interaction effect between intelligence, life satisfaction, and number of times you meet up with friends over the week. What you see is that among the less intelligent more interactions means more life satisfaction and among the more intelligent you see the reverse...But take a look at the y-axis...The effect here is very small....These are not actionable results for anyone.”
I wonder if the reason could be that for smart people it is difficult to find many good friends. So the actual choice for most of them is between having only a few great friends (which is better), or having many friends that suck (which is worse). But maybe given a chance, having many great friends could be even better.
By difficulty to find many good friends I mean that for people with very high intelligence the set of their peers is already small enough, and then within this set they need to find people with similar values, hobbies, personality, etc. Even admitting this problem is a huge taboo (essentially you are telling 99% of your social environment “I don’t consider you a good friend material”), so many people probably don’t have good strategies for solving it.
It would be interesting to know whether the alleged finding (assuming it holds up, which is always uncertain for this sort of thing) looks different in places where very smart people are easier to find, or for populations with more effective ways of finding very intelligent friends.
(For instance, I live near a city with a world-class university and a pretty vigorous tech industry in the area that encourages smart people to stay around. There’s a pretty good supply of highly intelligent potential friends around here.)
More intelligent individuals experience lower life satisfaction with more frequent socialization with friends.
The paper is paywalled but here it is claimed that life satisfaction is negatively correlated with the frequency of socialization and not the number of friends. Granted, those two are likely to be positively correlated.
[Link] Scientists Say Smart People Are Better Off With Fewer Friends (from slashdot)
Not according to Razib Khan who writes in part:
“A new paper on which has some results on life satisfaction, intelligence and the number of social interactions one has has generated some mainstream buzz....The figure above shows the interaction effect between intelligence, life satisfaction, and number of times you meet up with friends over the week. What you see is that among the less intelligent more interactions means more life satisfaction and among the more intelligent you see the reverse...But take a look at the y-axis...The effect here is very small....These are not actionable results for anyone.”
I wonder if the reason could be that for smart people it is difficult to find many good friends. So the actual choice for most of them is between having only a few great friends (which is better), or having many friends that suck (which is worse). But maybe given a chance, having many great friends could be even better.
By difficulty to find many good friends I mean that for people with very high intelligence the set of their peers is already small enough, and then within this set they need to find people with similar values, hobbies, personality, etc. Even admitting this problem is a huge taboo (essentially you are telling 99% of your social environment “I don’t consider you a good friend material”), so many people probably don’t have good strategies for solving it.
It would be interesting to know whether the alleged finding (assuming it holds up, which is always uncertain for this sort of thing) looks different in places where very smart people are easier to find, or for populations with more effective ways of finding very intelligent friends.
(For instance, I live near a city with a world-class university and a pretty vigorous tech industry in the area that encourages smart people to stay around. There’s a pretty good supply of highly intelligent potential friends around here.)
Abstract
The paper is paywalled but here it is claimed that life satisfaction is negatively correlated with the frequency of socialization and not the number of friends. Granted, those two are likely to be positively correlated.