Scientists Say Smart People Are Better Off With Fewer Friends

HughPickens.com writes: Christopher Ingraham writes in the Washington Post that a new study finds that when smart people spend more time with their friends, it makes them less happy. "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," says Carol Graham, a Brookings Institution researcher who studies the economics of happiness. According to Graham you should 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. (More, below.) Hugh Pickens continues: Kanazawa and Li's theory of happiness 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. "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." 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. Accordingly smarter people may be better-equipped to jettison that whole hunter-gatherer social network — especially if they're pursuing some loftier ambition. "Whatever the explanation might prove to be, this obviously doesn't mean smart people don't like having friends," says Emma Cueto. "But it does probably mean that they don't enjoy having too many — after all, keeping track of lots of people does usually involve, you know, talking to them. So if you're naturally more of a loner, congratulations! It might be a sign of intelligence."

Comments

Probably true for everyone

[BarbaraHudson]

Better to have fewer friends, but spend more time with them, than more friends, and only shallow interactions ...

Re:Probably true for everyone

[Anonymous Coward]

Yes, however, setting aside the number of friends, the more interesting matter of concern is how much time you spend with the friends you have.

Some people get a significant chemical payoff when engaging in recreational activities with their friends. So, doing a lot of that maximizes their satisfaction with life. Other people get significant chemical payoff from cultivating their mental abilities (studying and/or applying those abilities towards a meaningful goal). Such people can enjoy (and need) some recreational time with their friends, but not nearly as much. Too much and they will start to feel like they are wasting time and falling behind schedule (even if there isn't a schedule). They maximize their happiness by spending less time with friends (and family).

It is popular to portray such people as selfish, and usually miserable because of their selfishness. This meme is a cultural troll; it is nothing more than one group insisting that their tastes are superior to the tastes of another. It is also defensive, seeing as how people who spend more time focused on the acquisition and utilization of intellectual skills tend to accomplish more and make more money than people who just watch football all day. These attitudes should be seen as pedestrian, and flatly rejected.

Re:Probably true for everyone

[chipschap]

I hate to use the old phrase "quality time" but it comes to mind here. I have a handful of very good friends with whom I interact regularly but not constantly. I don't need or want more than that, and they don't either. So when we do get together, it's terrific. I think there would be rapidly diminishing returns if we got together more and more often.

Email is fine to stay in touch day to day (which doesn't necessarily translate as 'daily' in all cases). We are all really busy, like-minded people, which is probably why we're friends.

I don't understand the idea of calling and talking on the phone for hours daily, or the modern equivalent of texting every other minute. Now, many people do that. I'm not being critical. To each his or her own. Whatever makes you happy.

Drinking beer and watching football at the bar with buddies doesn't do it for me. And, lest you accuse me of being judgmental (when I just said above that I'm not!) --- this puts me outside the mainstream, and many if not most of those football/bar people do judge me for not being "social" enough.

It took me way too long to learn this: When you're outside the mainstream, don't expect acceptance and understanding to be reciprocal.

Re:Probably true for everyone

[Archtech]

It seems to me (as a confessed introvert) that the dominant culture in the USA - and hence one of the most popular cultures in most of the developed world - is strongly extravert. To stereotype mercilessly, most Americans are seen as energetic, conscientious, achievement-oriented team workers. This is especially so in corporate and government environments, for fairly obvious reasons. Since all human strengths have (indeed, are) complementary weaknesses, this entails being somewhat superficial, outer-directed, over-sensitive to consensus, and averse to solitary thought or study. One consequence is that introverts often find themselves feeling excluded, undervalued, or even (in extreme cases) considered as suffering from mental illness.

That's unfortunate, not only begans introverts have just as much right to live their own lives in the way they prefer as extraverts, but also because a lot of progress depends on introverts. Not to say that extraverts can't accomplish a huge amount too - but often the really big breakthroughs, which require focused attention for many months or years on end, have been made by introverts. It would be great if we could ever adjust our social perceptions to accept the whole spectrum of introversion/extraversion.

For a good introduction, anyone unfamiliar with the topic should try http://www.ted.com/talks/susan...

Re:Probably true for everyone

[Gr8Apes]

It took me way too long to learn this: When you're outside the mainstream, don't expect acceptance and understanding to be reciprocal.

Don't worry, everyone posting here is outside the mainstream and coincidentally also proves that just because you're introverted doesn't mean you're smart.

Re:Probably true for everyone

[chipschap]

Yours is an excellent post and contains much food for thought. I do however view things much differently, but I don't want to seem to "attack" what you've said, as it provides valuable insight.

Perhaps I have a different idea of what it means to be an introvert or extrovert. In my case, introversion displays as difficulty in starting relationships. However, the ones that do "make" it (that sounds terrible, I know) become very deep and indeed extremely "fault tolerant." I accept and navigate friends' "flaws" because I realize that they are simply part of who they are. They extend the same tolerance to my flaws and faults. It's not at all a matter of limiting time together because of fault intolerance, so to speak.

So I go back to the OP's idea that my group of introverts is simply very busy and wants to get lots of things done, and so we treasure our time together but none of us want it to be so extended that our goals are diverted. In that manner we're supportive of each other. (It might help to know that in my case, my friends are mostly other writers.)

I want to go back, though, and briefly elaborate my unrelated side point: that the bar/football "mainstream" crowd is non-reciprocal. That is, while I can see that those folks enjoy the bar/football experience, and I'm not at all critical of their choice, they will not extend the same tolerance to me and my own choices and interests, which they criticize openly. Example: I once told one of the bar/football people I was going to compete in the American Crossword Puzzle Tournament. He gave me a disdaining look and said, "Is there something wrong with you?"

A minor correction

[petes_PoV]

There are a lot of things wrong with this article. The idea that doctors spend their time curing cancer - hmmm, maybe one in ten thousand. Great writers don't tend to be highly intelligent (if they were, they'd get work that pays better). And I have yet to meet any lawyer IRL who was both intelligent AND spent all their time doing civil rights cases.

I also don't buy the "evolutionary" or sociological explanation. The population density of our ancestors might have been tiny, when measured over a whole country. But because they stuck together, it was clearly much higher in the groups they lived in. Since it took much more effort to build a house, they tended to be small and close to each other (within the village walls).

I would suggest that one reason that intelligent people would have fewer friends is the difficulty they would experience in finding like-minded individuals to be friends with. It wouldn't be very fulfilling for someone with a brain the size of a planet to spend all their time with people who only talked about soaps and sport.

Re:Alternative theory

[__aaclcg7560]

As a smart person, I post on Slashdot to annoy the idiots and assholes.

Re:Conflating smart people and introverts

[NicknameUnavailable]

It sounds like this article is mixing up “smart people” with “introverts.” What about the really smart extraverts? Richard Feynman was very extraverted, he had lots of friends, hung around with them a lot, and was very successful.

Introverts can act in a not-introverted manner. Feynman's bongo obsession should be enough to confirm him as an introverted autist that got placed in a lot of social situations. From the FBI files on Feynman:

...the appointee's wife was granted a divorce from him because of appointee's constantly working calculus problems in his head as soon as awake, while driving car, sitting in living room, and so forth, and that his one hobby was playing his African drums. His ex-wife reportedly testified that on several occasions when she unwittingly disturbed either his calculus or his drums he flew into a violent rage, during which time he attacked her, threw pieces of bric-a-brac about and smashed the furniture.