“Why smart people are better off with fewer friends” is a Washington Post article summarizing research about the relative merits of city and rural life:
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.”
Kanazawa and Li explain: “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.”
There’s a twist, though, at least as Kanazawa and Li see it. Smarter people may be better equipped to deal with the new (at least from an evolutionary perspective) challenges present-day life throws at us. “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,” they write. 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.
Could it be that there is a simpler explanation? Suppose that people who are unusual in any way seek out similarly unusual folks for friendship. If you are 1 in 1000 there are 20,000 people just like you in a big Chinese city. That gives you a lot of choice of friends. If you are average, on the other hand, you can find similar friends in even the smallest community. High intelligence can be modeled like any other abnormal personal characteristic that leads to affinity in friendship.
[Confirming the cited research to some extent, in this ranking of states by happiness, the least crowded states seem to be where Americans are happiest, but some of that may be due to the fact that costs of living are typically low in uncrowded states (no matter how many immigrants we pack into the U.S., a 1/4-acre lot in Alaska (#2), Montana (#3), or Wyoming (#5) will probably still be pretty cheap). My home state of Massachusetts is ranked #30 despite having the #6 rank for income. Don’t forget to check realworlddivorce.com before moving; unless she has already sued the father of her children, a woman who agrees to move from Massachusetts to Colorado may be giving up $millions in potential profits from child support and also will give up her more-than-90-percent chance of winning sole custody.]
Absolutely, smart people – especially smart women should live in a big city. In a big city there are more doctors and other wealthy people with whom a woman can have sex and get a big payout as a result 🙂
I think there’s a lot of disconnected weak correlation going on here.
A lot of smart, successful people have social issues or even disorders. Life in rural areas tends to be cheaper and less stressful. People who like living in rural areas may seek that out. While people may feed on stress and excitement and lots of social interaction in a city, it may result in less happiness.
When are you moving Philip?
Steve: I’m waiting for your full report from Beaver Creek! Perhaps there is a subcommunity there that you found with folks just like me (starting with room temperature IQ).
Being a lawyer in DC is better than being a lawyer in Gary, Indiana. But being a fry cook in Gary might be a tolerable lifestyle choice in Gary whereas it would be hell in NYC or DC. I feel like these guys take relatively obvious observations anyone would intuit and then layer on BS about evolutionary psychology.