There is no doubt that we rely on our friends. Communication with others has its advantages, but there has been an ongoing question that scientists felt a need to answer. That question was: do we really need communication to feel happy and satisfied in life?
The research project involved some 15,000 people between 18 and 28 years of age. They lived in different areas of the world, communicated at different frequencies and lived in different types of population densities.
The outcome was published in a British psychological magazine. The results are quite surprising.
3 Things You Can Learn from the Research
After analyzing all of the data, evolutionary psychologists, Norman Li, of the Singapore Management University and Satoshi Kanazava, of the London School of Economics came up with the following conclusions.
Firstly, as a rule, people living in densely populated areas feel less happy.
Secondly, to feel happy most of us need constant communication with friends and people with like minds. The more close conversations we have, the higher the level of our happiness.
Thirdly, people with high intelligence are most often the exception to the rule.
As a person’s IQ got higher, they required less communication. Intellectual individuals typically felt less satisfied in life when they were overly active in a social way. They don’t typically enjoy being the life of the party.
It was also seen that an individual with higher intelligence will typically have a smaller circle of friends. It is thought this is due to the way that an individual with higher intelligence thinks. Not only does their brain work differently, they may even look at communication differently as well.
Intelligent people tend to live in their own world
When an individual has above average intelligence, social activity is seen more as something that is necessary rather than essential. Many geniuses tend to go off to themselves, and fewer people accept or understand them as individuals. As they communicate more, they tend to be less happy.
When a person is intelligent, they also tend to be more enthusiastic about what is important to them, rather than being enthusiastic about communication.
Carol Graham, a researcher at the Brookings Institution thinks intelligent people spend their time achieving their long-term goals. They find happiness when what they do leads to results.
Individuals who are highly intelligent, such as a doctor working on research or a writer working on a novel, will interact less frequently with other people. If they do have interaction, it tends to distract them from their main purpose, and it affects their happiness and inner harmony.
One Suggestion of Why It Happens
According to the ‘Savanna Theory of Happiness,’ a human being is just a set of genes as well as a culmination of the memories of their ancestors. It states that our inner feelings are affected by our ancestors.
In other words, we feel happy when we are in the same situations and circumstances that our ancestors experienced thousands of years ago.
The ancestors from the African savanna were few in number and they lived in a small village with one person per square kilometer. They needed to stay together to survive a hostile environment.
Today, we live in an age of technology and we have people surrounding us at almost all times. Although we live in today’s world, we were still made for the world of our ancestors. It is almost as if our bodies exists today but our brain still lives in the past.
But that is not true for everyone.
A high level of intelligence allows an individual to adapt to new conditions more readily. Those individuals can often overcome the gap between what we were and what we are.
Intelligent people tend to live by their own rules rather than sticking to what may have been in their past. A high level of intelligence provides the opportunity for them to rely on themselves more readily and seek their goals independently. They may require communication, but only from time to time.
Via: Bright Side
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