Were you wondering why sometimes you would rather spend time at home than go out and hang out with your friends all day? Were you worried that you aren’t as friendly and sociable as they are?
Well it’s about time you stop beating yourself up about it. You are neither unfriendly nor unsociable. You simply have higher IQs than others.
Apparently, the more clever you are, the less you want to hang out and socialize with others.
The evolutionary psychologist Norman Li of Singapore Management University and Satoshi Kanazawa from the London School of Economics conducted a study in order to establish how the level of intelligence, friendships and population density affect people’s happiness. The study was published in the British Journal of Psychology.
Kanazawa and Li based their conclusions on a long-term survey of 15,000 people who were between the age of 15 to 28. They noticed that:
- People who live in big cities are less happy than those who live in the country.
- People with busier social life were more satisfied than others.
However, not all of them felt the same way.
According to the survey people with higher IQ felt worse whenever they spend a lot of time hanging out with friends.
Well, it has sense if we just think about it. People with higher IQ are aware of their abilities and know exactly what they are capable for. They would rather spend time on some projects or a job that will provide some benefits for themselves or others instead of spending time just hanging up with their pals.
Take a moment and think about doctors who are giving all of them to find cure for cancer or some other difficult disease, a writer who is putting his heart and soul on those pages which would enlighten so many generations to come or a civil rights lawyer who spends so many sleepless nights not for himself, but to protect the most vulnerable class of people in the society.
This phenomenon was also worked out by Carol Graham, a researcher of the economics of happiness for the Brookings Institute.
“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,”- said Graham in an interview for the Washington Post.
So, stop scolding yourself the next time you’d rather stay at home than go clubbing with friends. And remember you are not unsociable person you’re simply smarter than the others.
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A professional writer with over a decade of incessant writing skills. Her topics of interest and expertise range from health, nutrition and psychology.
