Adam Mastroianni is the author of Experimental History. He studies how people perceive and misperceive their social worlds. His work has been featured in Science, Nature, and The Tonight Show with Jimmy Fallon. He has a PhD in psychology from Harvard and a certificate of completion from 137 different escape rooms. He’s originally from Monroeville, Ohio (pop. 1,400) and currently lives in New York City.
Here’s a definition of intelligence that lots of psychologists can get behind:
Intelligence is a very general mental capability that, among other things, involves the ability to reason, plan, solve problems, think abstractly, comprehend complex ideas, learn quickly and learn from experience. It is not merely book learning, a narrow academic skill, or test-taking smarts. Rather, it reflects a broader and deeper capability for comprehending our surroundings-“catching on,” “making sense” of things, or “figuring out” what to do […] Intelligence, so defined, can be measured, and intelligence tests measure it well.
Intelligence sounds pretty great. Who doesn’t want to “catch on” and “make sense”? Hell, “figuring out” what to do is pretty much all of life!
Naturally, people with more of this mental horsepower must live happier lives. When they encounter a problem, they should use their superior problem-solving ability to solve it. Smarter people should do a better job making plans and getting what they want, and they should learn more from their mistakes and subsequently make fewer of them. All of this should add up to a life that makes smart people go “this life rules!”
So smarter people are happier, right?
Well, this meta-analysis says no. Another says maybe a teeny tiny bit. This large, nationally-representative study from the UK finds that people who score the lowest on an intelligence test are a little less happy than everyone else, but that’s pretty much it.
I also pulled data from the General Social Survey, which includes (a) a short vocabulary test that seems to correlate reasonably well with longer intelligence tests (you can try it here), and (b) a simple measure of happiness: “Taken all together, how would you say things are these days—would you say that you are very happy, pretty happy, or not too happy?” Across 50 years of data and 30,346 people, the folks who scored higher on the vocab test were a tiny bit less happy (r = -.06, p < .001).
WHAT’S GOING ON HERE?
Maybe our tests are bad. The psychological study of intelligence has a long, bleak history of racism and prejudice against poor people (“three generations of imbeciles are enough”), so we should be skeptical coming in. Psychologists have been trying to construct bias-free tests for a long time, but it’s hard. Plus, people score higher on IQ tests when you pay them for performance, so what looks like a test of intelligence may in part be a test of how hard you’re willing to try.
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