Why aren't smart people happier? - by Adam Mastroianni

Experimental History

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Why aren't smart people happier?<br>A new way to think about brainpower.

Adam Mastroianni<br>Aug 09, 2022

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Photo cred: my dad<br>Here’s a definition of intelligence that lots of psychologists can get behind:<br>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!<br>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!"<br>So smarter people are happier, right?<br>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.<br>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<br>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.<br>But even if intelligence tests only measure something like “ability to succeed in an unfair society” or “willingness to try hard,” it only deepens the mystery. Shouldn’t those people end up with happier lives, however unfair that may be?<br>And the tests likely do tap something more than just privilege and effort. There’s plenty of skepticism toward intelligence tests in psychology, but even the biggest skeptics agree that IQ can predict things like how well you do in school and what kind of job you get, even accounting for all the criticisms. So why doesn’t it also predict living a life that you like?<br>SPEARING SPEARMAN

I think there’s one guy to blame for this big mystery, and his name is Charles Spearman.<br>Way back in 1904, Spearman noticed something weird: the same kids who did well in one subject in school tended to do well in other subjects, too. The correlations were never perfect, of course, but they were pretty darn high, even across subjects that seemed pretty different from each other, like French and math. How come?<br>Spearman figured there must be some general mental ability that humans use to solve all kinds of problems. He later wrote:<br>This continued tendency to success of the same person throughout all variations of both form and subject-matter—that is to say throughout all conscious aspects of cognition whatever—appears only explicable by some factor lying deeper than the phenomena of consciousness.

Helpfully, he also drew us a picture:

Intelligence!<br>This is, I think, exactly where everything went wrong with the study of intelligence for the next 119 years. It’s not that Spearman’s results were inaccurate—in fact, they’ve been replicated over and over. At this point, pretty much every paper on intelligence has to start out like this review from 2006:<br>In the study of intelligence, one empirical phenomenon is well established: Test scores on cognitive tasks show a positive manifold, that is, they are invariably positively intercorrelated, albeit to varying degrees. This implies that people who score well on one cognitive test are likely to score well on other cognitive tests. The positive manifold is a robust phenomenon.

Spearman’s stats were sound, but his interpretation was wrong. He did not, as he claimed, observe a “continued...