Smarter people are happier, says new analysis involving 80,000 participants, but only a bit

By Christian Jarrett “happiness in intelligent people is the rarest thing I know” Ernest Hemingway A lot of us would like to be smarter and happier, but does one lead to the other? Folk wisdom suggests not: old sayings tell us that “ignorance is bliss” and that “only a fool can be happy”. What does the psychology literature say? A new meta-analysis in the Journal of Vocational Behaviour has combined the results from dozens of previous studies involving many tens of thousands of participants and, contrary to the received wisdom, it concludes that higher intelligence actually does correlate with greater happiness (or “life satisfaction”) and job satisfaction, but only weakly. Erik Gonzalez-Mulé at Indiana University and his colleagues sifted the literature, identifying relevant papers, published and unpublished, going back to 1980. Combining the results from 33 papers involving nearly 50,000 participants, they found that intelligence (or what they called “general mental ability”) had a weak but statistically non-significant positive correlation with life satisfaction, and a modest, statistically significant positive correlation with job satisfaction. They found further evidence for the apparent benefits of higher intelligence for life satisfaction by factoring in the influence of “job complexity” (greater complexity meaning a job with more variety, skill demands and autonomy) and job income, two f...
Source: BPS RESEARCH DIGEST - Category: Psychiatry & Psychology Authors: Tags: Emotion Intelligence Occupational Source Type: blogs