Happiness and intelligence

[stpauler]

According to this, intelligent kids tend to be less happy due to social rejection.

Children develop along four streams: intellectual, physical, emotional (psychological) and social. In classrooms, the smartest kids tend to be left out of more activities by other children than they are included in. They are “odd,” they are the geeks, they are social outsiders. In other words, they do not develop socially as well as they may develop intellectually or even physically where opportunities may exist for more progress.
Their emotional development, characterized by their ability to cope with risky or stressful situations, especially over long periods of time, also lags behind that of the average person.
Adults tend to believe that intelligent kids can deal with anything because they are intellectually superior. This inevitably includes situations where the intelligent kids have neither knowledge nor skills to support their experience. They go through the tough times alone. Adults don’t understand that they need help and other kids don’t want to associate with kids the social leaders say are outsiders.

Lisa Simpson said in one episode: “As intelligence goes up, happiness goes down. See, I made a graph. I make lots of graphs.”

So is there any truth to Lisa’s graph?

[Omar_Little]

I’m sure that you can find individuals that would marry up to the tracks laid out in the article, but rarely are people, even kids, that one dimensional. I believe that it’s also the parent’s responsibility to make sure that your kids are as well rounded as possible. As a parent, you can’t just cop out and say “Tommy just likes to do X.” and abdicate your responsiblity to introduce other aspects to living to them.

[Johanna]

@stpauler

According to this, intelligent kids tend to be less happy due to social rejection.

It corroborates with my experience growing up. It tracks very closely with my views in the thread What makes "smart people socially awkward? But there was a lot of contrary opinion in that thread that if you were really smart you’d figure out how not to be socially rejected, so if this misfortune happens to you it’s your own damn fault. So it’s nice to see my own perspective backed up.

[KneadToKnow]

I’m dumb as a stump and reasonably content, does that add any data points to the discussion?

[Ambivalid]

I wonder if there are correlations one could find between IQ levels and suicides?

[njtt]

I would like to see some actual evidence that happiness (or even social awkwardness) is significantly negatively correlated with intelligence. There is certainly none in the article you link to, or in the article that it links to.

My WAG, which is quite as good as theirs, is that it is much more likely that unhappiness, and especially social awkwardness, tends to cause intelligence, or, rather, intellectuallity and the appearance of intelligence. People who are not getting much satisfaction from social life are more likely to turn to the life of the mind as an alternative.