More the intelligence, fewer the friends

If you have a very small circle of friends and you are happy about it, then it might be a sign that you are intelligent as a new study has revealed that loners tend to be more intellectual than others.

Evolutionary psychologists Satoshi Kanazawa of the London School of Economics and Norman Li of Singapore Management University wrote that situations and circumstances that would have increased our ancestors' life satisfaction in the ancestral environment may still increase our life satisfaction today.

They use what they call "the savanna theory of happiness" to explain two main findings from an analysis of a large national survey (15,000 respondents) of adults aged 18 to 28.

First, they found that people, who live in more densely populated areas, tend to report less satisfaction with their life overall. The higher the population density of the immediate environment, the less happy the survey respondents said they were. Second, they found that the more social interactions with close friends a person has, the greater their self-reported happiness.

However, there was one big exception. For more intelligent people, these correlations were diminished or even reversed.

The research is published in the British Journal of Psychology.