Often Accussed Of Being Anti-Social? It Might Be Because You’re A Genius

High-IQ individuals need fewer friends

The next time your friends accuse you of being a bore because you don’t feel like going out, you can hit them with this rigorously researched theory: People with high IQs feel less happy when they spend lots of time with their friends.

Sure, they’ll probably never ask you to go to the pub with them again, but that would suit you and your big brain just fine, right? Because according to a new study, having fewer friends makes you, as a smart person, happier.

The research published in the British Journal of Psychology (by evolutionary psychologists Satoshi Kanazawa of the London School of Economics and Norman Li of Singapore Management University) states that ‘More intelligent individuals experience lower life satisfaction with more frequent socialization with friends.’

We repeat: super smart people are happier when they don’t socialise very much. The study found that extremely intelligent people are more fulfilled when they have lots of alone time (to focus on brain enhancing pursuits like code cracking, language learning and complex problem solving, perhaps?).

The researchers discovered that people with lower IQs reported a greater life satisfaction the more social interactions they had with their close friends.

But this correlation was reversed for high-IQ individuals: "more intelligent individuals were actually less satisfied with life if they socialized with their friends more frequently."

Even time spent with their best mates doesn’t trump the high very brainy people get from spending lots of time with themselves.

And we're going to presume it's a sliding scale: if you have a small, core group of friends you like to spend time (but not too much time) with then you are probably nearly-Mensa material too.

So there you have it, if you really like staying in most of the time and you don't get crippling FOMO if you don't spend loads of quality time with your mates on the regular, you shouldn’t feel bad. Not at all, blame it on your big IQ.