Gaps in Access to Information

Publicity-grabbing media headlines about scientific findings are often quite different than, and miss important nuances of, the research studies they summarize.  Take an oft-cited thesis:  friendships lead to good health, long life, and happiness.  See, e.g., How Social Isolation is Killing Us, How Loneliness Affects our Health, How Friendship Makes You Happier, Healthier.  For a politically unbiased review of the research behind the claims you would have to go to the underlying studies themselves.  Few of us have the time or inclination for that.  But without delving into the original research, we often miss important findings absent from the popular press.

Does Having More Friends Mean We Will be Happier?

Not necessarily.  It has been well-established by research that, in general, the quality of friendships and frequency of socialization are positively correlated with happiness.  One 2016 study, however, found a statistically important exception to this holding.  Authors Norman P. Li of Singapore Management University and Satoshi Kanazawa from the London School of Economics found that highly intelligent people are in fact less satisfied with life when they have high frequency of socialization.

The Li-Kanazawa research – not cited in many of the types of media articles noted above – was novel in applying a concept known as the Savanna Principle to the notion of subjective happiness, and finding a correlation between happiness and intelligence. The Savanna Principle was originally coined by Kanazawa in 2004 as a theory that human brains (like any other evolutionary formed organ or appendage like our liver and our hands) have not changed since they evolved thousands of years ago on the Savanna plains of Africa during the Neolithic times when humans lived in smaller, cooperative groups of about 150 people. The theory holds that any study or experiment or hypothesis related to human behavior that does NOT take into account or model the circumstances and conditions that the human brain would have encountered during the evolutionary ancestral time – what they call the environment of evolutionary adaptedness (EEA)­ – would be doomed to fail. The authors noted that adapting to novel evolutionary circumstances that did not exist in the EEA (like electronic communications or large, dense urban communities), and overcoming the brain’s bias towards EEA circumstances is not impossible, but difficult for most brains other than those with high intelligence.

Under theories of evolutionary psychology, intelligence is thought to have developed in response to the success of individuals responding to novel evolutionary circumstances (as opposed to recurrent situations).  Thus, the researchers argued, individuals today with higher levels of intelligence may have evolved from ancestors who were adept at addressing and solving evolutionary novel problems themselves.  Descendants of those brains thousands of years later have a better success rate of overcoming the EEA bias by differentiating what existed in the EEA from what is novel today.

The authors noted their statistical analysis of a well-known study on life satisfaction proved their proposed savanna theory of happiness — for the modern human brain, lack of meaningful frequent social contact of the kind humans would have encountered in the EEA leads to perceived and reported lower levels of life satisfaction.  They found the inverse, however, for individuals with higher levels of intelligence, positing that their brains are better able to navigate modern environmental factors.  The Savanna Principle still holds for each type of person; it just has a stronger effect on less intelligent individuals and is weaker for people with higher IQs.

This theory that intelligence has an evolutionary root and affects modern humans’ feeling of happiness in certain circumstances did not gain much traction in the mainstream media discussion of the positive effects of social interaction, no doubt because wading into the waters of genetic-based intelligence can be hazardous. The Washington Post seems to be the only popular news outlet that addressed the interplay of intelligence with life satisfaction that the Li-Kanazawa research found. Though even this article slightly skewed the research findings with the title “Why Smart People are Better Off With Fewer Friends”; they are not necessarily better off, but at least in the data that Li and Kanazawa analyzed, there was a statistically significant correlation between intelligence and the effects of the Savanna principle at work on the brain.  Even the research authors acknowledged they did not discover why more intelligent people reported having lower life satisfaction with higher number of socialization interactions.  They posited other factors that could be at play and not revealed in the data, like the strength of family ties.  The Washington Post author, Peter Ingraham, quoted a senior fellow and research director at Brookings Institution (a liberal think tank where Ingraham used to work), who posited that really smart people might be (or prefer to be) more focused on long-term objectives, like research, writing and pursuing large, worldly causes.  Or maybe the high-intelligence respondents were healthier and had less to worry about.  We will have to wait to see what future research reveals.

Limited Access to Research

Trying to access original research can be frustrating.  Original studies are primarily published in academic subscription-only journals.  To review most original studies and academic papers yourself (if not linked through the media articles), you would have to have dig through Google Scholar or the like, find a hard copy by going to your local library or elsewhere through WorldCat, have an institutional or expensive individual online account with JSTOR or Springer, and pay to view and download an article. Some articles can be found on free, open access sites like SSRN and PLOSone. For the Savanna theory of happiness article cited above, for example, one would need access to an online research library, like Wiley Online Library (often through one’s college or university if one is a current student or faculty member; alums don’t often have the same kind of free access), a subscription to the British Journal of Psychology, or pay anywhere from $6 to $38 depending upon whether you just wanted to rent, view online, or download and keep the article.  With some digging, it was possible to find a full pdf copy of the article, though not the official one for citation purposes.

To learn more about the support for and against the academic research open access movement, see:  PLOSone; a Report on the overview of scientific and scholarly journal publishing; Ethical Arguments in Support of Open Access Journals; The pros and cons of Open Access; and a Nobel Laureate’s call to boycott publishing in prestigious scientific journals.  Some research institutes, like the Eisen lab, commit to making all of their research and data publicly available. On the value of scholarly research publication, try this amusing article, or this one on the future of academic legal scholarship.

If you are interested in double-checking statements on research findings and public policy statements, you can go to sites like Politicfact and FactCheck.org (part of the Annenberg Public Policy Center of the University of Pennsylvania), though even those sites have been criticized for bias.  Other sites and organizations that do an excellent job bringing complicated academic research to public discourse in a more generally understandable level include The Tobin Project and footnote1.  For oversight of research publications on education policy, see the National Education Policy Center based in Colorado.  One of their reviews of a Brookings Institution article entitled Segregation, Race, and Charter Schools: What Do We Know? found misleading summaries and selective notation of prevailing academic research (perhaps the downside of non-academic peer reviewed publication pre-screening?).  If you really want to be sure you are getting an objective summary of a law, policy, decision or research finding, go to the original source and read it yourself.

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Know of good fact-checking or open access academic research sites?  Have you found other gaps between publicly popular summaries and the underlying original findings? Let us know!