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.
我们中的很多人都想变得更聪明更快乐,但是,更快乐是否是来自于更聪明呢?民间的智慧并不这么认为:老话说“无知是福”,“只有傻瓜才会幸福”。那么,心理学文献会怎么说呢?在《职业行为杂志》上新发表的一项元分析结合了数十个过去的研究,这些研究包含了成千上万个被试,而且,与被普遍认可的智慧相反,其结论是,更高的智力的确与更多的幸福(或“生活满意度”)和工作满意度相关,但,这个相关性有些弱。
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at Indiana University and his colleagues sifted the literature, identifying relevant papers, published and unpublished, going back to 1980.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.
印第安那大学的Erik Gonzalez-Mulé和他的同事详细筛选并辨识了从1980开始发表的和未发表的文献与论文。综合了涉及近50000人参与的33篇论文的结果,他们发现,智力(或他们所谓的“一般智力能力”) 与生活满意度呈弱相关,但与生活满意度没有显著的正相关,与工作满意度呈现统计学上的中度显著正相关。
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 factors that are themselves correlated with greater happiness. This showed that higher intelligence has indirect links with greater happiness because more intelligent people tend to earn more, but especially because they tend to have more complex jobs, which presumably are more rewarding.
他们将因素分解到智力对“工作满意度”的影响,以及智力对“工资收入”的影响,这两项因素本身是与更大的幸福相关的,进而进一步发现了更高智力对于更高的生活满意度有显而易见好处的证据。这表明,更高的智力间接的相关于更大的幸福,因为更聪明的人往往赚的钱更多,但是,这尤其是因为他们往往有更复杂的工作,这大概会有更多的回报。