Is IQ related to happiness and life satisfaction?

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No. In our sample, IQ was virtually unrelated to both momentary happiness (r = -0.04, n = 3688) and life satisfaction (r = -0.001, n = 674). To investigate this, we asked our participants "Right now, at this very moment, how happy or unhappy do you feel?" - which is our measure of "happiness." . Additionally, we gave a subset of our participants a short Satisfaction With Life scale by Diener et al. (1985) that consisted of five statements related to life satisfaction (e.g., "In most ways my life is close to my ideal.", "The conditions of my life are excellent." and "I am satisfied with my life.") that we averaged to get a final score for life satisfaction. The two plots below with their (almost) horizontal lines of best fit illustrate this lack of relationship between IQ and happiness/life satisfaction.

What do the other studies say?

Research on the relationship between IQ and happiness/life satisfaction show mixed results. At the individual level, a lot of studies have found very low and usually not statistically significant correlations between IQ and happiness (Kanazawa, 2014; Veenhoven & Choi, 2012; Sigelman, 1981), but there are exceptions that reported a positive association (Ali et al., 2012), though the effect was quite weak. Thus, our study is generally in line with the existing literature.

Takeaways

• IQ likely has little to no correlation with either momentary happiness or life satisfaction. 

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