Relative Verbal Intelligence and Happiness

Boris Nikolaev and Jennifer McGee

MPRA Paper from University Library of Munich, Germany

Abstract: Even though higher intelligence (IQ) is often associated with many positive outcomes in life, it has become a stylized fact in the happiness literature that smarter people are not happier than their less intelligent counterparts. In this paper, we examine how relative verbal intelligence correlates with happiness and present two main findings. First, our estimations from the General Social Survey for a large representative sample of Americans suggest a small, but positive and significant correlation between verbal intelligence and happiness. Second, we find that verbal intelligence has a strong positional effect on happiness, i.e., people who have greater verbal proficiency relative to their peers in their reference group are more likely to report higher levels of happiness. The positional effect of happiness holds even when we control for a large set of socio-economic characteristics as well as relative income.

Keywords: Verbal Intelligence; Social Comparison; Happiness (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: I26 I3 I31 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2016
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-exp, nep-hap, nep-hpe and nep-neu
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (5)

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Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:pra:mprapa:78564

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