The savanna theory of happiness posits that the human brain is designed for and adapted to the conditions of the ancestral environment, not necessarily the current environment, and is therefore predisposed to perceive and respond to the current environment as if it were the ancestral environment. We may have difficulty comprehending and dealing with entities and situations that did not exist in the ancestral environment, roughly the African savanna during the Pleistocene Epoch.

The Savanna Principle is a term coined by Satoshi Kanazawa in 2004. It can explain why, for example, nearly half the players of one-shot Prisoner’s Dilemma games make the theoretically irrational choice to cooperate with their partner. The game models a situation that did not exist in the ancestral environment, and the human brain has difficulty comprehending completely anonymous social exchange and absolutely no possibility of knowing future interactions.

Recent theoretical developments suggest that general intelligence, far from being domain-general, might have evolved as a psychological adaptation to solve evolutionarily novel problems. This suggests that the evolutionary constraints on the human brain proposed by the Savanna Principle may be stronger among less intelligent individuals. More intelligent individuals are more likely to make the theoretically rational choice to defect in one-shot Prisoner’s Dilemma games, because they would be better able to comprehend the evolutionarily novel situations of complete anonymity and absolutely no possibility of knowing future interactions and make the rational decision to defect. In contrast, less intelligent individuals may have greater difficulty comprehending such novel situations and, as a result, make the theoretically irrational (albeit evolutionarily rational) decision to cooperate.

In a paper published last year⁽¹⁾, Norman P. Li and Satoshi Kanazawa focus on two factors that characterise basic differences in the social landscape of ancestral versus modern environments and thus might affect life satisfaction: population density and friendships. The two following charts are self-explanatory:

In particular, the effect of friendships on life satisfaction may be particularly stronger among less intelligent individuals, who are likely less able to adapt to evolutionarily novel circumstances such as a dearth of close friends.

____________________

(1) Li, Norman P., and Satoshi Kanazawa. 2016. ‘Country Roads, Take Me Home… to My Friends: How Intelligence, Population Density, and Friendship Affect Modern Happiness’. British Journal of Psychology (London, England: 1953) 107 (4): 675–97. https://doi.org/10.1111/bjop.12181.

Featured Image: Savana painting — African SPEED painting