Posted on 03/22/2016 5:46:12 AM PDT by Reeses
... Kanazawa and Li theorize that the hunter-gatherer lifestyles of our ancient ancestors form the foundation for what make us happy now. "Situations and circumstances that would have increased our ancestors’ life satisfaction in the ancestral environment may still increase our life satisfaction today," they write.
They use what they call "the savanna theory of happiness" to explain two main findings from an analysis of a large national survey (15,000 respondents) of adults aged 18 to 28.
First, they find that people who live in more densely populated areas tend to report less satisfaction with their life overall. "The higher the population density of the immediate environment, the less happy" the survey respondents said they were. Second, they find that the more social interactions with close friends a person has, the greater their self-reported happiness.
(Excerpt) Read more at washingtonpost.com ...
In 1970 the US population was a little over 200 million. It is now well over 300 million. So there are more people per square mile in the country. That may explain the general downward trend in the lines since 1970. Too crowded.
I don’t think I would stake my professional career on that study.
I seem to remember a classic study in psychology from, oh, maybe 50 years ago: rats were placed in cages with increasingly dense populations. The more the rats were confined in a small space, the greater the attacks, violence, killings, sexual deviancy. Those with more “free range” space led fairly normal, happy lives.
A quote from Dave Gardner also comes to mind, “Ain’t nothin’ wrong with the country, ‘ceptin’ the city!”
Look at the Bruce effect. Also, Konrad Lorenz wrote of similar studies.
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