Why the Less Intelligent May Enjoy Television More than the More Intelligent

Kanazawa (2004a) proposes that the human brain may have difficulty comprehending entities and situations that did not exist in the ancestral environment, and, as one empirical demonstration of this Savanna Principle, Kanazawa (2002) shows that people who watch certain types of TV shows are more satisfied with their friendships, suggesting that they may have difficulty distinguishing TV characters from real friends. In an entirely different line of research, Kanazawa (2004b) advances an evolutionary psychological theory of the evolution of general intelligence, which proposes that general intelligence evolved in order to handle evolutionarily-novel problems. The logical convergence of these two separate lines of research leads to the prediction that the human difficulty in dealing with evolutionarily-novel stimuli interacts with general intelligence, such that the Savanna Principle holds stronger among the less intelligent than among the more intelligent. Further analyses of the U.S. General Social Survey demonstrate that less intelligent men and women may have greater difficulty separating TV characters from their real friends than more intelligent men and women.