The Good Don't Die Young

Just about everyone hopes to live a long and healthy life, so the Longevity Study: surprising discoveries for health and long life from the landmark eight-decade study, by Howard S. Friedman and Leslie R. Martin, published about two weeks ago by the Hudson Street Press of the Penguin Group, is likely to have a healthy sale and a long shelf life.

The “landmark” research to which the title refers is a long-term study of intellectually gifted children begun by Lewis Terman in 1921. Terman, an educational psychologist at Stanford University, best known as the author of the Stanford-Binet Intelligence Test and the father of the term IQ, hoped to dispel the notion that intellectually gifted children are maladjusted misfits and that the popular saying “early ripe, early rot” was wrong. He enrolled in his study more than 1,500 bright children, mainly from white, urban, educated, middle-class families, principally from California, who were about 10 years old in 1921, and indeed he found that as a group they were healthier and better adjusted socially than other children.

Not content with his initial findings, Terman followed his sample until he died in 1956, periodically gathering data from them. The data are presented in the five-volume Genetic Studies of Genius. The fifth volume (1959), a 35-year follow-up, completed after Terman’s death, found that the participants in the study were in generally good health and exhibited normal personalities. Most of them had succeeded academically and socially at school and were generally successful in their careers, and their divorce rate was lower than of the general population. However, nine years later, a study by one of Terman’s associates compared the 100 most successful and 100 least successful men in the sample, with success defined in terms of the intellectual gifts required by their occupations, and found no difference in the average IQ of the two subgroups.

Friedman and Leslie undertook the laborious job of finding the death certificates of those in the sample – by now most have died – and they then determined what characteristics were related to longevity. It was of interest to discover that women in the study who reported a higher frequency of orgasm during intercourse tended to live longer than their less sexually fulfilled sisters. Alas, there was no similar effect for men, but this can probably be explained by the fact that most men who engage in sexual intercourse reach orgasm. When there’s little variability, there's little correlation to be found.

The good, it turns out, do not die young. The variable most strongly related to longevity was conscientiousness, marked by being “thrifty, persistent, detail-oriented, and responsible.” Oh dear, the dull plodders among us will outlive the really interesting people. If we survive to extreme old age, will those of our contemporaries who are still compos mentis be worth talking to? Let us cultivate some amusing younger friends.

Friedman and Leslie’s findings have to be taken with a liberal dose of salt for several reasons. First, in any study, some correlations will be large simply by chance. Second, the children sampled were scarcely typical Americans, although they might well correspond to the readers of this blog. Third, Terman intervened in the lives of his respondents, writing them letters of recommendation, for example, or helping some get into Stanford University, which probably biased his results.

Still, the two findings I’ve noted here are plausible. Healthier women are probably more able to achieve orgasm in the first place, and happy marriages, to which sexual compatibility contributes, promotes better health. The conscientious are probably more likely to pay attention to their health, going for regular physical check-ups and following their doctors’ orders, than the less conscientious. So, toiling tortoises among you, take heart. It’s more likely that you will outlive the carefree hares.