Are Liberals Smarter than Conservatives? New Study Says "Yes"!

Einstein calculating Republican I.Q. ?

In a study published in the March 2010 issue of Social Psychology Quarterly, evolutionary psychologist Satoshi Kanazawa asserts that more intelligent people are statistically more likely to exhibit social values and religious and political preferences that are novel to the human species.  Specifically, liberalism and atheism correlate with higher intelligence, the study finds.

Kanazawa advances a new theory to explain why people form particular preferences and values.  More intelligent people are more likely than less intelligent people to adopt evolutionarily novel preferences and values, but intelligence does not correlate with preferences and values that are old enough to have been shaped by evolution over millions of years. 

"General intelligence, the ability to think and reason, endowed our ancestors with advantages in solving evolutionarily novel problems for which they did not have innate solutions," says Kanazawa, who teaches at the London School of Economics and Political Science.  "As a result, more intelligent people are more likely to recognize and understand such novel entities and situations than less intelligent people, and some of these entities and situations are preferences, values, and lifestyles." 

Kanazawa argues that humans are evolutionarily designed to be conservative, caring mostly about their family and friends.  Being liberal, however, means caring about an indefinite number of genetically unrelated strangers they never meet or interact with – which represented evolutionarily novel behavior. 

Kanazawa’s data suggests that more intelligent children may be slightly more likely to grow up to be liberals than conservatives.

Young adults who subjectively identify themselves as "very liberal" have an average IQ of 106 during adolescence while those who identify themselves as "very conservative" have an average IQ of 95 during adolescence.

The study found that more intelligent people are no more or no less likely to value such evolutionarily familiar entities as marriage, family, children, and friends. 

Kanazawa may have found the Holy Grail for persuading liberals – traditionally suspicious of biological explanations of human behavior – to be more receptive to evolutionary psychology. 

Indeed, I would ask both liberal and conservative readers to perform the following thought experiment:  based on your personal family, school and work experience, what is more dangerous – to conform to social norms and rules, or to rebel against them?  Who needs more intelligence, the conformist or the rebel?  I hope that most readers will agree that rebels attract a lot more heat and criticism than conformists.   Consequently, they probably needed to have extra intelligence.  Throughout human evolution, rebels and outsiders probably were only to survive – and pass their genes on to future generations – if they also were a bit smarter than average. 

However, this still leaves us with the same question that liberals have often asked about I.Q. studies that indicate racial or gender differences in intelligence: so what?  Are these small differences in intelligence really relevant in our everyday lives?  Moreover, even if extremely conservative thinkers may have lower I.Q.s than extremely liberal ones, that does not mean that liberals are on average smarter than conservatives. 

Despite the caveats that invariably come with any new scientific theory, this is an extremely powerful study destined to have a huge impact on political science.  

Comments

[Apemstemn]

0WkzG3sR4 uggs 2MfmP4qT1 uggs 2HcxI9dD3 http://www.barlaventure.com

[Dave]

"Indeed, I would ask both liberal and conservative readers to perform the following thought experiment: based on your personal family, school and work experience, what is more dangerous – to conform to social norms and rules, or to rebel against them? Who needs more intelligence, the conformist or the rebel? I hope that most readers will agree that rebels attract a lot more heat and criticism than conformists. Consequently, they probably needed to have extra intelligence. Throughout human evolution, rebels and outsiders probably were only to survive – and pass their genes on to future generations – if they also were a bit smarter than average. "

How are modern liberals rebels? They support government authority being imposed over just about every aspect of life. How on earth is that rebellious? Also I think being what's called a liberal today is about the safest position one can take currently. Otherwise you're classified by most of the mainstream society as a racist, sexist, bigot, hater of the poor, etc. I think that the only 'conservative' position that's relatively uncontroversial is support for war. 'Support the troops' tends to be a safe opinion as it's also pro-government.