Hum de hum. You may know that a number of studies have demonstrated that higher intelligence is correlated with left-wing political beliefs. And that might be so. But I've always been a bit skeptical because (a) it seems unlikely, and (b) maybe what's really going on is that smart people tend to go to college and it's actually college education that's correlated with lefty beliefs.
A new study from a grad student at the University of Minnesota tries to tease this apart. Here's the basic result:
This chart shows how much political beliefs shift leftward in response to an IQ increase of one standard deviation (15 points). The raw result is 0.54, which is—a lot? A little? It's hard to say because the paper doesn't explain the scale they use to measure political orientation.¹ In any case, if you control for income and education about a third of the effect goes away: the new result is 0.38 and is no longer statistically significant.
Now let's take a look at a different table:
This is the correlation between political beliefs and educational attainment (EA). The raw result is 0.176, which is about a third of the raw effect of IQ. That fits with the first result.
I have no idea if the authors' methods are reliable. For technical reasons, their measures of intelligence and educational attainment are based on clusters of genetic markers from other studies: One cluster is associated with intelligence and the other is associated with education. So a big part of the correlations depends on whether these genetic clusters are reliable in the first place.
There's also the fact that once you control for education you (barely) lose statistical significance for the effect of IQ. This may not be a big deal, but it's not especially promising either.
In any case, if the genetic clusters are reliable and the methodology is sound, it suggests that intelligence really does have an impact on political beliefs regardless of educational level. Which I still find odd. I know that we lefties want to say "Duh, of course smart people are more liberal," but that's really not persuasive. It's very hard to conceive of why a high IQ should make you more likely to support abortion or social welfare or a smaller defense budget. But maybe that's just a failure of imagination on my part.
¹Their scale is a "summed composite" of five other scales, which I'd guess are each scales of 0-1. That makes the composite a scale of 0-5, so an increase of 0.54 is about 10%. However, this is just a wild guess on my part. I have no clue why the authors present a bunch of numbers without explaining what they mean.
I'm skeptical of studies that purport to measure intelligence, so they lost me on the genetic markers/clusters/whatever.
That said, left-side politics tends to encourage and include critical thinking. Right-side politics tends to encourage a lack thereof, in favor of tribal unity. It's just kind of inherent to conservatism that tribal unity is prioritized and therefore critical thinking doesn't matter. I don't think there's anything special about the left when it comes to critical thinking these days, it's just that the right has none of it.
This very much, also, too! Critical thinking is not just not practiced on the right; it is actively disdained. Part of this is the moral belief structure of "conservatives," who (as well established by research) value obedience to authority and loyalty (aka belonging) highly. But I think part of it also is due to a lack of training/experience in critical thinking: they simply don't know HOW to do it, so they rely on settled beliefs and social custom, and they distrust anyone who would question settled beliefs or social custom.
That is, it is reactionary. Quelle surprise.
Well said. I would put your skepticism much more emphatically: "IQ" is BS. (See Stephen Jay Gould on this question, for example.) I could go on at length on the topic, but not today.
And yes, one side of today's political spectrum values critical thinking, and one side aggressively does not. To me, as someone who has tried to teach (politically neutral) critical thinking for decades, that matters.
clearly, you are not considering kevin's tuesday lunching buddies when alleging conservatives don't think critically.
The definition of "conservative" has become slippery, with many people that I categorize as reactionary describing themselves as conservative. Old fashioned conservatism is simply support for the status quo and opposition to change. Conservatism of that sort is the position of least intellectual effort; you don't have to evaluate proposed changes to decide if they're good or bad, you can just oppose any proposed change without thinking about it. This naturally appeals to the less intellectually endowed.
It's very hard to conceive of why a high IQ should make you more likely to support abortion or social welfare or a smaller defense budget.
Here's a hypothesis. Higher "intelligence" (whatever precisely that means) and/or (more concretely) more education disposes one to basing beliefs on evidence and logic, and evidence and logic in turn suggest that, in a pluralistic society with an advanced industrialized economy, (1) women should damn well have bodily and medical autonomy and (2) spending over 4% of the GDP of the largest economy on the planet on the military -- especially on procurement -- is both economically and militarily inefficient.
Picky but important stylistic point:
Nobody "supports abortion". Many of us "support legal abortion."
"woman's own decision on abortion"
I don’t know that raw intelligence is that different— as a native of the Deep South, I’ve long observed that there are plenty of bright people who just don’t really get any smarter living in that culture. I find that highly politically engaged lefties are smarter than our counterparts on the right, mostly because their engagement is based on radio and tv propaganda, while we like to debate more.
I do think people on the left are more curious and more interesting, though, and those traits tend to refine intelligence more than just being smart enough to earn more money.
"... while we like to debate more."
Not really, at least not about things you care about. As shown for example by the distress expressed by many commenters on the Lawyers, Guns and Money blog about the ongoing debate there about whether Biden needs to abandon his campaign for President. Or the widespread feeling in many leftie circles that discussion of Israel and Palestine is best avoided.
The LGM commentariat is mostly just bored with the debate over Biden— the front page there is at almost NYT levels of over saturation, and there’s literally nothing to do except watch it shake out. Obviously, Israel/Palestine has been debated a lot more over the past nine months, but identifying moral culpability— while very complicated, since Hamas does suck— is much easier than figuring out what is to be done in a political system so different from our own. Pretty much everyone seems to agree that Bibi Netanyahu needs to go, though. Either way, the left reaches these points through arguing it out, not by messaging.
"The LGM commentariat is mostly just bored with the debate over Biden— the front page there is at almost NYT levels of over saturation, and there’s literally nothing to do except watch it shake out ..."
You could say that about lots of things. The war in Ukraine for example. And there were angry commenters leaving in a huff because they couldn't stand a single exposure to contrary opinions on something they cared about. Like the ones advocating a boycott of Twitter. These aren't people who enjoy open debate.
And there are things they could be doing. Calling their Congressional representatives with their opinion. Donating to Biden or donating to the Democratic party depending on whether they want to make it harder or easier to replace Biden.
Note that I didn’t describe the debate as “productive” or “leading to solutions.” And there still seem to be plenty of people more than willing to offer their opinions.
Not that I can speak for anyone else, but it’s possible that lefties like debate just to refine and solidify their understanding of a given topic, which would still be an intellectual step or two above sucking down right-wing propaganda like lab rats who just had cocaine added to their water bottles. It doesn’t mean that the debates are substitutes for a graduate seminar, just that the act of turning ideas over to examine them tends to correlate with a more active mind.
My family spent a few days at the home of a conservative relative who has young children. When the topic drifted to politics, he was of course worried about illegal immigration, Chinese spies, trans people, and liberal teachers.
He also keeps his (purportedly unloaded) guns under the bed, has an unfenced pond and above ground pool, lets the (thankfully helmeted) kids rip around on an assortment of ORVs, and until a recent DUI drove moderately drunk routinely. He and all his friends who aren’t drug addicts are blowing up like blimps from the geysers of cheap beer and mountains of junk food they consume, and it hasn’t been a year since a neighborhood kid was splatted by a speeding pickup truck just around the bend.
These people are tragically inept at accessing risk.
Typos happen and I am only calling yours out because I think it is funny... It is my assessment that they have plenty of access to risk.
Interesting. But this is just one snapshot (early 21st century USA). I wonder if there are any other studies elsewhere that look into it from other countries. It would be nice to have more datapoints. Also, the US has gotten weird in that politics has veered away from more traditional ideological sorting based on economic self-interest towards what, values/cultural issues I guess? I was also going to wonder how this compared to other times in American History, but I suppose the genetic data was not available for anything but the relatively recent past...
Conservatives vote for conservative politicians who work hard to get their votes.
That's the kind of thing they vote for.
Conservatives are idiots.
This is one of those cases where the trait being measured is incompletely correlated with the actual causal trait. I think that the core trait is empathy, the ability to imagine one’s self in another’s situation. Empathy is positively (though not strongly) correlated with intelligence, while negatively associated with conservatism.
I think the weakness here is how to define liberal and conservative. Example: many devout Catholics would be considered socially very liberal because they believe fervently in helping the poor, they deplore excessive wealth, and they believe in forgiveness. But they may be 100% against abortion. This scrambles the categories, and there are many other examples. Some libertarians believe nearly all government regulations should be repealed, but they also think government has no business meddling in our sex lives or reproductive choices.
We also see right now that in the age of trump, the meaning of "conservative" in much of the media has become "trump-supporting." They refer to people like MTG and Scott Perry as the "conservative" wing of the Republican Party.
This is, I think, a problem with studies like this.
Interesting. Of course empathy wasn't measured but I was thinking about a potentially related variable: It would be capacity for self-regulation. It gets complicated. I'll simplify here: 5HT is a promising polymorphism associated with individual differences in self-regulation. It may well be that it is a combination of genes associated with intelligence that when combined with self-regulation produce emergent outcomes that allow individuals to optimize what they are capable of (that is, to be their best selves so to speak)...So siblings could have similar genes (associated with intelligence lets say and even high emotionality) but the one strong in genes associated with self-regulatory capacities could use that emotionality to be sensitive to the world (in the sense of adaptive and responsive) while the other (with lower self-regulation capacities) may become more neurotic and fearful (and that could impede their ability to leverage their talents and advance their education, and such an individual might have a low threshold for perceiving that which is novel or different as threatening)
Here is a simple test: if you think the 2020 election was fixed you are a moron.
For a few years after the election, we had a sign go up every Christmas, "Santa, give us back our real president." I don't think it was meant to be ironic.
Maybe it's not about which party smart people join, but about which party stupid people join. There are certainly things about both parties that could draw very intelligent people: low taxes for the high-earning intelligent conservatives, social welfare policies for the policy-wonk intelligent liberals.
But if you're not very smart, the Republicans may appeal to you more - at least these days. The focus on a past golden age, emphasis on loyalty, set social roles, etc. may really resonate with those who are not all that bright, and who fear being left behind in a changing world. Liberals also tend to be pretty wonky, which could be a turnoff for those who don't really understand what they're talking about.
This is probably not a permanent correlation. If people with lower levels of intelligence are brought together into politically-active groups, you could see this flip. For example, if unionization of low-skill jobs were to bring those groups into the Democratic party, you could see Democrats as a whole become "dumber."
"... but about which party stupid people join."
That is the correct answer.
The Rpeublican party, for years, based their success on bamboozling people to vote against their own interestes, so the people that are easier to bamboozle ("stupid") tend to support Republicans.
Trump amplified the effect (because he is a more effective bamboozler).
Yes, at least in the case of the Republican party. See my comment below.
John Stuat Milll made a sumilar point 150 years ago, minus the reference to unionization:
"Conservatives are not necessarily stupid, but most stupid people are conservatives...
I never meant to say that the Conservatives are generally stupid. I meant to say that stupid people are generally Conservative. I believe that is so obviously and universally admitted a principle that I hardly think any gentleman will deny it. Suppose any party, in addition to whatever share it may possess of the ability of the community, has nearly the whole of its stupidity, that party must, by the law of its constitution, be the stupidest party; and I do not see why honorable gentlemen should see that position as at all offensive to them, for it ensures their being always an extremely powerful party . . . There is so much dense, solid force in sheer stupidity, that any body of able men with that force pressing behind them may ensure victory in many a struggle, and many a victory the Conservative party has gained through that power."
Despite the reference to Pearl (who has developed some very sophisticated causal modeling techniques) we are primarily dealing here with correlations. As the authors conclude: even if it is the case that intelligence (however measured in our culture) "causes" individuals to be more likely to adopt certain political beliefs (I put this in quotes here because I'm not convinced by the data and think it's more appropriate to say "predicts"), we don't know why that would be (that is what is the emergent set of variables in the model that over time (by such and such mechanisms) actually cause that outcome under what conditions (that "under what conditions" is the moderator reference)). I could speculate on what those causal conditions might be but they also involve additional variables not mentioned in these analyses.
My take is that greater intelligence means less religious, and from there various "left" policies are embraced (e.g. abortion because they don't believe in the existence of souls).
Another point. It's obvious that "lefties" - people who are left handed, are better than dexters - in every way (sports, STEM, the Arts). And I'm not saying that because I'm left-handed. It's simply the way it is.
Interesting Dana..but may depend on what you mean by "religious". It could be that more intelligent people do not belong to an organized religion that involves conforming to particular beliefs. Not sure about the data on this (I'll have to look). But I know a lot of intelligent people who are what I might call "spiritual" or who have their own religious beliefs about themselves, their networked relationship to other humans and creatures, and their responsibilities (e.g., to God and his creations; the world; future generations). Then again, there are intelligent folks who do not have those beliefs (I just mentioned) at all.
Your are right on several points, and my comment was too brief and not detailed enough. Maybe my mistake was seeing many MAGA policies conjoined with a religious outlook that was NOT subtle, and more like Iron Age theology - which has elements of magic (demons, angels, souls, Circles of Hell). That seemed far away from how someone at the top would think, although I'm certain some believe every word of Sacred Scripture.
"Are lefties really smarter than conservatives?"
Let's put that another way: Would lefties ever do anything as stupid as finding the stupidest man in the known universe to worship and adore and elect as leader of the most powerful nation on Earth?
I think not.
I thought the primary distinction between liberalism and conservatism had more to do with empathy and charity, not intelligence.
Results probably need to be broken down further.
I think it is true that conservatives court support from people for whom conservative policies are contrary to their personal interests ... and their success with that is probably highly correlated with stupidity.
Progressives don't really have a parallel recruitment apparatus.
IQ and political views may be connected. But at the superficial level, it is also confusing. I have sometimes had discussion with extremely smart people with very conservative views. Nevertheless, I usually come away thinking that theirs is a failure of so-called intelligence. They pick the option that right now in in their own interest, but failing to see the long term consequences where this leads to. In my mind, political intelligence is to see what the entire planetary community and society of billions of humans must do for survival. Many things in this are going to be against my immediate self interest. But my kids and their kids won't be stuck on an unlivable out spent and poisoned planet.
I admit a pre-existing bias against anything that tells us we are just somehow better than our opponents, as a soothing just so story.
I also have a pre-existing bias against studies of IQ since they tend to equate IQ with wisdom and some sort of moral stature.
Further, as others have pointed out, mapping political beliefs is difficult since most people have all sorts of heterodox beliefs, even if they vote for one party regularly.
And finally, I don't believe that very many people arrive at their political orientation via a path of reason and logic. I think our political orientation is produced through our experiences and biases and emotional reactions to what we see happening around us.
Having said all that, if I were forced at gunpoint to explain a study that showed some statistical edge of IQ among liberals I would say that illiberalism (whether of the left or right variety) actually makes one stupid because illiberalism demands that its adherents believe things that are absurd and shut down all their skepticism and reasoning powers.
isn't it odd how 'the bell curve' didn't present data showing that conservatives (and evangelicals) have lower IQ's?
it's almost like charles murray wasn't being entirely honest about his data or motivation
"it suggests that intelligence really does have an impact on political beliefs regardless of educational level."
No, it doesn't. To conclude that smarter people tend to be more leftist because of better application of reasoning is totally unwarranted.
Self-interest and group allegiance must outweigh any such effects, which the study shows are small. Smarter people - that is those who score higher on IQ tests, however that is related to "native" intelligence or education, probably tend to be more successful in life. Their interests are usually best served by conservative political policy. There are certainly many smart people in the big-money wing of the Republican party, as well as among many lower-level employers. Traditionally Republicans have appealed to these functionally intelligent people. But over the last 50+ years Republicans have won votes from less-successful whites by appealing to racism and religiosity, that is tribal loyalty. This loyalty can be and is so strong as to negate rationality - MAGAs have basically lost touch with reality not because they are inherently stupid, but because tribal loyalty comes first.
Once again the fact that there is not a single left-right spectrum is ignored. There are two main spectra - one based on economics and one based on cultural matters.
If the study had shown huge effects of IQ scores there might be some kind of conclusion to be made, but the real motivations for political leanings are not to be found in those scores - the problem is very complex.
The real problem here is that "conservative" is not necessarily correlated with conservative political parties. Many "conservative" political parties are radical reactionaries - who are not conservative at all. And much of this reactionary movement is due to the direct and indirect impact of climate change and increasing inequality. We cannot adapt to climate change (or inequality), without impacting people's habits (including habits of mind) and this has triggered a reaction. Which of course has been amplified by the oligarch press.
A very old observation: https://www.goodreads.com/quotes/1486818-conservatives-are-not-necessarily-stupid-but-most-stupid-people-are
Many conservatives are able to get deeply into a narrow topic, generally their profession, but are incapable almost entirely to appreciate the depth of anything else, or even the existence of some topics. They are incapable of context which is what gives the impression of 'tribalism', which in them is really their incapacity of empathy and their incapacity of context acting together.
It's wrong to confuse their occasional detail in a narrow area with general intelligence.
I am troubled by this post by KD. Not because of the post itself but because of our reaction to it.
Intelligence does not necessarily relate to "smartness".
I think we all know some intelligent people who don't have a lick of common sense. We also know some folks who are exactly the opposite.
And this post from KD comes what? 2 to 3 days after he talked about teaching basic finance to young children in CA schools. Many of us old timers recalled taking basic checkbook balancing in Home Economics or some other such course (which are no longer taught it seems)
But I would caution that this is not a left/right, Conservative/Liberal, or Republican/Democrat issue - we tend to want to pigeon hole everyone into some sort of "box" and then judge accordingly
When in fact, we shouldn't judge at all!
Is Kevin really looking for research to establish the extent of correlation between intelligence (which isn't well-measured by IQ if that's what IQ measures at all) and liberalism/conservatism (defined how? Because a liberal or conservative in 1824 in America isn't believing the same things as one today. Is a Confucian in 500 BCE "liberal" or "conservative"?). The study here doesn't even define its numeric measure; I don't have great confidence in how it defines "liberal" or "conservative" (left-wing isn't "liberal" by default, either).
My guess would be that a higher percentage of "intelligent" people are resistant to things like authoritarianism, not out of some innate virtue so much as having a lower opinion of the "average" intelligence. 1930s eugenicists were happy with authoritarianism if it fed their high opinion of themselves; Plato wanted a philosopher-king, not a democracy.
Culture (where and how you were raised) has, I would wager, a high relation to what we presently define as liberal or conservative. I'd be more curious to know if economic mobility (the ability to pick up and move somewhere, especially somewhere more expensive to live, for a job) correlates to more "liberal" beliefs on average. The coasts/big cities are more liberal because people raised in more conservative parts of the country move there; I do read about conservatives moving to Texas, but not so much about wealthy conservatives moving into rural small-town America.
As for intelligence, clearly certain forms of intelligence can be more associated with liberalism or conservatism however defined, because if we treat these vague terms as clear definitions, they are defined in part by the intellectual labor of their respective proponents. They aren't objective concepts or things that pre-exist human thinking, but rather produced by it.
A “lefty” in the news:
https://www.cnbc.com/amp/2024/07/08/frances-far-left-jean-luc-mlenchon-wants-left-to-lead-government.html
That's a leftist social conservative, motivated primarily by how much harm they can claim to justify.
& like le pen, & bernie & trump, funded by russian intelligence .
Bernie is not like that, but a lot of the people who try to use Bernie to create division for its own sake are.
lol.
lmfao even.
I think that a lot of people confuses 'good at figuring things out' with 'high intelligence' (I'm of the camp that thinks the idea of IQ -- that is, unitary intelligence -- is suspect at best, a statistical artifact at worst.) What's really going on then is that better solutions are often described as 'liberal' solutions, hence the person going with that solution must be a 'liberal'. Think that certain utilities are best treated as government-regulated monopolies? Why, you must be a liberal!
I'm also of the opinion that higher empathy is correlated to some degree with higher intelligence, but that's just mouthy me speaking well out of my bailiwick. Going in the other direction, the only people I know who frequently want to punish what they think of as bad behaviour are conservatives.
There’s smart and then there’s smart. And while Lefties can be smart, it could not possibly be more obvious that they are also not smart at all.
One of the best possible examples of what I’m talking about is the Lefty tendency to think that Lefties are smart. There are few things that can so clearly indicate a lack of wisdom than to take pride in one’s own small amount of knowledge. Anytime you have a group of people who say, “look how smart we are,” rest assured that disaster is quickly approaching.
A very timely and real world example of one such looming disaster, in fact, is the Left’s all-out effort to utterly discredit and destroy itself by ousting its own democratically elected incumbent President. That’s an effort which Kevin Drum himself has happily contributed to, and it’s one of the most spectacularly stupid things I’ve ever seen.
It is, therefore, painfully ironic that Kevin would publish this post now, a post in which he “grudgingly” concludes that Lefties really do seem to be smarter, at a time when Lefties are in fact trumpeting their epic stupidity from every mountaintop,
Kevin’s lack of self awareness must be up there somewhere with the other great wonders of the world.
John Stuart Mill said that conservatives are not generally stupid, but stupid people are generally conservative.
I think this is the reason: the lower your IQ, the harder it is to adapt to change. People with low IQs therefore have a stronger incentive to vote against any sort of change, making them more conservative than people with high IQs.
The lower your intelligence, the more likely you are to stay in that small town you grew up in.
the johnny cougar piece.
> It's very hard to conceive of why a high IQ should make you more likely to support abortion or social welfare or a smaller defense budget.
Lower IQ people make poor decisions and expect others to make poor decisions ; they want decisions codified. Higher IQ people make better decisions and expect others to make better decisions. Except that, lower IQ people expect corporations to act intelligently and for the public good, and higher IQ people realize that just doesn't happen.
Similarly, other fascist traits: fear of other, selfishness, tendency toward violence ... correlat better with low iq.
abortion: you trust women and doctors to make good health care decisions for themselves.
This is also tightly coupled to religion, where low iq people blindly follow superstitions created by others.
social welfare: you understand that social welfare increases productivity.
defense budget: you aren't motivated by fear-of-other nor bullying, and you understand that reducing the defense budget would allow increased investment elsewhere (which would increase gdp and allow the defense budget to be more easily increased)
Simple answers to complicated questions, something an idiot can understand, give them that then tell them 'elites' think they're stupid with their obvious answer and now they want to fight somebody about it.
IQ also drops with age, and Republicans are generally older than Dems.
Are they measuring stupidity or ignorance? If you lived in or near a city, most likely a trading post with regular contact with outsiders, you were much more likely to be aware of people with different lifestyles, different genetics, different gods and different lines of work. If you lived a rural life, odds are your only contact would be with the local town and mainly with people much like yourself engaged in the local dominant industry, usually farming but sometimes mining or the like.
There's a reason we supposedly got our word "clown" from the Latin word for farmer and conservatives traditionally have vilified urban life and mores. If you look at the US, it seems that salt water is associated with a more open view of the world, religious tolerance, empathy with those less fortunate and a host of other liberal virtues. This is not a hard and fast rule, but it is a common pattern world wide.
Conservatives try to live in a closed world with a fixed hierarchy. Ignorance becomes a virtue, but at some point ignorance becomes a moral failing.
Presumably "higher intelligence" means being in closer contact with reality as it is and not as one might like it to be. Because ignoring reality is one of the key drivers of conservative/reactionary thought.