I just checked in the General Social Survey, and the correlation between cognitive ability and liberal ideology is only 35% larger for women. This means that if the GSS sample were 63% female, the overall correlation would be only 4% larger. Assuming the same holds true in Edwards and colleagues' sample, the female skew can't make much difference.
It’s bleakly amusing that anyone takes these studies seriously. Academia runs at about 90-94% left leaning now. Any academic study of IQ in relation to political affiliation will be intending to find a correlation between high IQ and leftism. The former editor of the Lancet some time ago concluded that about 50% of scientific studies are pure horseshit, such is the level of bias and ideological distortion (as well as financial incentive) applying to these studies in order to reach predetermined conclusions. You can bet that bullshit percentage is much higher for any directly political question that will provide ammunition for leftist sneers and vanity. Not only that, but leftist attitudes to IQ testing are riddled with cognitive dissonance and obvious contradictions. When IQ testing indicates racial disparities, such testing is described as racist and clearly influenced by inherent white biases. Yet if IQ testing can be used to pretend that leftists are innately more intelligent than rightists, well then there are no biases affecting the results and the results must be unimpeachably accurate.
These studies are garbage data spitting out the results that are fed into them and intended by the authors of the study from the start. Even their conception of what defines rightism will have been framed in such a way as to lead to the conclusion they want, to be a leftists interpretation of what right wing attitudes are, rather than to be an objective and factual reflection of what right wing attitudes actually are. And the same will be applied in reverse, with a huge positive bias in the way in which leftist attitudes are defined.
Leftism does not parallel IQ and any attempt to conflate higher intelligence with leftism is laughable. Having been in academia and seen the utterly unthinking nature of many of the people thriving in that field, who NEVER question their own political prejudices, it’s my considered opinion based on experience that in many cases modern education probably lowers IQ (and empathy too).
Yes Ive just made a separate comment that the results would have been entirely different if the test was done 50, 70 or 90 years ago... you put it much better. Love your latest substack article by the way x
The rate of publication of those studies which magically 'discover' that conservatives are stupid, fearful, cruel, and twice as smelly as Hitler, is correlated with US presidential election cycles.
I've seen a lot of discussions of this research recently and my reaction (this post excepted) is one of irritation. What this comes down to is some annoyingly widespread mental gymnastics with the meaning of the concept of intelligence. Let's come at it a different way:
What are some of the ways of identifying a LACK of intelligence? Let me count the ways....
1) an inability to distinguish between observable reality and wishful thinking
2) an inability to interrogate one's own psychological motivations for the holding of a particular belief
3) an inability to look with dispassionate scepticism at peer group pressures favoring the adoption of currently fashionable beliefs and attitudes....and managing to stand aside from them with a degree of intellectual independent-mindedness.
Now what was it again that the research has found? Ah Yes, people holding (or seeming to hold) Leftist opinions are typically more 'intelligent'? Was that it?
That isn't exactly what intelligence is, you are referring to ideological dogmatism which exists at all levels of intelligence. It is very possible that many leftists are entirely capable of figuring out that their beliefs are wrong if they were willing to apply critical thinking to them, but they simply are unwilling to do so out of self-interest, group loyalty, etc.
We'll have to agree to disagree. I set out my case clearly enough. Any notion of intelligence that somehow manages to leave out of account clarity in the distinguishing of observable reality from obfuscation is frankly a self-evidently intellectually bankrupt one ... although I guess it might appeal to a certain kind of pedant
I have had this type of argument with some people before, almost always there is the demand of benefit of doubt, as if one could hold wrong beliefs while still being able of higher intelligence.
In my opinion it is always false, there is always the travesty of higher intelligence in one of approved social way but mysteriously never actual higher intellect whenever it would be needed to solve a particular issue.
The people who hold wrong beliefs do so not because they are unwilling to apply critical thinking to them but just because they are completely unable of such a process, no matter how much external signaling they use to mimic higher intelligence.
We know very well that humans learn a lot by mimicking because of the high intellectual costs of figuring out everything by yourself, those people have just mastered this process into an art and they usually know extremely well how to appear/behave in public for their own benefits.
I think if you could study a large sample of this type of people you would find out, not only that they are left-leaning/liberal but also more extraverti, prefer groups and social activities; all because they can take advantage of their carefully crafted image to obtain things they could never dream of doing themselves...
this might be expressed as a difference beween intelligence and reason - with intelligence being merely a facilitator of reasoning. A critical attitude and a seeking (curiosity) motivation are needed for reasoning.
An interesting observation but it is still the case that, for intelligence to be a useful concept, it must encompass all the attributes in my list (as well as your "reason" formulation). Absent any of these, the concept becomes merely vacuous.
I saw research that said higher IQ people tend to conform to what everyone else is doing because they're more adept at reading the room. And thus, if everyone is around is a leftist or a communist or a nazi, they go along with that. And it's social conformity, not based on logic or reason.
Let me suggest that one facet of general intelligence is social awareness. I do not consider it the most important, but I think it is there. Terman found that social adjustment was positively correlated with IQ up to about IQ 140, after which it declined. I am not fully convinced that holds up, but we can pretend arguendo that it is so.
If it is so, then the social advantage of liberalism, and its primary mode of transmission being fashion rather than intellectual argument, begins to come into play. I do not say that there are no arguments for liberalism nor that it is all fashion, but my observation is that these are both quite present. The bulk of the extra IQ advantage then, might be in some domain closely connected to social awareness, such as vocabulary rather than spatial or arithmetic or pattern-recognition.
"Moreover, the association between intelligence and liberal ideology appears to be driven by verbal intelligence, so you’d expect Wordsum to slightly understate the general intelligence of conservatives."
Vocabulary tests are pure memory tests. There is no logic or critical thinking in spelling
'Perhaps there is something unusual about Minnesota, the state of which the sample was meant to be representative? I’m just speculating here."
When was Minnesota's IQ data obtained? My understanding is that most state IQ data is from long ago. It is hard to get more left than California. If a representative, comprehensive IQ test were given in California today, they would be lucky to hit double digits.
In terms of IQ a very consistent pattern is liberals > leftists > rightoids (conservative and nationalists). It's true virtually everywhere. (Nationalists can be a bit smarter than conservatives, who are more uniformly dumb, but they make up for it with much greater rates of mental illness).
Leftism is the prevailing ideology now. Would be interesting how this would work in societies with different ruling ideologies for example how was it in Soviet Union, Nazi Germany or 19th century Britain.
Ahem! There is a huge cultural/temporal element to this. If you did the same test 50 years or 70 or 100 years ago you would surely get different results. Then the zeitgeist would have been much more conservative. But maybe my comments are too obvious! We have had the long march through the institutions and so the results are not surprising!
Could the correlation be partly down to intelligent people working out what's good for them faster than stupid people, and therefore more likely than them to adopt to whatever happens to be the ascendant culture, religion or dogma?
But if you're basing that on the people know and consider intelligent, couldn't that mean (a) that they're an unrepresentative sample precisely because they're people you know, which in itself would suggest they agree with you on many things, and (b) that they're agreeing with you on many things is one, at least, of the reasons you think them intelligent?
"But if you're basing that on the people know and consider intelligent, couldn't that mean (a) that they're an unrepresentative sample precisely because they're people you know, which in itself would suggest they agree with you on many things, and (b) that they're agreeing with you on many things is one, at least, of the reasons you think them intelligent?"
It is just not people I know, but people I know of. People who are acknowledged as intelligent through their accomplishments.
One trait that intelligent people have is a burning quest for knowledge. They are not inclined to acquiesce to bullshit slingers.
I've wondered for a l long time whether there really is a strong correlation between being highly intelligent and having an enquiring mind. I have come across many people who are far quicker thinking than I am, and who I would expect score higher on IQ tests than I do, but who seem uninterested in anything that doesn't have utility to them. In my observation, people like that adapt themselves to fit in with whatever milieu they inhabit, and as a result do very well in life, both economically and socially. .
Being successful economically and socially doesn't have that much to do with intelligence. Of course, it helps and if one decides to use his intelligence to reach this goal this is what will happen but depending on the intelligent person's experience/environment it might not be the chosen objective.
I don't think they are intelligent people who are not constantly interested in learning; they might tone down the desire for subjects too far from their main expertise but you could hardly call them uninterested.
The people you are talking about are not necessarily intelligent, at best they are what we call "emotionally intelligent", they just know how to mimic and replicate known behavior to get whatever they want/need without thinking too much about it. They can do that precisely because they are not burdened by higher intelligence that require deeper thinking and precise understanding for satisfaction.
Also, it has been shown that more intelligent people are generally much slower thinkers. It makes sense even physically because they use more synapses for a given problem and require more processing time just because informations is going to be derived from more places in the brain and the "dataset" is larger.
"I've wondered for a l long time whether there is a strong correlation between being highly intelligent and having an enquiring mind."
I know of no studies along those lines. Maybe Aporia knows of one.
"I have come across many people who are far quicker thinking than I am, and who I would expect score higher on IQ tests than I do, but who seem uninterested in anything that doesn't have utility to them. In my observation, people like that adapt themselves to fit in with whatever milieu they inhabit, and as a result do very well in life, both economically and socially."
The problem is that your supposition is without data. Neither of us has 'proof' of our supposition (opinion), so we will just have to disagree.
An r of 0.12 means that only 1.44% (r^2) of the variance in political attitude was explained by the variance in intelligence. A lot of the error bars cross the boundary of no effect, too.
Has anyone done any research showing that leftists have a genetic sense of intellectual and moral superiority? I think that would explain all this pointless research.
I's like to suggest that rather than postulating that those who go to college have their IQ boosted by their attendance and hence this is a contributory factor to the greater tendency towards liberalism/progressivism, we should look at it like this...
Those who attend college represent a selected subset based in part on IQ. This was formerly true more than now, but I intuit that it's still the case. While in college they are also increasingly directed toward an enlightened and cosmopolitan views, either by the intent of doctrinaire educators, or by simple introduction to enlightenment principles, or by peer pressure, or most likely a combination of all of these factors.
So what you have, simply and harshly put, is a subset selected for IQ who is exposed to informal indoctrination for the number of years they are in college.
Now, I don't know any of this for a fact, but my gut feeling is that it is indeed a plausible explanation.
I believe I remember an old article by Emil Kirkegaard saying that the best predictor of whether someone is rightwing for leftwing isn't IQ, but whether one is doing better or worse than would be expected from one's IQ.
I'd add a third caveat, from page 4:
"63% of the included sample is female compared to 54% at intake, suggesting males were more likely to drop out."
That's almost 2 females for every male in their sample. Anyone ever notice anything about the politics of high-IQ females?
I just checked in the General Social Survey, and the correlation between cognitive ability and liberal ideology is only 35% larger for women. This means that if the GSS sample were 63% female, the overall correlation would be only 4% larger. Assuming the same holds true in Edwards and colleagues' sample, the female skew can't make much difference.
Got it, thanks.
If they controlled for gender, this shouldn’t matter, no?
It’s bleakly amusing that anyone takes these studies seriously. Academia runs at about 90-94% left leaning now. Any academic study of IQ in relation to political affiliation will be intending to find a correlation between high IQ and leftism. The former editor of the Lancet some time ago concluded that about 50% of scientific studies are pure horseshit, such is the level of bias and ideological distortion (as well as financial incentive) applying to these studies in order to reach predetermined conclusions. You can bet that bullshit percentage is much higher for any directly political question that will provide ammunition for leftist sneers and vanity. Not only that, but leftist attitudes to IQ testing are riddled with cognitive dissonance and obvious contradictions. When IQ testing indicates racial disparities, such testing is described as racist and clearly influenced by inherent white biases. Yet if IQ testing can be used to pretend that leftists are innately more intelligent than rightists, well then there are no biases affecting the results and the results must be unimpeachably accurate.
These studies are garbage data spitting out the results that are fed into them and intended by the authors of the study from the start. Even their conception of what defines rightism will have been framed in such a way as to lead to the conclusion they want, to be a leftists interpretation of what right wing attitudes are, rather than to be an objective and factual reflection of what right wing attitudes actually are. And the same will be applied in reverse, with a huge positive bias in the way in which leftist attitudes are defined.
Leftism does not parallel IQ and any attempt to conflate higher intelligence with leftism is laughable. Having been in academia and seen the utterly unthinking nature of many of the people thriving in that field, who NEVER question their own political prejudices, it’s my considered opinion based on experience that in many cases modern education probably lowers IQ (and empathy too).
Yes Ive just made a separate comment that the results would have been entirely different if the test was done 50, 70 or 90 years ago... you put it much better. Love your latest substack article by the way x
Thanks Caroline. 😀
And half of the rest of the studies are adulterated, ersatz horseshit.
The rate of publication of those studies which magically 'discover' that conservatives are stupid, fearful, cruel, and twice as smelly as Hitler, is correlated with US presidential election cycles.
You make excellent points.
Thanks. 😀
I've seen a lot of discussions of this research recently and my reaction (this post excepted) is one of irritation. What this comes down to is some annoyingly widespread mental gymnastics with the meaning of the concept of intelligence. Let's come at it a different way:
What are some of the ways of identifying a LACK of intelligence? Let me count the ways....
1) an inability to distinguish between observable reality and wishful thinking
2) an inability to interrogate one's own psychological motivations for the holding of a particular belief
3) an inability to look with dispassionate scepticism at peer group pressures favoring the adoption of currently fashionable beliefs and attitudes....and managing to stand aside from them with a degree of intellectual independent-mindedness.
Now what was it again that the research has found? Ah Yes, people holding (or seeming to hold) Leftist opinions are typically more 'intelligent'? Was that it?
That isn't exactly what intelligence is, you are referring to ideological dogmatism which exists at all levels of intelligence. It is very possible that many leftists are entirely capable of figuring out that their beliefs are wrong if they were willing to apply critical thinking to them, but they simply are unwilling to do so out of self-interest, group loyalty, etc.
We'll have to agree to disagree. I set out my case clearly enough. Any notion of intelligence that somehow manages to leave out of account clarity in the distinguishing of observable reality from obfuscation is frankly a self-evidently intellectually bankrupt one ... although I guess it might appeal to a certain kind of pedant
I have had this type of argument with some people before, almost always there is the demand of benefit of doubt, as if one could hold wrong beliefs while still being able of higher intelligence.
In my opinion it is always false, there is always the travesty of higher intelligence in one of approved social way but mysteriously never actual higher intellect whenever it would be needed to solve a particular issue.
The people who hold wrong beliefs do so not because they are unwilling to apply critical thinking to them but just because they are completely unable of such a process, no matter how much external signaling they use to mimic higher intelligence.
We know very well that humans learn a lot by mimicking because of the high intellectual costs of figuring out everything by yourself, those people have just mastered this process into an art and they usually know extremely well how to appear/behave in public for their own benefits.
I think if you could study a large sample of this type of people you would find out, not only that they are left-leaning/liberal but also more extraverti, prefer groups and social activities; all because they can take advantage of their carefully crafted image to obtain things they could never dream of doing themselves...
this might be expressed as a difference beween intelligence and reason - with intelligence being merely a facilitator of reasoning. A critical attitude and a seeking (curiosity) motivation are needed for reasoning.
An interesting observation but it is still the case that, for intelligence to be a useful concept, it must encompass all the attributes in my list (as well as your "reason" formulation). Absent any of these, the concept becomes merely vacuous.
I saw research that said higher IQ people tend to conform to what everyone else is doing because they're more adept at reading the room. And thus, if everyone is around is a leftist or a communist or a nazi, they go along with that. And it's social conformity, not based on logic or reason.
"I saw research that said higher IQ people tend to conform to what everyone else is doing because they're more adept at reading the room."
I have my doubts about that, but if true, that is bad news for science. A scientist who conforms is useless.
Let me suggest that one facet of general intelligence is social awareness. I do not consider it the most important, but I think it is there. Terman found that social adjustment was positively correlated with IQ up to about IQ 140, after which it declined. I am not fully convinced that holds up, but we can pretend arguendo that it is so.
If it is so, then the social advantage of liberalism, and its primary mode of transmission being fashion rather than intellectual argument, begins to come into play. I do not say that there are no arguments for liberalism nor that it is all fashion, but my observation is that these are both quite present. The bulk of the extra IQ advantage then, might be in some domain closely connected to social awareness, such as vocabulary rather than spatial or arithmetic or pattern-recognition.
"Moreover, the association between intelligence and liberal ideology appears to be driven by verbal intelligence, so you’d expect Wordsum to slightly understate the general intelligence of conservatives."
Vocabulary tests are pure memory tests. There is no logic or critical thinking in spelling
'Perhaps there is something unusual about Minnesota, the state of which the sample was meant to be representative? I’m just speculating here."
When was Minnesota's IQ data obtained? My understanding is that most state IQ data is from long ago. It is hard to get more left than California. If a representative, comprehensive IQ test were given in California today, they would be lucky to hit double digits.
In terms of IQ a very consistent pattern is liberals > leftists > rightoids (conservative and nationalists). It's true virtually everywhere. (Nationalists can be a bit smarter than conservatives, who are more uniformly dumb, but they make up for it with much greater rates of mental illness).
As you ascend the IQ ladder, libertarianism - maximizing freedoms across all axes, both social and economic - goes from marginal to near hegemonic. https://x.com/powerfultakes/status/1752393733998272577
Leftism is the prevailing ideology now. Would be interesting how this would work in societies with different ruling ideologies for example how was it in Soviet Union, Nazi Germany or 19th century Britain.
Ahem! There is a huge cultural/temporal element to this. If you did the same test 50 years or 70 or 100 years ago you would surely get different results. Then the zeitgeist would have been much more conservative. But maybe my comments are too obvious! We have had the long march through the institutions and so the results are not surprising!
Is this cause for the left’s self-righteous condescending attitude? May be book smart and worldly dumb.
Could the correlation be partly down to intelligent people working out what's good for them faster than stupid people, and therefore more likely than them to adopt to whatever happens to be the ascendant culture, religion or dogma?
I doubt it. My experience is that intelligent people do not go along to get along.
But if you're basing that on the people know and consider intelligent, couldn't that mean (a) that they're an unrepresentative sample precisely because they're people you know, which in itself would suggest they agree with you on many things, and (b) that they're agreeing with you on many things is one, at least, of the reasons you think them intelligent?
"But if you're basing that on the people know and consider intelligent, couldn't that mean (a) that they're an unrepresentative sample precisely because they're people you know, which in itself would suggest they agree with you on many things, and (b) that they're agreeing with you on many things is one, at least, of the reasons you think them intelligent?"
It is just not people I know, but people I know of. People who are acknowledged as intelligent through their accomplishments.
One trait that intelligent people have is a burning quest for knowledge. They are not inclined to acquiesce to bullshit slingers.
I've wondered for a l long time whether there really is a strong correlation between being highly intelligent and having an enquiring mind. I have come across many people who are far quicker thinking than I am, and who I would expect score higher on IQ tests than I do, but who seem uninterested in anything that doesn't have utility to them. In my observation, people like that adapt themselves to fit in with whatever milieu they inhabit, and as a result do very well in life, both economically and socially. .
Being successful economically and socially doesn't have that much to do with intelligence. Of course, it helps and if one decides to use his intelligence to reach this goal this is what will happen but depending on the intelligent person's experience/environment it might not be the chosen objective.
I don't think they are intelligent people who are not constantly interested in learning; they might tone down the desire for subjects too far from their main expertise but you could hardly call them uninterested.
The people you are talking about are not necessarily intelligent, at best they are what we call "emotionally intelligent", they just know how to mimic and replicate known behavior to get whatever they want/need without thinking too much about it. They can do that precisely because they are not burdened by higher intelligence that require deeper thinking and precise understanding for satisfaction.
Also, it has been shown that more intelligent people are generally much slower thinkers. It makes sense even physically because they use more synapses for a given problem and require more processing time just because informations is going to be derived from more places in the brain and the "dataset" is larger.
"I've wondered for a l long time whether there is a strong correlation between being highly intelligent and having an enquiring mind."
I know of no studies along those lines. Maybe Aporia knows of one.
"I have come across many people who are far quicker thinking than I am, and who I would expect score higher on IQ tests than I do, but who seem uninterested in anything that doesn't have utility to them. In my observation, people like that adapt themselves to fit in with whatever milieu they inhabit, and as a result do very well in life, both economically and socially."
The problem is that your supposition is without data. Neither of us has 'proof' of our supposition (opinion), so we will just have to disagree.
An r of 0.12 means that only 1.44% (r^2) of the variance in political attitude was explained by the variance in intelligence. A lot of the error bars cross the boundary of no effect, too.
"The working class is stupid."--V.I. Lenin
Has anyone done any research showing that leftists have a genetic sense of intellectual and moral superiority? I think that would explain all this pointless research.
I's like to suggest that rather than postulating that those who go to college have their IQ boosted by their attendance and hence this is a contributory factor to the greater tendency towards liberalism/progressivism, we should look at it like this...
Those who attend college represent a selected subset based in part on IQ. This was formerly true more than now, but I intuit that it's still the case. While in college they are also increasingly directed toward an enlightened and cosmopolitan views, either by the intent of doctrinaire educators, or by simple introduction to enlightenment principles, or by peer pressure, or most likely a combination of all of these factors.
So what you have, simply and harshly put, is a subset selected for IQ who is exposed to informal indoctrination for the number of years they are in college.
Now, I don't know any of this for a fact, but my gut feeling is that it is indeed a plausible explanation.
I believe I remember an old article by Emil Kirkegaard saying that the best predictor of whether someone is rightwing for leftwing isn't IQ, but whether one is doing better or worse than would be expected from one's IQ.