"Though it comes as a surprise to some observers, it is not Americans in the high-income, urban, liberal states like Massachusetts or California who are our most generous citizens. Rather it is residents of middle-American, conservative, moderate-income, religiously active regions who step up the most."
Thanks for the comment. I didn't actually say that liberals donate more to charity, but rather that intelligent people do (though I did say that such behaviour helps to explain why they are more liberal).
In any case, you're right that I didn't address the evidence that conservatives give more to charity. My understanding is that this is largely accounted for by conservatives donating more to their churches and religious organisations:
However, it still constitutes pro-social behaviour. To be clear, my claim was not that conservatives are less other-regarding than liberals across all domains. They are probably more so when it comes to family, close friends and local community.
Yes, my impression is that conservatives are more likely to contribute directly to the (local) community via charities, while liberals prefer high taxes, so that the government can (inefficiently) dole out the funds as they see fit... This comports with the notion that liberals generally prefer big-government socialism over local control and individualism.
I thought that Arthur Brooks "Who Really Cares?" showed that conservatives give 70% more to charity and similarly volunteer and give blood more often. This still remains higher, at 20% more when religious giving is taken out.
I have read the follow up comments and am not wholly convinced, though I think the point is somewhat true. More is still more, even if it is "largely accounted for." As George Will noted decades ago, there is a difference between donating to clean water in Africa versus the new boat house at St. Paul's School. I suspect that international charity is more from religious, and thus conservative people. If conservatives give more to local charities and those which touch them personally, then liberals will be giving more to those which skip over circles in order to give to political, cultural, and university appeals. One might make the argument that those are "just as good" as food banks (I wouldn't), but I would hardly call them MORE pro-social. That is really getting into the realm of virtue signalling at that point, which would be expected of those who have better social intelligence.
Which, now that I think of it, might "largely account for" their higher IQ scores, which are concentrated in verbal rather than performance subtests.
If you surveyed Europeans in 1300, you would find that more intelligent were more likely to report beliefs consistent with Catholic doctrines, simply because intelligent people are more able to understand those doctrines.
Liberal democracy is the ruling ideology of most of the world's advanced countries (and the non-democratic advanced countries are ruled by self-described communist countries.) The default hypothesis should be that smart people in left-liberal countries believe in left-liberal ideas because smart people in every civilization believe in the ruling ideology of that civilization.
Thanks for the comment, Simon. As mentioned in the article, a major study in China found that richer and more educated Chinese were more socially liberal. Since liberal democracy is definitely not the ruling ideology in China, wouldn't your theory predict the opposite?
China is ruled by a self-described communist party, and communist movements are strongly associated with socially liberal views.
It would be interesting to see the correlation between IQ and social views in China before the communist revolution, but we don't have that data. The Islamic world is the only major world civilization mostly untouched by both liberal democracy and communism.
I don't think the communist - socially liberal connection is true outside of the West. It seems to be the opposite in Eastern Europe and unrelated in most of Africa.
Of course, Muslims like this are not in the news. Pretty much the only Indonesian Muslims you hear about in the news are the Islamist minority in Aceh province.
You can see and hear the elements of pancasila come together in the popular Indonesian band Voice of Baceprot, consisting of 3 young hijabi women from rural Indonesia who play a kind of rap/punk/funk/fusion and sing songs with lyrics espousing progressive values (women's rights, pacifism, environmentalism, civil rights, education reform, etc. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4aZX-C8HKJc)
"It’s important to note that “socially liberal” does not mean “woke”. Nor does it mean mean “Democrat”. Many Democrats, particularly blacks and Hispanics, do not hold socially liberal views. And a sizeable minority of Republicans — the pro-business or libertarian types — do hold such views."
Your headline is a little misleading. The headline says 'liberal,' and in the article, the term is refined to socially liberal. I would imagine this is a rather large distinction in the United States, where Democrats are considered liberal and Republicans are considered conservative. You occasionally use the two terms interchangeably throughout the article.
More intelligent, or more educated? Seems to me that a distinct lack of intelligence is needed to believe that biological sex isn’t binary, that all police are racist, that Islam is compatible with and therefore should be defended by feminism, inability to define “woman” void of vague correlations to femininity or circular logic, etc.
These are all hallmark beliefs of the left, so unfortunately Im going to be “that guy” and argue the premise without answering the question asked.
Thanks for the comment. As mentioned in the article, "socially liberal" does not mean "woke". For example, intelligent people are more supportive of free speech:
At the back of a tourist hotel in NZ I had a discussion about immigration, with the truck driver delivering gas bottles. He said: "Now I'm just a dumb fella, but I can see that they are coming here because their lands are overcrowded"; which describes the Skills based Migration Program exactly.
I’d say the intelligent are mostly liberal but also more stratified. It was noted that the highly educated took the Covid vax quickly at high rates, whereas the less educated, including blacks and Hispanics, were initially hesitant but eventually folded and did so over a longer period of time. But, the minority of the better-educated who refused the vax were adamant about not taking it.
It has been noted by Edward Dutton that the less intelligent don’t have much of a difference in fertility between liberal and conservative, but there is a massive difference among the more intelligent, where the right-wing minority has a much larger percentage of the children compared to the liberal majority. It’s sort of like the birth rate dynamics among Jews.
Correct, though that was driven by "socially liberal, fiscally conservative" Republicans. Even back in the 70s and 80s, intelligence was correlated with socially liberal beliefs:
Have you looked at Peter Turchin’s structural-demographic model? What if these views are formed partly at the group level based on group dynamics not just on individual psychological profiles? That could be part of the explanation here.
The projection Noah describes is the Golden Rule applied. I want freedom and emotional support, and so I'll do unto others. Confucius and the Greek and Roman moralists took the better tact here, whether in the concept of benevolence (ren) or in the timeless distinction between friend and flatterer.
Very interesting article, thanks for clarifying what is meant by liberalism for our US American friends. Maybe do a part 2 on the other pillars of liberalism, so as not to just speak to the social one?
This is well brought out when one looks at a scatter plot of what, say, a correlation of .38 looks like. Namely, a turkey shoot at fifty yards, the shotgun's barrel moving slowly towards the upper right hand corner of the target. (Sorry, turkey shoots are an American thing I suspect. The winner is the one with a pellet hole nearest the center of the target.)
I like this point also. Lots of people get very focused of the difference between the mean, mode or maximum of two related bell(ish¹) curves even when the two curves are mostly overlapping.
¹a friend who had a doctorate in psychology was rather fond of pointing out that, although IQ scores had been modeled standard deviations and Gaussian distribution, that the curve was actually perceptibly heavier on the left, due to the effects of fetal alcohol syndrome.
'Homosexuals and high-skilled immigrants do not pose any obvious threat to people of low intelligence.'
Er, they do if they're more likely to be abusive or exploitative, as those of lower intelligence will be more vulnerable before and after the fact by virtue of being less able to detect malintent to begin with. It therefore makes sense for the less intelligent to protect themselves by avoiding risks completely rather than engaging with the risky when one knows that one is less able to separate friend from foe.
While individuals in those categories can certainly be abusive or exploitative, is there any evidence that this is true more generally? For example, high-skilled Asian immigrants have very low crime rates.
While Indians' malfeasance may not be criminal it's certainly corrosive of social trust and national wellbeing. Look at Vivek's history of abusive business practices and how his fellow Indians act when they take over businesses employing non-Indians.
If H1Bs really were elite capital, India wouldn't be a ******** they're desperate to escape.
Hi NC. Are you aware of the issues that arise when indians in a workplace come to power? See also somali fraud, migrant takeovers of trucking industries, etc. The reason that lower int people see them as a threat more quickly, is because they have been dealing with the effects of them more immediately. Many white collar european derived peoples, for example, did not at first have to deal with the issues presented with these changes - they may even mistakenly believe them to be progress. But the lower class people understood the nature of the migrant arrivals immediately
First of all the premise is questionable. Depending on how you define intelligence, the stereotype that liberalism in the contemporary American sense of the word is a function of intelligence is a stereotype, and this by definition, is flawed. I know many high-IQ conservatives and relatively low-IQ liberals.
Second, the main correlation in my experience is education, especially among younger generations, which is unsurprising given the leftist ideological capture of the educational system. Even that is a stereotype though.
Third, to the extent that the correlation between intelligence as measured by IQ and educational level is valid, it is also caused by the tendency of such intelligentsia to stereotype others. Either they assume that those with lesser intellectual gifts and educational achievements are just like them in terms of decision-making prowess and character, or they assume that they are so incapable intellectually that they need to be protected by their betters.
Both of these are dangerous stereotypical assumptions. They neglect the lesser angels of human nature which tend to be exacerbated by economic hardship that to some extent correlates inversely with the intelligence measures mentioned above, and ignore the fact that common sense does not correlate with such measures—in other words, those who aren't booksmart can and often are blessed with more common sense than their supposedly smarter fellow citizens.
that stereotypes are accurate is "the most robust finding in all of social science". [Lee Jussim et al "Handbook of Prejudice, Stereotyping, and Discrimination"].
So would that mean that racial stereotypes about, for example, African-Americans are accurate? If so, which ones?
If so, would that refute Dr. King’s legendary declaration that we should judge people not by the color of their skin, but the content of their character?
Impulsivity, IQ, athletic ability, violence. Statistically overwhelming, including cross-culturally. Knowing that does not prevent a person from judging on individual merit. Recently, the complaint has been that because of affirmative action, it is liberals who judge by color of skin, while conservatives favor merit. Having noted that, I will also allow that hypocrisy in such matters is rampant on both sides.
Stereotypes are usually about half-right. Dangerous to follow, dangerous to ignore.
I stand by my position. Stereotypes are by definition inaccurate and generally to be avoided in my view, even though there is some merit to what you say in the sense that they don't arise from a vacuum. There are too many exceptions to prove stereotypical rules.
Of course intelligence and liberalism go together. The proof of that is the tens of thousands of them trying to save the Illegal alien murderers and baby rapers from being deported. Everybody knows that.
If one believes at some level in objectively valid political decision-making, then maybe one day a measure of political intelligence will become standard. Then many of the PhD libs would drop by maybe 15 percent. heh heh Hey, in any case the fact is that Mill was a classical liberal and many conservatives today have much more of that in their battery packs than the socialistic liberals. The high g factor conservatives pay attention to concrete data and results and long term civilizational evidence in economic and social and political terms. And they do so no matter what their laughbable high IQ emotional instincts tell them.
"Intelligent people who hold socially liberal views are engaged in a kind of cognitive error, wrongly assuming that what works well for them works well for everyone."
(I recommend Mr. (Dr.) Henderson's writing - I don't agree with 100% of it, but it's interesting, informative, perceptive and provocative. His personal history gives him a fairly unusual perspective on the world)
A reasonable argument, though I think you're missing one large factor: intelligent people often tend to prefer abstract ideas over concrete facts of reality, or at the very least are much more comfortable with the former than duller types. The idealism and utopianism associated with so much left-wing thought (which historically included all liberal ideas, for obvious reasons) and equally its naivety, artificiality, oversimplification, is thus perfectly in keeping with the mental habits and preferences of many/most intelligent types. Furthermore, abstract theory-building is simply not that suitable to conservative/traditionalist thought, almost by its very definition (that which we have inherited from the past and know to work, to some extent or other). Certainly, though, the correlation with openness (at least certain types thereof) is not mutually exclusive with this idea, and perhaps even neurologically connected to a preference for abstract ideas.
I don't know where you get the idea that Liberals donate more to charity... In the US, it's quite the opposite: https://www.philanthropyroundtable.org/almanac/statistics-on-u-s-generosity/
"Though it comes as a surprise to some observers, it is not Americans in the high-income, urban, liberal states like Massachusetts or California who are our most generous citizens. Rather it is residents of middle-American, conservative, moderate-income, religiously active regions who step up the most."
Thanks for the comment. I didn't actually say that liberals donate more to charity, but rather that intelligent people do (though I did say that such behaviour helps to explain why they are more liberal).
In any case, you're right that I didn't address the evidence that conservatives give more to charity. My understanding is that this is largely accounted for by conservatives donating more to their churches and religious organisations:
https://www.jstor.org/stable/48693898
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0049089X21000752
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S2214804314000202
However, it still constitutes pro-social behaviour. To be clear, my claim was not that conservatives are less other-regarding than liberals across all domains. They are probably more so when it comes to family, close friends and local community.
—NC
Yes, my impression is that conservatives are more likely to contribute directly to the (local) community via charities, while liberals prefer high taxes, so that the government can (inefficiently) dole out the funds as they see fit... This comports with the notion that liberals generally prefer big-government socialism over local control and individualism.
I thought that Arthur Brooks "Who Really Cares?" showed that conservatives give 70% more to charity and similarly volunteer and give blood more often. This still remains higher, at 20% more when religious giving is taken out.
I have read the follow up comments and am not wholly convinced, though I think the point is somewhat true. More is still more, even if it is "largely accounted for." As George Will noted decades ago, there is a difference between donating to clean water in Africa versus the new boat house at St. Paul's School. I suspect that international charity is more from religious, and thus conservative people. If conservatives give more to local charities and those which touch them personally, then liberals will be giving more to those which skip over circles in order to give to political, cultural, and university appeals. One might make the argument that those are "just as good" as food banks (I wouldn't), but I would hardly call them MORE pro-social. That is really getting into the realm of virtue signalling at that point, which would be expected of those who have better social intelligence.
Which, now that I think of it, might "largely account for" their higher IQ scores, which are concentrated in verbal rather than performance subtests.
If you surveyed Europeans in 1300, you would find that more intelligent were more likely to report beliefs consistent with Catholic doctrines, simply because intelligent people are more able to understand those doctrines.
Liberal democracy is the ruling ideology of most of the world's advanced countries (and the non-democratic advanced countries are ruled by self-described communist countries.) The default hypothesis should be that smart people in left-liberal countries believe in left-liberal ideas because smart people in every civilization believe in the ruling ideology of that civilization.
https://simonlaird.substack.com/p/yes-the-right-has-enough-smart-people
There is some evidence that Islamic terrorists have higher IQs than other muslims. For example, they are about 3-4x more likely to have engineering degrees. https://eprints.lse.ac.uk/29836/1/Why_are_there_so_many_Engineers_among_Islamic_radicals_%28publisher%29.pdf
Thanks for the comment, Simon. As mentioned in the article, a major study in China found that richer and more educated Chinese were more socially liberal. Since liberal democracy is definitely not the ruling ideology in China, wouldn't your theory predict the opposite?
—NC
China is ruled by a self-described communist party, and communist movements are strongly associated with socially liberal views.
It would be interesting to see the correlation between IQ and social views in China before the communist revolution, but we don't have that data. The Islamic world is the only major world civilization mostly untouched by both liberal democracy and communism.
I don't think the communist - socially liberal connection is true outside of the West. It seems to be the opposite in Eastern Europe and unrelated in most of Africa.
I suspect that the majority of Muslims in the most populous Muslim-majority country (Indonesia) are in favor of democracy and religious pluralism - these are elements (if imperfectly practiced ones) of the founding philosophy of independent Indonesia, pancasila (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pancasila_(politics) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Politics_of_Indonesia).
Of course, Muslims like this are not in the news. Pretty much the only Indonesian Muslims you hear about in the news are the Islamist minority in Aceh province.
You can see and hear the elements of pancasila come together in the popular Indonesian band Voice of Baceprot, consisting of 3 young hijabi women from rural Indonesia who play a kind of rap/punk/funk/fusion and sing songs with lyrics espousing progressive values (women's rights, pacifism, environmentalism, civil rights, education reform, etc. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4aZX-C8HKJc)
Respectfully, it sounds like you might be falling for NGO propaganda. That band is funded by the British government.
71% of Indonesians want Sharia to be the law of the land. https://www.pewresearch.org/religion/2013/04/30/the-worlds-muslims-religion-politics-society-beliefs-about-sharia/.
An excellent article.
"It’s important to note that “socially liberal” does not mean “woke”. Nor does it mean mean “Democrat”. Many Democrats, particularly blacks and Hispanics, do not hold socially liberal views. And a sizeable minority of Republicans — the pro-business or libertarian types — do hold such views."
Your headline is a little misleading. The headline says 'liberal,' and in the article, the term is refined to socially liberal. I would imagine this is a rather large distinction in the United States, where Democrats are considered liberal and Republicans are considered conservative. You occasionally use the two terms interchangeably throughout the article.
Fair point — I wanted a pithy title.
—NC
More intelligent, or more educated? Seems to me that a distinct lack of intelligence is needed to believe that biological sex isn’t binary, that all police are racist, that Islam is compatible with and therefore should be defended by feminism, inability to define “woman” void of vague correlations to femininity or circular logic, etc.
These are all hallmark beliefs of the left, so unfortunately Im going to be “that guy” and argue the premise without answering the question asked.
My apologies.
Thanks for the comment. As mentioned in the article, "socially liberal" does not mean "woke". For example, intelligent people are more supportive of free speech:
https://econtent.hogrefe.com/doi/abs/10.1027/1614-0001/a000385
—NC
Ah, you are correct. The mistake was in how I read it and conflating the two. Thanks for the correction.
At the back of a tourist hotel in NZ I had a discussion about immigration, with the truck driver delivering gas bottles. He said: "Now I'm just a dumb fella, but I can see that they are coming here because their lands are overcrowded"; which describes the Skills based Migration Program exactly.
https://copilot.microsoft.com/shares/prNKfjSedSK6y4huY7aeU
https://copilot.microsoft.com/shares/uevZon8vUDEkLWRZQ7Baj
I’d say the intelligent are mostly liberal but also more stratified. It was noted that the highly educated took the Covid vax quickly at high rates, whereas the less educated, including blacks and Hispanics, were initially hesitant but eventually folded and did so over a longer period of time. But, the minority of the better-educated who refused the vax were adamant about not taking it.
It has been noted by Edward Dutton that the less intelligent don’t have much of a difference in fertility between liberal and conservative, but there is a massive difference among the more intelligent, where the right-wing minority has a much larger percentage of the children compared to the liberal majority. It’s sort of like the birth rate dynamics among Jews.
There was a time when the university educated tended to vote Republican, and were significantly more conservative. Things could swing that way again.
Correct, though that was driven by "socially liberal, fiscally conservative" Republicans. Even back in the 70s and 80s, intelligence was correlated with socially liberal beliefs:
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0160289615000136
—NC
Have you looked at Peter Turchin’s structural-demographic model? What if these views are formed partly at the group level based on group dynamics not just on individual psychological profiles? That could be part of the explanation here.
The projection Noah describes is the Golden Rule applied. I want freedom and emotional support, and so I'll do unto others. Confucius and the Greek and Roman moralists took the better tact here, whether in the concept of benevolence (ren) or in the timeless distinction between friend and flatterer.
Very interesting article, thanks for clarifying what is meant by liberalism for our US American friends. Maybe do a part 2 on the other pillars of liberalism, so as not to just speak to the social one?
"none of the correlations is particularly large"
This is well brought out when one looks at a scatter plot of what, say, a correlation of .38 looks like. Namely, a turkey shoot at fifty yards, the shotgun's barrel moving slowly towards the upper right hand corner of the target. (Sorry, turkey shoots are an American thing I suspect. The winner is the one with a pellet hole nearest the center of the target.)
Maybe Noah can show us such a scatter plot.
I like this point also. Lots of people get very focused of the difference between the mean, mode or maximum of two related bell(ish¹) curves even when the two curves are mostly overlapping.
¹a friend who had a doctorate in psychology was rather fond of pointing out that, although IQ scores had been modeled standard deviations and Gaussian distribution, that the curve was actually perceptibly heavier on the left, due to the effects of fetal alcohol syndrome.
'Homosexuals and high-skilled immigrants do not pose any obvious threat to people of low intelligence.'
Er, they do if they're more likely to be abusive or exploitative, as those of lower intelligence will be more vulnerable before and after the fact by virtue of being less able to detect malintent to begin with. It therefore makes sense for the less intelligent to protect themselves by avoiding risks completely rather than engaging with the risky when one knows that one is less able to separate friend from foe.
While individuals in those categories can certainly be abusive or exploitative, is there any evidence that this is true more generally? For example, high-skilled Asian immigrants have very low crime rates.
—NC
While Indians' malfeasance may not be criminal it's certainly corrosive of social trust and national wellbeing. Look at Vivek's history of abusive business practices and how his fellow Indians act when they take over businesses employing non-Indians.
If H1Bs really were elite capital, India wouldn't be a ******** they're desperate to escape.
Hi NC. Are you aware of the issues that arise when indians in a workplace come to power? See also somali fraud, migrant takeovers of trucking industries, etc. The reason that lower int people see them as a threat more quickly, is because they have been dealing with the effects of them more immediately. Many white collar european derived peoples, for example, did not at first have to deal with the issues presented with these changes - they may even mistakenly believe them to be progress. But the lower class people understood the nature of the migrant arrivals immediately
First of all the premise is questionable. Depending on how you define intelligence, the stereotype that liberalism in the contemporary American sense of the word is a function of intelligence is a stereotype, and this by definition, is flawed. I know many high-IQ conservatives and relatively low-IQ liberals.
Second, the main correlation in my experience is education, especially among younger generations, which is unsurprising given the leftist ideological capture of the educational system. Even that is a stereotype though.
Third, to the extent that the correlation between intelligence as measured by IQ and educational level is valid, it is also caused by the tendency of such intelligentsia to stereotype others. Either they assume that those with lesser intellectual gifts and educational achievements are just like them in terms of decision-making prowess and character, or they assume that they are so incapable intellectually that they need to be protected by their betters.
Both of these are dangerous stereotypical assumptions. They neglect the lesser angels of human nature which tend to be exacerbated by economic hardship that to some extent correlates inversely with the intelligence measures mentioned above, and ignore the fact that common sense does not correlate with such measures—in other words, those who aren't booksmart can and often are blessed with more common sense than their supposedly smarter fellow citizens.
that stereotypes are accurate is "the most robust finding in all of social science". [Lee Jussim et al "Handbook of Prejudice, Stereotyping, and Discrimination"].
So would that mean that racial stereotypes about, for example, African-Americans are accurate? If so, which ones?
If so, would that refute Dr. King’s legendary declaration that we should judge people not by the color of their skin, but the content of their character?
I await with bemusement your response.
Impulsivity, IQ, athletic ability, violence. Statistically overwhelming, including cross-culturally. Knowing that does not prevent a person from judging on individual merit. Recently, the complaint has been that because of affirmative action, it is liberals who judge by color of skin, while conservatives favor merit. Having noted that, I will also allow that hypocrisy in such matters is rampant on both sides.
Stereotypes are usually about half-right. Dangerous to follow, dangerous to ignore.
I stand by my position. Stereotypes are by definition inaccurate and generally to be avoided in my view, even though there is some merit to what you say in the sense that they don't arise from a vacuum. There are too many exceptions to prove stereotypical rules.
Of course intelligence and liberalism go together. The proof of that is the tens of thousands of them trying to save the Illegal alien murderers and baby rapers from being deported. Everybody knows that.
If one believes at some level in objectively valid political decision-making, then maybe one day a measure of political intelligence will become standard. Then many of the PhD libs would drop by maybe 15 percent. heh heh Hey, in any case the fact is that Mill was a classical liberal and many conservatives today have much more of that in their battery packs than the socialistic liberals. The high g factor conservatives pay attention to concrete data and results and long term civilizational evidence in economic and social and political terms. And they do so no matter what their laughbable high IQ emotional instincts tell them.
"Intelligent people who hold socially liberal views are engaged in a kind of cognitive error, wrongly assuming that what works well for them works well for everyone."
This relates strongly to Rob K. Henderson's concept of luxury beliefs: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Luxury_belief
(I recommend Mr. (Dr.) Henderson's writing - I don't agree with 100% of it, but it's interesting, informative, perceptive and provocative. His personal history gives him a fairly unusual perspective on the world)
A reasonable argument, though I think you're missing one large factor: intelligent people often tend to prefer abstract ideas over concrete facts of reality, or at the very least are much more comfortable with the former than duller types. The idealism and utopianism associated with so much left-wing thought (which historically included all liberal ideas, for obvious reasons) and equally its naivety, artificiality, oversimplification, is thus perfectly in keeping with the mental habits and preferences of many/most intelligent types. Furthermore, abstract theory-building is simply not that suitable to conservative/traditionalist thought, almost by its very definition (that which we have inherited from the past and know to work, to some extent or other). Certainly, though, the correlation with openness (at least certain types thereof) is not mutually exclusive with this idea, and perhaps even neurologically connected to a preference for abstract ideas.