"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.
When the U.S. depended on charity, social services were lacking and most people did not receive much help. The average conservatives would have taken the position that the person is suffering because God is punishing them for sinning.
Yes, in 1900, many people, particularly within various Christian denominations and other religions, strongly believed that God punished individuals and nations for sin. This belief was a significant aspect of traditional religious doctrine.
At the time, the concept of divine punishment was a mainstream theological view, often associated with the idea of eternal torment in Hell for the wicked. Sermons and religious texts frequently emphasized the consequences of sin, drawing heavily from Old and New Testament narratives that describe God's wrath and direct intervention in human affairs to enact justice.
The view that God rewards virtue with prosperity is not that old or traditional. It first emerged with the Calvinists in the Reformation. Older forms of Christianity had no such assumption and rather saw poverty and sickness as a challenge to respond to, in accordance with the Gospel, in which Jesus has a very jaundiced view of riches and demands charity toward "the least of my brethren". Thus the Church, in the Middle Ages, operated a sort of social safety and while it compares poorly with modern day efforts (as do many aspects of that era) it was vastly superior to the lack of such efforts in the pagan past.
One might want to mention what percent of income tax (state and federal) are to funding the total cost of government. The bottom 50% may not pay much income tax cut do pay a higher percentage of the total income in sales taxes.
Yes, I understand that the American tax system is highly progressive and that people, when driven by perverse incentives, will offload their costs onto others as much as in their power to do so.
Have you any comment on my suggestion that liberals direct their belief in higher powers to the government, whereas other [less liberal] Americans direct such beliefs into organised religion? ie the difference between American liberals and non-liberals is not in their nature but in formalised beliefs?
I agree that most liberals worship the power of government, but there are many non-liberals (conservatives) who are not particularly religious. They believe in small government and individual responsibility (charity only when the recipient cannot support themselves through no fault of their own).
"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)."
I wonder how much does this have to do with more intelligent -> more income when paired with better management of your means -> more disposable income?
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.
American liberals do seem (from the state of internet exchange) to be inordinately verbal. How gendered and cultural (ie aligned with American liberal feminism) is that result?
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.
Yes. I have a study - which i can't find right now - that shows how western European majorities are economically somewhat right of center while socially moderately liberal. Eastern Europeans showed left leaning i.e. collectivist economical preferences while being socially more conservative.
This also makes it very clear why western European progressive parties, media, ntellecuals etc are in such dire need of race, gender, inequality etc cards since ambitious leftist academics took over the, until then worker-focused, Labour parties as vehicles for their own ideological wants.
Agreed. If you look at the Hungarian Magyar Munkaspart (Workers Party) and the ruling Slovak SMER party, what you find is communitarian economics, combined with nationalism and moderately conservative social values.
Before 1968, most of the labour parties of the Anglosphere followed this same pattern, but thereafter they were corroded by the New Left.
USSR was the first state in the world to legalize abortion and decriminalize homosexuality. They promoted female empowerment. Lenin was very anti nationalist. Lenin also supported full freedom of divorce.
Some of this gains were lost under Stalin. But most of them were reinstalled after Stalin, like abortion and divorce.
Still, Soviet society all in all was less socially liberal than the Western one in 1980s, before USSR came to an end. For example, it was a woman's duty to work AND it was her duty to bear children and to be a hearthkeeper.
There's no such thing as the "Islamic World". Muslim worldwide are not a single cultural-political entity. Most Muslim countries are not Theocracies and most of them do not have Sharia Law in their Constitutions.
The Modern Middle East itself is significantly LESS religious than Westerners claim it is, including Saudi Arabia and Qatar.
It depends of course on what you mean by "religious." As for Muslims, across the world, embracing or not embracing sharia, Muslims are people and a good portion of any people are ignorant. They may think of sharia simply as a term for good or godly.
Communist movements in the Anglosphere may be associated with more socially liberal ideas but the French communist party was (yes, it's fair to use the past tense for them now though they still exist)… was remarkably puritanical.
You don't know what you're talking about 🙄. I'm talking about card-carrying members of the French communist party, not “communists,” or lefties or progressives or liberals or bohemians… Not Foucault and Sartre and so on. The latter left the communist party. The actual communist party in France was very puritanical.
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)
Muslims don't agree with each other on what "Sharia law" is.
If you ask Muslims in various countries more specific questions on each of the tenets of Sharia law, they have lot of disagreements, as shown in the polling data linked in your comment.
But you are right that most Indonesians and most Muslims aren't liberal.
Educated Chinese people don't hold the conservative views their government promotes because there's no prestige in them. The liberal west is still the global trendsetter that everyone in the world aspires to copy.
While it does seem true to some extent that these correlations with being more intelligent exist across different social ecologies, the West is demanding more and more cronyism and ideological signaling loyalty while many Chinese elites want more economic freedom. Also we see how people signaling tradition in places like Russia or Turkey has little impact on stopping their falling fertility since having many children and earlier is negatively correlated with intelligence and still seen as low status. There are times where personal preference is directly reflected in policy support or other times where they go in opposite directions or a mix (local nimbyism while supporting a wider policy in the opposite direction)
"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:
"that Islam is compatible with and therefore should be defended by feminism, "
Middle east would have been a lot more secular and peaceful if not for western intervention. From Taliban to ISIS to hamas to Iranian mullah regime, all has some kind of western intervention behind their formation. Also how does killing more women and children to "save" them from Islam actually helps them?
People like you would cry crocodile tears over how women are oppressed under Islam and then cheer to bomb more women in middle east in the next breath.
"inability to define “woman” void of vague correlations"
Please define a 'mother'.
Conservatives are so stupid they can't understand any nuance. The same word can have different meaning in biology and sociology. Just like they use pounds for both mass and weight in imperial system.
"lack of intelligence is needed to believe that biological sex isn’t binary"
How is it that you know what I cheer or lament? Assumption absent knowledge is the hallmark of an ideologue that has long since abandoned critical thought in favor of dogma.
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.
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.
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.
I think I agree with you, this is the best explanation. Author's - not at all, complete miss, though also, he did not invent it, his explanation circulates around for a long time.
I think the author may get the correct picture after reading all the comments. Good way to learn better ideas - to broadcast a half-baked one and read responses.
I have another theory. The more liberal society is, the more competitive it gets. Those who are highly intelligent, attractive and without any crippling neuroses welcome competition because they know they will win. Others not so competent might not like it all that much.
Tradition puts some forms of competition off limits. This is obviously appealing to people who don't think might never win.
"Those who are highly intelligent, attractive and without any crippling neuroses welcome competition because they know they will win. Others not so competent might not like it all that much" Well given that cultural revolutions and the general drive toward a more liberal society are driven by trying to out signal each other, that really doesn't make sense. Also many of the most conspicuous ideological signalers, the sjw types, do so as a play for status precisely because they are less competent, and more competent people signal in a very different way. Verbally tilted people are also more liberal and prefer less formal "fair" competition and change the rules or move the goalposts as they go which is part of the reason why everyone hates lawyers
"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)
Since they can navigate unspoken less formal rules better, they often promote them as a way of intra-elite competition even if it's worse in general and even for them in the long run because it's a Nash equilibrium
“We know that intelligent people have more self-control and make better decisions in general — they’re less likely to play the lottery, more likely to follow medical advice, less likely to die in accidents.”
Lots of talk wrt “intelligent people” without much of a definition/classification there of. Perhaps here lies my confusion—just how intelligent are those whom you term intelligent?
For example, unless I missed something, during the great Covid scamdemic we had a division of thought wrt the Covid mRNA vaccine. Seems the very “dumb” said something along the lines of “screw the vaccine, it’s a government/communist plot” and the very intelligent said something along the lines of “screw the vaccine, it’s an untested and potentially unsafe product with potential unknown side effects”. Such was this division that the Internet produced memes noting such.
Ed Dutton has termed a great deal of those folk we’d term “intelligent” (right side of Bell Curve) as “mid-wits”. He even postulates in his writings a cutoff point of 120-125 IQ. Mid-wits are (defined crudely) as those individuals who go along with the crowd consensus through ignorance (inability to understand cause and effect, but not ignorant wrt social consequences (benefit) of going along with perceived consensus.
My thought here is that we might find somewhat of an interest relationship comparing people’s IQ with their predilections if we fit a curve to the data, rather than the typical assumption of a linear relationship across IQ.
Thanks for the comment. It's a valid question, but I have not found any evidence that the correlation between IQ and social liberalism is driven by midwits. In fact, social liberalism typically peaks in the top 10% of IQ.
From your above citation: “Responding to Solon’s (2014) article, Carl (2015) finds that cognitive ability has a pronounced U-shaped relation to some measures of leftism, a slightly U-shaped relation to others, and a monotonic negative relation to still others.”
I’m not sure my observation has been refuted—albeit, I’ve not gone and read the stated studies in whole. However, they do seem to support that there are findings of a “U-shaped” (i.e., non-linear, curved) relationship wrt to cognitive ability and leftism/conservative inclinations. This might well support my speculation on mid-wits muddying finding based upon an assumption of linearity. Whether this changes the particular aspects of behavior you’ve noted is of course admittedly speculative on my part.
In any event, thanks for your reply and inclusion of your thoughtful, supportive citation in support. Not found much in discussion these days.
Yeah, I can’t argue against that from personal experience. I always simply assumed such was because in general, ‘higher intelligence usually indicts higher SES wrt the general populace’. One can afford to be liberal/leftist from such a (removed) (ad)vantage point.
"Ed Dutton has termed a great deal of those folk we’d term “intelligent” (right side of Bell Curve) as “mid-wits”. He even postulates in his writings a cutoff point of 120-125 IQ. Mid-wits are (defined crudely) as those individuals who go along with the crowd consensus through ignorance (inability to understand cause and effect, but not ignorant wrt social consequences (benefit) of going along with perceived consensus."
Yes, it seems important to define what constitutes intelligence.
'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.
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
Yeah, the West probably has too many Indians. They should be vetted more heavily, especially in favor of selecting immigrants with Western-aligned values.
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.
1) gays I think is obvious. See Emil kirkegard’s data showing being gay is a mental illness associated with all sorts of bad things.
Really, can you not go to a pride parade and conclude it’s messed up.
The catholic priest scandal was essentially a gay scandal.
My experience has been that “fag hags” are bad news.
One thing I think you need to understand is the gigantic fertility gap amongst smart people based on ideology. In the top 20% of IQ conservatives have 3x higher tfr than liberals.
“Social liberalism” is corrosive to TFR for smart people. Liberals solved their post 60s divorce problem by not marrying until 35 and having one kid.
I view the conservative/liberal divide as mainly a divide between high and low fertility smart people.
Each group reaches out to various non-elite constituencies for votes.
2) high skill immigration is either the talented tenth of third world countries or Asians.
The talented tenth of third world countries bring a lot of their values and resentment with them. They don’t seem loyal or even non-hostile to white Americans. If you haven’t noticed, lots of smart people apply their smarts to bad ends.
As for Asians im not sure we want them replacing our elite. The Vivek vision for America’s future is pretty dystopian.
It’s worth asking how those values are working in Asia. All the Asian tigers have had stalled economies for 20 years now. Their per capita gdp is much lower than ours. Their innovation rate per capita relative to their IQs is low. They have APOCOLYPSE level fertility rates. They work and study all day in mainly unproductive red queen races and then commit suicide at high oecd rates.
And that’s east Asia. India is a lot worse.
Yes, they are individual high earners, but it’s not clear to me we want to import a new elite. A lot of the talent appears to get channeled into red queen races, which doesn’t scale (hence why a people with higher iq then us is poorer then us).
As heretical insights notes in “immigrants from where” on Substack, nearly all the real innovation comes from whites and Jews, with a few East Asians. Indians for instance vastly underperform per capita given their share of skilled immigration slots. When they do rise to elite levels it’s mostly winning hierarchical contests within already established institutions, something their nepotistic ethnic networking is good at.
It’s worth noting BTW that the rest of t the anglosphere took “import infinite skilled jeets “ seriously the last decade and it’s been a real disaster. Go ask Canada what the experience has been like.
I would note that “liberals” kind of get this already. It’s why Harvard and every elite prep school had an Asian cap. It’s why elite whites move away from schools and neighborhoods that get “too Asian”.
They want enough of these kids around to do their math homework and skilled grunt work, but not too many.
I honestly think that this is one of your best articles. I concur with everything that you wrote here.
An arguable third reason why intelligent people are more socially liberal is that they are less religious. Religion has a strong effect on whether someone is pro-life, opposed to feminism, opposed to pro-LGBT positions, opposed to mass immigration, opposed to victimless crimes (e.g. taking drugs prohibited by their religion), etc.
The causal effect can also go both ways. If a person is socially liberal, they might be less religious because most religions and denominations aren't socially liberal enough. Religiosity is also somewhat related to the pro-social/less instinctual reason, so it's already partially covered.
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:
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.
It looks like this article really struck a chord. I wondered about some of the same questions regarding my college professors and peers. The explanations listed certainly make sense but I wonder if more emphasis could be put on cognitive trait differences such as openness that overlap with IQ. It might be the other traits that go along with IQ and not the problem solving ability/short term memory that makes the key difference.
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.
When the U.S. depended on charity, social services were lacking and most people did not receive much help. The average conservatives would have taken the position that the person is suffering because God is punishing them for sinning.
This is a specious argument. Most people were poorer then, even people who weren't "poor"
really... https://www.philanthropyroundtable.org/magazine/less-god-less-giving/
From Google AI:
Yes, in 1900, many people, particularly within various Christian denominations and other religions, strongly believed that God punished individuals and nations for sin. This belief was a significant aspect of traditional religious doctrine.
At the time, the concept of divine punishment was a mainstream theological view, often associated with the idea of eternal torment in Hell for the wicked. Sermons and religious texts frequently emphasized the consequences of sin, drawing heavily from Old and New Testament narratives that describe God's wrath and direct intervention in human affairs to enact justice.
The view that God rewards virtue with prosperity is not that old or traditional. It first emerged with the Calvinists in the Reformation. Older forms of Christianity had no such assumption and rather saw poverty and sickness as a challenge to respond to, in accordance with the Gospel, in which Jesus has a very jaundiced view of riches and demands charity toward "the least of my brethren". Thus the Church, in the Middle Ages, operated a sort of social safety and while it compares poorly with modern day efforts (as do many aspects of that era) it was vastly superior to the lack of such efforts in the pagan past.
"Liberals prefer high taxes, . . . ." seems like quite a stretch on your part.
Perhaps liberals prefer to buy indulgence from sins (mostly of omission?) through donating to the government rather than the church.
Not a stretch...
https://www.pewresearch.org/short-reads/2025/03/19/most-americans-continue-to-favor-raising-taxes-on-corporations-higher-income-households/sr_25-03-19_taxes_3/
Meanwhile, the top 1% already pay 40% of all federal income tax, while almost half of the population pays virtually nothing...
https://taxfoundation.org/data/all/federal/latest-federal-income-tax-data-2025/
However, according to Liberals, the "rich" aren't paying their "fair share"...
One might want to mention what percent of income tax (state and federal) are to funding the total cost of government. The bottom 50% may not pay much income tax cut do pay a higher percentage of the total income in sales taxes.
Yes, I understand that the American tax system is highly progressive and that people, when driven by perverse incentives, will offload their costs onto others as much as in their power to do so.
Have you any comment on my suggestion that liberals direct their belief in higher powers to the government, whereas other [less liberal] Americans direct such beliefs into organised religion? ie the difference between American liberals and non-liberals is not in their nature but in formalised beliefs?
I agree that most liberals worship the power of government, but there are many non-liberals (conservatives) who are not particularly religious. They believe in small government and individual responsibility (charity only when the recipient cannot support themselves through no fault of their own).
"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)."
I wonder how much does this have to do with more intelligent -> more income when paired with better management of your means -> more disposable income?
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.
American liberals do seem (from the state of internet exchange) to be inordinately verbal. How gendered and cultural (ie aligned with American liberal feminism) is that result?
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.
Yes. I have a study - which i can't find right now - that shows how western European majorities are economically somewhat right of center while socially moderately liberal. Eastern Europeans showed left leaning i.e. collectivist economical preferences while being socially more conservative.
This also makes it very clear why western European progressive parties, media, ntellecuals etc are in such dire need of race, gender, inequality etc cards since ambitious leftist academics took over the, until then worker-focused, Labour parties as vehicles for their own ideological wants.
Agreed. If you look at the Hungarian Magyar Munkaspart (Workers Party) and the ruling Slovak SMER party, what you find is communitarian economics, combined with nationalism and moderately conservative social values.
Before 1968, most of the labour parties of the Anglosphere followed this same pattern, but thereafter they were corroded by the New Left.
USSR was the first state in the world to legalize abortion and decriminalize homosexuality. They promoted female empowerment. Lenin was very anti nationalist. Lenin also supported full freedom of divorce.
Some of this gains were lost under Stalin. But most of them were reinstalled after Stalin, like abortion and divorce.
Still, Soviet society all in all was less socially liberal than the Western one in 1980s, before USSR came to an end. For example, it was a woman's duty to work AND it was her duty to bear children and to be a hearthkeeper.
There's no such thing as the "Islamic World". Muslim worldwide are not a single cultural-political entity. Most Muslim countries are not Theocracies and most of them do not have Sharia Law in their Constitutions.
The Modern Middle East itself is significantly LESS religious than Westerners claim it is, including Saudi Arabia and Qatar.
It depends of course on what you mean by "religious." As for Muslims, across the world, embracing or not embracing sharia, Muslims are people and a good portion of any people are ignorant. They may think of sharia simply as a term for good or godly.
Communist movements in the Anglosphere may be associated with more socially liberal ideas but the French communist party was (yes, it's fair to use the past tense for them now though they still exist)… was remarkably puritanical.
French communists wanted to legalize sex with children.
You don't know what you're talking about 🙄. I'm talking about card-carrying members of the French communist party, not “communists,” or lefties or progressives or liberals or bohemians… Not Foucault and Sartre and so on. The latter left the communist party. The actual communist party in France was very puritanical.
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/.
Muslims don't agree with each other on what "Sharia law" is.
If you ask Muslims in various countries more specific questions on each of the tenets of Sharia law, they have lot of disagreements, as shown in the polling data linked in your comment.
But you are right that most Indonesians and most Muslims aren't liberal.
"Sharia Law" means different things to different Muslims. It's not a monolithic thing
Educated Chinese people don't hold the conservative views their government promotes because there's no prestige in them. The liberal west is still the global trendsetter that everyone in the world aspires to copy.
CCP is not conservative at all in many policies from abortion to female empowerment.
China has one the highest percentage of female engineers.
Socially and politically liberal are separated. Especially in the U.S.
While it does seem true to some extent that these correlations with being more intelligent exist across different social ecologies, the West is demanding more and more cronyism and ideological signaling loyalty while many Chinese elites want more economic freedom. Also we see how people signaling tradition in places like Russia or Turkey has little impact on stopping their falling fertility since having many children and earlier is negatively correlated with intelligence and still seen as low status. There are times where personal preference is directly reflected in policy support or other times where they go in opposite directions or a mix (local nimbyism while supporting a wider policy in the opposite direction)
Yeah. Salafism/Wahabis have lower IQs than the average Muslim, but Islamists/Terrorists are the opposite
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.
"that all police are racist"
Police as an institution is racist in USA.
"that Islam is compatible with and therefore should be defended by feminism, "
Middle east would have been a lot more secular and peaceful if not for western intervention. From Taliban to ISIS to hamas to Iranian mullah regime, all has some kind of western intervention behind their formation. Also how does killing more women and children to "save" them from Islam actually helps them?
People like you would cry crocodile tears over how women are oppressed under Islam and then cheer to bomb more women in middle east in the next breath.
"inability to define “woman” void of vague correlations"
Please define a 'mother'.
Conservatives are so stupid they can't understand any nuance. The same word can have different meaning in biology and sociology. Just like they use pounds for both mass and weight in imperial system.
"lack of intelligence is needed to believe that biological sex isn’t binary"
XXY, X, XYY, XXX, XXYY or XO chromosomes.
How is it that you know what I cheer or lament? Assumption absent knowledge is the hallmark of an ideologue that has long since abandoned critical thought in favor of dogma.
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.
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.
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.
I think I agree with you, this is the best explanation. Author's - not at all, complete miss, though also, he did not invent it, his explanation circulates around for a long time.
I think the author may get the correct picture after reading all the comments. Good way to learn better ideas - to broadcast a half-baked one and read responses.
I have another theory. The more liberal society is, the more competitive it gets. Those who are highly intelligent, attractive and without any crippling neuroses welcome competition because they know they will win. Others not so competent might not like it all that much.
Tradition puts some forms of competition off limits. This is obviously appealing to people who don't think might never win.
"Those who are highly intelligent, attractive and without any crippling neuroses welcome competition because they know they will win. Others not so competent might not like it all that much" Well given that cultural revolutions and the general drive toward a more liberal society are driven by trying to out signal each other, that really doesn't make sense. Also many of the most conspicuous ideological signalers, the sjw types, do so as a play for status precisely because they are less competent, and more competent people signal in a very different way. Verbally tilted people are also more liberal and prefer less formal "fair" competition and change the rules or move the goalposts as they go which is part of the reason why everyone hates lawyers
The entire history of capitalism shows that people want to own and run monopolies because they do not want to compete against other organizations.
"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)
Since they can navigate unspoken less formal rules better, they often promote them as a way of intra-elite competition even if it's worse in general and even for them in the long run because it's a Nash equilibrium
“We know that intelligent people have more self-control and make better decisions in general — they’re less likely to play the lottery, more likely to follow medical advice, less likely to die in accidents.”
Lots of talk wrt “intelligent people” without much of a definition/classification there of. Perhaps here lies my confusion—just how intelligent are those whom you term intelligent?
For example, unless I missed something, during the great Covid scamdemic we had a division of thought wrt the Covid mRNA vaccine. Seems the very “dumb” said something along the lines of “screw the vaccine, it’s a government/communist plot” and the very intelligent said something along the lines of “screw the vaccine, it’s an untested and potentially unsafe product with potential unknown side effects”. Such was this division that the Internet produced memes noting such.
Ed Dutton has termed a great deal of those folk we’d term “intelligent” (right side of Bell Curve) as “mid-wits”. He even postulates in his writings a cutoff point of 120-125 IQ. Mid-wits are (defined crudely) as those individuals who go along with the crowd consensus through ignorance (inability to understand cause and effect, but not ignorant wrt social consequences (benefit) of going along with perceived consensus.
My thought here is that we might find somewhat of an interest relationship comparing people’s IQ with their predilections if we fit a curve to the data, rather than the typical assumption of a linear relationship across IQ.
Thanks for the comment. It's a valid question, but I have not found any evidence that the correlation between IQ and social liberalism is driven by midwits. In fact, social liberalism typically peaks in the top 10% of IQ.
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0191886915002925
—NC
From your above citation: “Responding to Solon’s (2014) article, Carl (2015) finds that cognitive ability has a pronounced U-shaped relation to some measures of leftism, a slightly U-shaped relation to others, and a monotonic negative relation to still others.”
I’m not sure my observation has been refuted—albeit, I’ve not gone and read the stated studies in whole. However, they do seem to support that there are findings of a “U-shaped” (i.e., non-linear, curved) relationship wrt to cognitive ability and leftism/conservative inclinations. This might well support my speculation on mid-wits muddying finding based upon an assumption of linearity. Whether this changes the particular aspects of behavior you’ve noted is of course admittedly speculative on my part.
In any event, thanks for your reply and inclusion of your thoughtful, supportive citation in support. Not found much in discussion these days.
Sorry, the terminology in that article is a bit confusing. I was using "leftism" to mean "economic leftism" exclusively.
—NC
Yeah, I can’t argue against that from personal experience. I always simply assumed such was because in general, ‘higher intelligence usually indicts higher SES wrt the general populace’. One can afford to be liberal/leftist from such a (removed) (ad)vantage point.
"Ed Dutton has termed a great deal of those folk we’d term “intelligent” (right side of Bell Curve) as “mid-wits”. He even postulates in his writings a cutoff point of 120-125 IQ. Mid-wits are (defined crudely) as those individuals who go along with the crowd consensus through ignorance (inability to understand cause and effect, but not ignorant wrt social consequences (benefit) of going along with perceived consensus."
Yes, it seems important to define what constitutes intelligence.
'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
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
You make a good point, but NC said high-skilled immigrants. Somalis and immigrant truck drivers are not high skilled.
Indians do this at all levels, see FedEx, for instance.
Yeah, the West probably has too many Indians. They should be vetted more heavily, especially in favor of selecting immigrants with Western-aligned values.
Meritocracy is the best policy.
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.
1) gays I think is obvious. See Emil kirkegard’s data showing being gay is a mental illness associated with all sorts of bad things.
Really, can you not go to a pride parade and conclude it’s messed up.
The catholic priest scandal was essentially a gay scandal.
My experience has been that “fag hags” are bad news.
One thing I think you need to understand is the gigantic fertility gap amongst smart people based on ideology. In the top 20% of IQ conservatives have 3x higher tfr than liberals.
“Social liberalism” is corrosive to TFR for smart people. Liberals solved their post 60s divorce problem by not marrying until 35 and having one kid.
I view the conservative/liberal divide as mainly a divide between high and low fertility smart people.
Each group reaches out to various non-elite constituencies for votes.
2) high skill immigration is either the talented tenth of third world countries or Asians.
The talented tenth of third world countries bring a lot of their values and resentment with them. They don’t seem loyal or even non-hostile to white Americans. If you haven’t noticed, lots of smart people apply their smarts to bad ends.
As for Asians im not sure we want them replacing our elite. The Vivek vision for America’s future is pretty dystopian.
https://x.com/VivekGRamaswamy/status/1872312139945234507
It’s worth asking how those values are working in Asia. All the Asian tigers have had stalled economies for 20 years now. Their per capita gdp is much lower than ours. Their innovation rate per capita relative to their IQs is low. They have APOCOLYPSE level fertility rates. They work and study all day in mainly unproductive red queen races and then commit suicide at high oecd rates.
And that’s east Asia. India is a lot worse.
Yes, they are individual high earners, but it’s not clear to me we want to import a new elite. A lot of the talent appears to get channeled into red queen races, which doesn’t scale (hence why a people with higher iq then us is poorer then us).
As heretical insights notes in “immigrants from where” on Substack, nearly all the real innovation comes from whites and Jews, with a few East Asians. Indians for instance vastly underperform per capita given their share of skilled immigration slots. When they do rise to elite levels it’s mostly winning hierarchical contests within already established institutions, something their nepotistic ethnic networking is good at.
It’s worth noting BTW that the rest of t the anglosphere took “import infinite skilled jeets “ seriously the last decade and it’s been a real disaster. Go ask Canada what the experience has been like.
I would note that “liberals” kind of get this already. It’s why Harvard and every elite prep school had an Asian cap. It’s why elite whites move away from schools and neighborhoods that get “too Asian”.
They want enough of these kids around to do their math homework and skilled grunt work, but not too many.
I honestly think that this is one of your best articles. I concur with everything that you wrote here.
An arguable third reason why intelligent people are more socially liberal is that they are less religious. Religion has a strong effect on whether someone is pro-life, opposed to feminism, opposed to pro-LGBT positions, opposed to mass immigration, opposed to victimless crimes (e.g. taking drugs prohibited by their religion), etc.
The causal effect can also go both ways. If a person is socially liberal, they might be less religious because most religions and denominations aren't socially liberal enough. Religiosity is also somewhat related to the pro-social/less instinctual reason, so it's already partially covered.
Thanks for the kind words.
—NC
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
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've talked with plenty of East Asians here in NZ who say they stayed in NZ because life is easier here.
As an aside, NZ has used growth through immigration since, well, people first arrived here and much easier to achieve than by growing productivity.
The less flattering reason is an instance of the Typical Mind Fallacy. https://www.lesswrong.com/w/typical-mind-fallacy
It looks like this article really struck a chord. I wondered about some of the same questions regarding my college professors and peers. The explanations listed certainly make sense but I wonder if more emphasis could be put on cognitive trait differences such as openness that overlap with IQ. It might be the other traits that go along with IQ and not the problem solving ability/short term memory that makes the key difference.