For the Sake of Science

…but dumb people tend to be conservative:

The research finds that children with low intelligence are more likely to hold prejudiced attitudes as adults. These findings point to a vicious cycle, according to lead researcher Gordon Hodson, a psychologist at Brock University in Ontario. Low-intelligence adults tend to gravitate toward socially conservative ideologies, the study found. Those ideologies, in turn, stress hierarchy and resistance to change, attitudes that can contribute to prejudice, Hodson wrote in an email to LiveScience.

“Prejudice is extremely complex and multifaceted, making it critical that any factors contributing to bias are uncovered and understood,” he said.

This matches up with the old saying, “Republicans may not all be racists, but racists vote Republican.” And though this confirms suspicions of liberals/the rest of the world concerning the general intelligence of conservatives, I think it should be clarified that this is talking about social conservatives. Going hand-in-hand with that is economic conservatism (at least in American politics), but that’s probably more a quirk of history and shitty political polarization than anything.

People with lower cognitive abilities also had less contact with people of other races.

“This finding is consistent with recent research demonstrating that intergroup contact is mentally challenging and cognitively draining, and consistent with findings that contact reduces prejudice,” said Hodson, who along with his colleagues published these results online Jan. 5 in the journal Psychological Science.

This matches up with the fact that large cities tend to vote more liberally. Using my home state as an example, independent 2010 candidate for governor Eliot Cutler – by far the most intelligent candidate the state has seen in quite some time – was doing very well according to early results. Unfortunately, those results were indicative of southern Maine where the technology and methods for reporting vote counts is more efficient due to more money as a result of a denser population. Once the results started coming in from rural northern Maine, our current shit governor [Waterville-R] started to take over. We saw the same pattern with the voting down of same sex marriage in 2009. Bigots like their rural atmospheres.

Of course, it has to be noted that this is all correlation. It matches up with a number of trends, yes, but that does not mean causation. In fact, since plenty of conservatives are intelligent, it’s obvious that believing in dumb ideologies does not make a person dumb. But still. Dumb people do tend to believe stupid things…

Filed under: Politics and Social, Science | Tagged: Low intelligence and conservatives |