Economic Left/Right: -0.38
Social Libertarian/Authoritarian: -0.92
but it means nothing, of course
Actually it carries quite of few implications about your intellectual acuity.
Kemmelmeier (2008) surveyed college students who scored above average in academic achievement tests (e.g. SAT and ACT) and found two trends. There was a linear trend for more intelligent students to be less conservative overall, in line with Stankov’s findings. Additionally, there was a non-linear trend for the most intelligent students to support more extreme political views as opposed to more moderate ones. Political views in this study were measured by first asking people how liberal vs. conservative they were, and additionally asking about their views on more specific issues referred to as “traditional gender roles” and “anti-regulation” attitudes.
Participants’ views on the former issues (e.g. gay marriage and abortion) were more strongly associated with their overall conservatism than their views on government regulation (e.g. gun control, higher taxes for the wealthy, speech codes on campus). Interestingly, higher intelligence was associated with less conservative views on traditional gender roles on the one hand, but more “conservative” views opposing government regulation. This suggests that more intelligent people in this study tended to support both greater personal freedom and less government regulation in general (libertarians take note). This finding is similar to a previous finding that higher education was associated with greater support for liberal social policies but not with support for greater economic regulation (Gerber, Huber, Doherty, Dowling, & Ha, 2010).
Stankov (2009) has argued that conservative political ideologies tend to be associated with lower intelligence on average. Conservatives generally value tradition, respect for authority, and social order, and tend to be leery of innovation and change. These scholars have argued that such values tend to be associated with cognitive rigidity and may therefore appeal to people who have difficulty with intellectual challenges that require them to process novel information. In support of his argument, Stankov cited evidence that people with more conservative views tend to score lower on IQ tests and to have lower levels of education.
One major reason why intelligent people tend to be liberal is that conservatism is the default position. As Charlton once wrote on this blog “conservatism is natural and spontaneous”. I agree with this; conservatism is natural because conservatism is all about our most primitive self-serving impulses: tribalism, family and children, greed etc. Evolution has predisposed us to feel emotions that enhance our genetic fitness, and these are the conservative emotions, so conservatives are disgusted by immigration because it threatens their gene pool. They worship wealth because historically, the ability to acquire resources enhanced the survival of one’s self, one’s family, and one’s tribe. They are disgusted by feminism because feminist daughters threaten their genetic fitness by being too focused on career to give them grand-kids. Similarly, they are disgusted by gays because openly gay sons also don’t give them any grand-kids. So evolution has programmed us to feel conservative emotions, and thus only people who are intelligent enough to think critically about their evolutionary programming and rebel against it, tend to have the option of being liberal.
A second major reason why intelligent people tend to be liberal is that intelligence is the mental ability to adapt and liberalism is all about change. By contrast, those who are not intelligent enough to adapt to a changing society or just new ideas, may fear it, and thus prefer conservatism which seeks to preserve tradition.
A third reason why intelligent people tend to be liberal is that liberalism is more complex and ambiguous. By contrast conservatism seeks simple solutions and simple dichotomies like good vs evil, us vs. them. However just because liberalism is more intellectually demanding than conservatism does not make it more correct. I find a lot of smart people really are “clever sillies” in that they embrace theories and ideas that are unnecessarily complex and this is probably a major problem in the IQ 120-140 range that so many of our elites are drawn from. Such people are smart enough to think of complex answers to questions, but they’re not smart enough to understand why the complex solution is wrong.
They suffer from bounded cognition, because they haven’t internalized Occam’s razor.
Beliathlon, thank you for insightful commentary. However, how does supposed correlation between IQ and conservatism/liberalism fall in with the fact, that "more intelligent people" take more extreme positions?
Nobody sane would accuse ultraconservatives like Khomeini, Putin or representatives of Mormon church of low IQ - even though you could label them as liberals, since their ideas go against rules set down by western mainstream.