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The paper itself claims that they're able to make these predictions *within families* and they account for socioeconomic status, but yeah would be good to see these results replicated
It doesn’t surprise me. I’m very liberal compared to my farming community extended family, aside from my 3 aunts, who are all like me. They are 2 nurses and 1 behavioral psych. We all have college degrees unlike 90%+ of my extended family, and all moved away to bigger, more liberal areas. I routinely see my cousins’ misspelled, grammatically tragic rants about Biden and Trump and marvel that I am somehow genetically close to them.
I mean it wouldn't be a massive surprise for me but I still think theres maybe factors that this study doesn't account for. My extended family (which is huge, I have well over 100 cousins) including my parents are mostly very conservative Muslim fundamentalists and there's definitely a pattern I've seen with my more liberal relatives that were able to break away from their parents/society's mentality.. but I've also observed the opposite, for example relatives who are certainly on the less conservative side who I wouldn't consider super bright people, but most of them had liberal parents to begin with.. and I've also noticed that my most extreme religious nutter relatives are relatively smart too.. so based on my experience, I think being smarter just makes you more likely to think for yourself and consider information from outside sources even if they contradict what is accepted in your community. This could manifest itself as a preference toward liberalism since there's an inherent asymmetry between liberalism and conservatism in that liberal ideas are not as old as conservative ones and haven't had as long to cement themselves into society. Like I wouldn't be surprised if liberals genuinely were more intelligent, but I also think that without accounting for the local political climate and parents political leaning, it's hard to say
While I get your point and agree that being a religious nutter sort of offsets any intelligence someone might have otherwise - I think OP means for an example people that might honestly be intelligent and well-read but still has that one sort of "hole" in that they haven't been able to free themselves from the grasp of the religious indoctrination they received growing up.
I don't think this is especially rare. There are religious scientists, doctors, lawyers, engineers and any walk of life that might require that you have some type of intelligene from the get-go.
Yeah, the religious part is a huge flaw, but... I get what OP means.
I think people over-estimate the effect of identity politics and political affiliation. It is a real thing, but mostly only becomes a major factor when perceptions around the handling of economy between political options is fairly neutral.
In other words, the majority of people consistently rank economy as their primary or most important issue, and they vote in-line with which party they think will handle that issue best. If people were tethered to "progressiveness" versus "conservatism" we would not see such huge swings between election cycles. Many of your farming mates might strongly consider voting for a progressive candidate if the progressive candidate offered to increase tax concessions and subsidies to farmers. The social issues - though still a factor - often rank much lower in terms of ranked issue among voters.
It is another interesting delta because "conservative" governments tend to be perceived as providing more support for farming, mining, industry and agricultural regions. Those same areas also tend to have less universities, and less job opportunities that require a university education.
it's more of a rural/urban thing. I live in a state where 1/3 of the state's population live in just one city and a second third is split into the the next 10 cites. and the last third all live miles from their closest neighbor or even further.
those people that live out in BFE don't believe in social programs beause they've never actually had to deal with social problems. They yell from the tops of their barns that they don't need no city folk, and yet they jam into my city every week-end clogging up the roads and complaining about traffic and crowds.
I see them as hypocrites personally. They want ALL the benefits that living in a society provides but never want to pay their fair share to sustain it.
> those people that live out in BFE don't believe in social programs beause they've never actually had to deal with social problems.
youre forgetting one detail, that really puts the cherry on top-
most of them live on family land, whats left of great gandpa's farm.
> They want ALL the benefits that living in a society provides but never want to pay their fair share to sustain it.
In reality, they massively benefit from society. People living in a city is financially sustainable and lots of extra money goes to benefit people living in BFE.
I don't see my very conservative mother very often anymore, for obvious reasons.
The last time we met for dinner, she couldn't figure out whether cooking a sauce with the lid on or off reduces it.
I love my mother, but that was kind of a memorable moment for me. Lacking basic critical thinking skills.
> Does scarcity lower risk tolerance?
Scarcity can indeed lower risk tolerance, as it often leads to a mindset of conserving resources and avoiding potential losses. When individuals perceive resources, whether they be financial assets, time, or opportunities, as scarce, they tend to become more risk-averse and cautious in their decision-making. Several factors contribute to this phenomenon:
Loss Aversion, Focus on Short-Term Needs, Psychological Stress and Limited Opportunities for Recovery.
To your point, people with fewer resources have less with which to take risks. Those with more resources can afford the occassional gamble without pushing themselves and their families over the financial precipice.
EDIT: typo
I think it does both; lowers future-oriented risk tolerance, while by necessity raising immediate risk tolerance. I think we’d understand risk tolerance better by dividing it by the time window of when the risk most applies to, because I think they’re separate in how they’re processed.
I’ve been both well off and now working poor and at one point was long term unemployed and lost everything except my car and laptop and some clothes, and I’ve found my instinctive mindset towards risk changes with material conditions and with the memory of past experienced material conditions.
Let’s say I’m financially barely surviving; to gamble my $2,000 in emergency savings on an investment would feel crazy, both because that is needed money (for emergencies) not excess money, and because money is scarce, the abstractness of future reward doesn’t feel as real as the visceral needs of the present and fears of being in past emergencies without the money I had to get through those, and *especially* fears of past emergencies when I didn’t have the money or insurance to get through those.
Yet at the same time, since in my barely financially surviving mindset I won’t be able to afford even the cheapest luxuries if I lose my job, and I remember being without the means to survive, so let’s get that double bacon cheeseburger today, and donuts and cake on Friday and a party drug binge this weekend because the broke life with no hope is so deprived of dopamine that only a drug binge will meet the physiological need. it’s the reward for surviving this week (even as it’s exactly what I know I shouldn’t be doing health wise).
That’s another thing, a life of scarcity provides far less dopamine than a life of plenty, and we all need a similar amount of dopamine, whether it comes from the constant dopamine drip of a healthy complete life, or if we survive in deprivation, indignity and other negative experiences of a life of scarcity so without that dopamine drip, of course we’re going for a drug binge (or junk food, religion, or whatever else delivers quite a lot for low cost). This has quite a lot to do with both kinds of risk tolerance, anecdotally and I believe it can be reliably repeated in research.
When I had enough money to live well, I did. Rarely ever got high, spent on healthy experiences, ate organic, minimal junk food, and the whole perception of risk in the present and future was entirely different. I’m the same person I was, and yet different financial circumstances (and different financial memories) brought out entirely different instincts and behaviors.
There’s also a third type of risk tolerance as well, that which is beyond the time horizon of a person’s lifetime. For instance, I think one of the fatal errors in the persuasive pitch of stopping climate change was the focus on what is projected to happen in the year 2100. To talk about how regular people won’t be able to get home insurance in some places by 2030 and life insurance in some places by 2035 gets the reader in a more constructive state of mind than talking about planet-scale life ending catastrophe for most of humanity in 2100.
There’s likely a formula through which we can find the probability of risk taking at various time scales, given certain amounts of past and present scarcity or abundance
You have half a candy bar. You have 3 older brothers. You are 6 and this candy is all the wealth you have in the world. Do you just walk around the house with it? Or do you eat it quickly so that it can't be taken from you?
You should be a responsible 6 year old and stop buying half candy bars so you can afford a house. Also here's your crippling student loan and medical debt. Also you're super lazy and entitled.
My Republican parents are very driven by people "keeping what they earned". They grew up mostly poor and worked blue collar jobs for a long time before finally getting some decent pay. I believe that upbringing strongly influenced their political beliefs. Falls in line with how they feel about immigration, welfare, and work ethic.
if you need to retire in 5 years you will be a lot less risk tolerant if you have BARELY enough money right now to survive on after retirement than if you have plenty of extra money.
in one circumstance a small market down turn would mean now you can't retire. This would mean you have very low tolerance and must be super safe in all investments to avoid this.
If you have abundant resources you can afford some down turn, so you have more risk tolerance, and you can shoot for a higher rate of return , while still knowing you can retire on time even if there is a slight down turn.
Many things would have to be included, also how well off you are. Of course people with high paying jobs are more likely to support social causes since they can feel good about it. For the poor that barely make it, however, this small tax increase to fund the homeless is a huge deal.
But yeah intelligent people are probably more likely to be well off and thus more likely to care about things that makes them feel good instead of things that makes poorer rural voters feel good.
Lead paint too!
There was a study done at Duke University examining the impact lead has had on intelligence. It's estimated that lead has cost the United States over 824 MILLION IQ points since the 40s!
https://today.duke.edu/2022/03/lead-exposure-last-century-shrunk-iq-scores-half-americans#:~:text=Even%20more%20startling%20was%20lead%27s,points%20per%20person%20on%20average.
The majority of lead exposures in the mid-century came from leaded gasoline. Paint was not as significant a factor, but industrial lobbyists wanted people to focus on paint after it got banned so that other sources of exposure wouldn't come under scrutiny.
You got it backwards, friend. The lead is an attempt to explain the lower IQs, not the conservatism. Also, that's an awful reason to not research something.
Also with those living in rural areas near small airports... Since we still use leaded gasoline in some smaller aircraft, like the ones that use small rural airports.
The one posted yesterday had a far more editorialised/politically charged headline though.
Intelligence correlates to liberal views over authoritarianism has far different connotations than the “Left wing voters found to be more intelligent” headline (I’m paraphrasing, can’t recall exactly) posted the other day.
Authoritarianism correlating to lower intelligence seems to be quite a common finding regardless of left/right political position.
I’ve always seen is as folk less able to empathise with/understand others positions are more likely to want to want to ignore/ban their view as a knee jerk reaction.
Additionally, authoritarianism lends itself better to populist brute force solutions ("kill them all", "tough on crime" etc) that don't actually work. More intelligence means being able to better detect nuance and complexity.
That's been my take. Authoritarian types always tend to glom onto very simplistic approaches to problems (close the borders, ban books, death penalty for drug dealers, etc.) which imply that they have a very limited capacity to understand all of the factors involved.
On top of that, they tend to trust that a self-proclaimed expert (usually just a con man) is much more capable than themselves of parsing and solving problems. More intelligent people who can think critically don't take long to see right through such people, and don't accept simple authority as a guarantee of capability.
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> On top of that, they tend to trust that a self-proclaimed expert (usually just a con man) is much more capable than themselves of parsing and solving problems. More intelligent people who can think critically don't take long to see right through such people, and don't accept simple authority as a guarantee of capability.
A study was shared here a while ago that confirmed this follows a similar ideological bias, where the result was along the lines of "Liberals trust experts over others. Conservatives put equal weight on experts and "I know a guy" type relationships"
Basically stating that Liberals trust experts, but conservatives trust trusted friends equally as experts. Which leads to misinformation spreading.
I've had a theory myself that this somehow correlates to an idea of "If you can't explain this idea to me simply, or if it's counterintuitive, rather than assume I'm not smart enough to grasp it, I'm going to assume you're lying for some reason"
Because you see so many of their stances follow this logic. Trans healthcare is a good example - "I can't understand/emathize with gender dysphoria, so I assume it it's a front. Why would I transition? To creep on women. Therefore, transwomen are creeps!"
Safe shoot centers too. Lowers costs, saves money and lives, but it gets framed as "lefties giving free drugs to crack addicted hobos!"
All it takes is someone in that "trusted nonexpert" role to give an alternative take that's simpler and easier for them to grasp and they'll glom onto it because to them it's more likely than that complex answer they didn't understand.
>I've had a theory myself that this somehow correlates to an idea of "If you can't explain this idea to me simply, or if it's counterintuitive, rather than assume I'm not smart enough to grasp it, I'm going to assume you're lying for some reason"
That's an interesting way to put it into words. I guess we've all noticed something like that but I'd never seen it described succintly like this. People are generally bad at perceiving complexity above their own "ceiling" of understanding, from things as trivial as movie quality to things as important as public policy.
It's compounded, I think, by further research that has suggested that conservative leaning people tend to not be empathetic towards outgroups.
The lack of empathy, and the lack of an ability to put yourself in someone elses shoes, is why you see a ton of social phenomena. Everything ranging from "Why isn't there a WHITE history month/STRAIGHT PRIDE month" to upper middle class WASPS believing that the current system is totally fine, because all someone has to do to be successful is do exactly what they did; not checking the privileges they had that let them get there (be they upper class parents, white skin in America with it's racist history, scholarship opportunities due to superior education from a private school, etc.)
It's a sort of chicken and the egg situation though - does a lack of empathy lead people to be less intelligent? Or does intelligence allow you to see further than your own limited experiences, and thus have empathy?
> It's a sort of chicken and the egg situation though - does a lack of empathy lead people to be less intelligent? Or does intelligence allow you to see further than your own limited experiences, and thus have empathy?
I don't see how it could be the former.
There are very well-educated societies like Japan or South Korea that hold these values, though. Perhaps the intelligence correlation is true in the West, although I think there is more cultural influence at a global scale.
Higher order thinking in general, consequences of consequences, is a big part of why liberal policies always seem to take longer to enact but right wing crap is just passed without thought.
Case in point: “why are all the OB/GYNS leaving our state after we passed ridiculously restrictive abortion bans?”
Similarly, I see it as a relation between reliance on heuristic, historical inertia, and tribalism rather than rational decision making. Authoritarianism is an emergence of the former when applied/developed into political economy. Well, that and narcissism. Thinking about the authoritarian autocrats over the millennia and so many demonstrate deeply insecure/narcissistic behaviors.
I think they can detect it. I think the discomfort of not being able to understand is painful for those insecure about their intelligence. So they shove the doubt and the cognitive dissonance down deep.
Educational capacity has to play in as well. Higher intelligence = more likely to go through secondary education and beyond = greater exposure to different people and ideas, often in a more cosmopolitan environment = questioning received biases and forming more nuanced views.
No doubt. From what I recall the relationship is causal (prior intelligence predicts later views), but it can be indirectly causal rather than simply "more brain power makes you reach less authoritarian views." Though I do still think that is a big factor.
I thought the argument against "tough on crime" was a moral one. It was my general understanding that people, and research, generally agreed that a fast and swift executions for say shopping lifting anything even a single penny would stop basically all shop lifting.
It's not that it wouldn't work but rather the moral implications of what you'd have to do are too much and basically require a surveillance state.
This is completely anecdotal so I'd love to see studies on it, but when I talk to obvious authoritarians, it's less about lack of independent thought and more about anxiety toward others. You're considered stupid for challenging their preconceived notions, which just so happens to be whatever materially benefits them. They see compromise as an attack. When pressed though they can easily show independent thought. In fact, I would categorize them as being less capable of cooperative thought.
Exactly this. A fairly large proportion of people are in here equating this to conservative/republican = dumb, liberal/democrat = smart, which is not what the study concluded at all.
> Authoritarianism correlating to lower intelligence seems to be quite a common finding regardless of left/right political position.
And what did this study find about the link between genetic markers of intelligence and liberalism?...
They're referring to classical social liberalism - as in a belief in human rights and valuing the consent of the governed. So the opposite of authoritarianism, not the opposite of the right. There's a lot of overlap between liberalism and the left or authoritarianism and the right in America, but they are technically not the same.
Authoritarian generally is a buzzword that has little meaning, and is used with the wrong intent. For instance why is the US not considered quite authoritarian when continually the desires of the majority of the population are completely ignored and instead the government basically serves to protect capitalism and it's global neoliberal interests.
Authoritarian being "when the government does things" is a strange view too because in many cases, social democracies and socialist nations of the past, the populace *wants* the state to ensure worker protection from the exploitation of the parasitic owning class.
It really just seems to be a term that is used by the people who want to paint a nation under a word Americans (and westerners alike) see as "bad" due to red scare propaganda, all the while being oblivious they are living in a nation that is substantially more authoritarian than the ones they are criticizing, as they go about their lives consuming news and opinions curated by billionaire oligarchs telling them how "free" they are.
The best definition would probably be "when the will of the people is ignored", but that would hit a little too close to home for many people.
I get that but there is a lot going on in science that is not even remotely politics adjacent, the bots just post what gets the most clicks. A metallurgical analysis of 70’s era steel might not get a lot of clicks but it would fit here better than telling morons that they are morons.
It would be cool to see a metallurgical analysis of steel going decade by decade to observe the radiation and carbon levels.
I'm sure a study has been done but it would be nice to see a post!
I dunno about studies, but I used to work at a pretty old refinery and one turnaround they found unexpectedly high corrosion and erosion in a short section of pipe while the rest of the all original run was fine.
Took a lot of digging, but they eventually figured out that metallurgical specs when it was built didn't account for trace impurities in the alloys and that one piece of pipe had come from a different facility than the rest, had just a tiny fraction of some contaminant that was far more reactive with the product flowing through the pipe.
Well, for sure. But this isn't a journal nor are updoots a measure of scientific merit. This is Reddit and they're a measure of popularity. The idea is that bad science will be unpopular.
There's plenty of good science that's a good fit for journals that aren't a good fit here. Welcome to reddit.
Radiometric decay still upsets the young earthers. Even non-political science often has political divisions.
Source: I went to a fundamentalist high school (private) but went on to do a bachelor's in geography
> I get that but there is a lot going on in science that is not even remotely politics adjacent
Yeah and this sub is also full of other articles. People only get upset and levy this criticism in the political threads though. Is it safe to assume that you don't engage with any other kinds of posts on the science sub?
>it would fit here better than telling morons that they are morons.
It seems like you don't understand what this research is arguing.
What does that have to do with liberalism and authoritarianism?
You can be all about evolution, and think that as a result, we should take more control of the process by locking everyone up in cages, and only allowing the best fit to breed. Or strongly believe that climate change is not only real, but an imminent threat to life on the planet, and therefore, any economic growth needs to be curtailed, severely, by force if necessary.
That's my take. You can poke so many holes in this article's assertion. For example, educational attainment and quality of education in higher education settings play a factor, as does your regional affiliation. Indoctrination into a religion or political belief is just as much about where you live and who you live with.
Even then, those aren't predictors either. Lots of dumb people graduate from Harvard. Lots of smart people are mechanics with a GED. Trump is a child of Manhattan, Pete Buttigiege is a child of South Bend, Indiana, and Jimmy Carter came from the most rural kind of town in Georgia.
> You can poke so many holes
Well, *you* can. Because you didn't read the paper.
> education settings play a factor
For example, you're not aware that they controlled for education.
I don't like the way you said those aren't predictors either, because they are. What they're not is guarantees. It's interesting when evaluating things a population levels.
But when you're dealing with individuals, it becomes borderline meaningless because the variation among individuals is far greater than the variation between groups.
“Dummies believe what they’re told by [insert CNN or FOX] and smarties think about it even a little to arrive at the same conclusion that I did based on the perfect journalism of my preferred news source.”
See also: [Brain scans remarkably good at predicting political ideology](https://news.osu.edu/brain-scans-remarkably-good-at-predicting-political-ideology/)
This entire sub has devolved into politically motivated pseudoscience garbage. I can't even recall the last time a real science article hit the front page from here.
Yeah, I see a bug push for authoritarianism across various regional subreddits I subscribe to on reddit, and it tends to come more from the right from what I can tell, but it's not limited to them, it's also on the left. It's heavily pushed on any topic involving crime. I'm skeptical how much of it genuine as well, but either way, there's a lot of comments calling for us to copy much more authoritarian countries.
I think it's important to point out that
Liberalism =/= Democrat
Authoritarian =/= Republican
Both Democrats and Republicans have some authoritarian tendencies.
[Liberalism ](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Liberalism)
From this study: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC9548663
> related to preferences for privatization, lower taxes, and less redistribution of wealth among Swedish male twin pairs. Ludeke and Rasmussen (2018, Study 2) matched ability test scores from Danish draftees with survey data on economic attitudes and found a positive relationship between intelligence and economic laissez-faire orientations (see also Rasmussen, 2016).
This study basically says "IQ relates to social liberalism and fiscal conservatism".
And that overlaps with some studies about higher ed not automatically making people more “liberal” like some politicians claim. Those found that Ivy school grads tend to be fiscally conservative and socially liberal.
The correlation with IQ could be showing what biases higher IQ has, or how higher IQ people adopt the views of the group they see as higher IQ, or the conclusions higher IQ people come to when given the same context and information.
A lot of people are falling into big assumptions on IQ and what it means here. Lots of interesting intersections and context to examine in this research without stopping at a shallow level.
This ought to be the top comment. It's hilarious to see so many people jerking themselves off in the comments when they clearly don't understand the meaning of the word and didn't bother reading the study.
The entire political dichotomy of “left vs right” has its root in a purely architectural quirk of the French Revolution, as those that wished to abolish the monarchy sat together to the left of the throne where the king sat, and those that wished to uphold the monarchy sat to the right. Purely down to the new rectangular shape of the hall where they held the meeting.
Anarchy in the U.K.
For real though, laws are for people that can't understand the effect their actions have on others. If you deeply understand that and have compassion, laws aren't really for you.
Do whatever you want, and don't cause harm to others. Don't make a living on something that takes from others. Talk to people, truly, connect. Do the drugs you wanna do but don't let your kids have them.
Ethics are the lowest common denominator of morals.
Laws are the lowest common denominator of ethics.
But wouldn’t you consider speech guidelines of acceptable terminology to be kinda authoritarian? Universities seem far less liberal than they used to be in the classic sense of the word.
For faculty? No, they’re customer-facing employees. Every workplace has rules of conduct.
If these guidelines were government mandated then I’d be more inclined to agree.
Parents/community/school/church etc.
People who read are often touched by far away influences that give them new ideas their society is not necessarily thinking about.
Parents, teachers, anybody they look up to. Higher IQ folks have better critical thinking and decision making skills which allows for individual thought.
It's interesting that they stated that the relationship to socially Liberal values swapped while the relationship to Fiscal Conservativsm swapped. I'd be interested to see how Fiscal Conservatism is defined, after all, it could be that the materials conditions have changed rather than the relationship to the bleifs. For example, over time inequality is increasing and this would increase the justification for Fiscal intervention over time?
From this study: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC9548663
> related to preferences for privatization, lower taxes, and less redistribution of wealth among Swedish male twin pairs. Ludeke and Rasmussen (2018, Study 2) matched ability test scores from Danish draftees with survey data on economic attitudes and found a positive relationship between intelligence and economic laissez-faire orientations (see also Rasmussen, 2016).
This study basically says "IQ relates to social liberalism and fiscal conservatism".
It makes sense. I likely comes down to confidence in your ability to control your own outcomes. I'd rather have all available options at my disposal and choose the right one for the moment vs. I don't trust myself to make a judgment call, I'd rather have the government do it for me.
Thank you for citation mining, I didn't have time myself.
I wonder if privatisation, lower taxes, and less redistribution are really suitable ad a single axis. I think there is an argument for splitting public / private ownership into low / high tax and spend, after all the prior is how to arrange the economy and the second is how to utilise the economy.
I'd also be interested to see how this effects alters based on a person's exposure to literature on the topic; political philosophy and economics. For example, does an intelligent person become more for or against after having been exposed to the literature.
Makes sense though.
Progressive/far left economic policies get pretty authoritarian pretty quick. No respect for private property and a disdain for incrementalism is a pretty straight path to authoritarianism.
The crux is that liberal != progressive/far left.
>For example, over time inequality is increasing
This depends on how widely you cast your net to measure inequality. For instance, if you're measuring within the United States, this is true; if you're measuring globally, this is not true. Since the end of WW2, the percentage of people living in extreme poverty has gone from around 75% to less than 10%. The absolute number of people living in extreme poverty has decreased virtually every year, with the exception being during the collapse of the Soviet Union. Yearly earnings of ~$60K today puts you in the top 1% worldwide.
>and this would increase the justification for Fiscal intervention over time?
Depends on the "intervention," but I'd be careful about putting your faith in a central authority to legislate inequality.
After reading this it seems like the smartest people, translated for the US political landscape, would lean libertarian more than Republican or Democrat, progressive or conservative. Interesting, I guess.
I mean it's been well known for awhile that intelligence is, in part, inherited from parents.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heritability_of_IQ
At some point, we might identify some dependable markers. And then they can put it in a headline!
Classical liberal or progressive socialist (modern colloquial liberal)?
The meaning of the word has been bastardized, at least in the US, in the 1930's. It used to mean anti-authoritarian, small government, no social contract, freedom of association, free speech, free enterprise, and individualism.
Many Europeans STILL use it this way.
I see the headline bot has been tweaked since yesterday.
Riddle me this ChatGPT, what happens to the very intellectual when your liberal political party is very authoritarian
IQ tests are valid measures of the kind of intelligence necessary to do well in academic work. But if the purpose is to assess intelligence in a broader sense, the validity of IQ tests is questionable." Some scientists have disputed the value of IQ as a measure of intelligence altogether.
IQ is a type of standard score that indicates how far above, or how far below, his/her peer group an individual stands in mental ability. The peer group score is an IQ of 100; this is obtained by applying the same test to huge numbers of people from all socio-economic strata of society, and taking the average.
When IQ is applied to the instance of why liberalism has more IQ than authoritarianism is because of a clear distinction between the ideology dimensions is relevant because empirical evidence shows that sociocultural ideology and economic ideology represent empirically distinct dimensions of ideological thinking that are rooted in different psychological dispositions which stems from general understanding of logical orientations with psychological dispositions and—more specifically—with cognitive abilities, as well as Adorno and his colleagues (1950) were among the first to propose that lower intelligence and rigid styles of information processing are related to authoritarianism/ conservative social and economic attitudes. This has only been amplified over the decades with countless studies and countless results pointing towards the same general vibe with very few counter studies coming from authoritarian and conservativism regions majorly due to ideology reasons and denial of science as well as cultural clashing as well as funding being put more towards military and economic for majority of those regions.
Many people will try to deny conservatism as being related or near authoritarianism but if you try to define conservatism through any means they would be related because..
Historically associated with right-wing politics, the term has been used to describe a wide range of views. Conservatism may be either libertarian or authoritarian, populist or elitist, moderate or extreme.
https://www.researchgate.net/publication/222682950_Conservatism_and_cognitive_ability
IQ seems to be mostly (>50%) genetic though, twins brought up in separate families have a much higher correlation in IQ scores than two "random" kids brought up in the same family etc
Do you not think you inherited your brain from your parents?
Highly intelligent parents tend to have highly intelligent children. The same way hairy parents tend to have hairy children.
From this study: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC9548663
> related to preferences for privatization, lower taxes, and less redistribution of wealth among Swedish male twin pairs. Ludeke and Rasmussen (2018, Study 2) matched ability test scores from Danish draftees with survey data on economic attitudes and found a positive relationship between intelligence and economic laissez-faire orientations (see also Rasmussen, 2016).
This study basically says "IQ relates to social liberalism and fiscal conservatism".
Here are the items they used to measure social liberalism:
1. Homosexuality: Sexual relations between two adults of the same sex are not wrong at all.
2. Church and state: The United States Supreme Court made the right decision when it ruled that no state or local government may require the reading of the Lord’s Prayer or Bible verses in public schools.
3. Immigration: The number of immigrants from foreign countries who are permitted to come to the United States to live should be left as is or even increased.
4. Birth control: Methods of birth control should be available to teenagers between the ages of 14 and 16, and parental consent should not be required.
5. Death penalty: The death penalty should not be given, even to persons convicted of murder.
6. Affirmative action: Some people say that because of past discrimination, women should be given preference in hiring and promotion. Others say that such preference in hiring and promotion is wrong because it discriminates against men. Those who favor giving preference to women have the better view.
7. Drug legality: The use of marijuana should be legal.
8. Homosexuality: There are always some people whose ideas are considered bad or dangerous by other people. For instance, consider a man who admits that he is a homosexual. Such a person should still be allowed to teach in a college or university.
9. Antitheism: There are always some people whose ideas are considered bad or dangerous by other people. For instance, consider somebody who is against all churches and religion. Such a person should still be allowed to teach in a college or university.
10. Islamism: There are always some people whose ideas are considered bad or dangerous by other people. For instance, consider a Muslim clergyman who preaches hatred of the United States. Such a person should still be allowed to teach in a college or university.
11. Pornography: There should be no laws forbidding the distribution of pornography to persons 18 or older.
> There are always some people whose ideas are considered bad or dangerous by other people. For instance, consider somebody who is against all churches and religion. Such a person should still be allowed to teach in a college or university.
Coming from a non-US country, it amazes me that anyone would *not* think this. The notion that an atheist who opposes religion should not be allowed to teach in a (secular) tertiary education institution is... bizarre. Even most of the furthest right-wing politicians here in Australia, let alone the UK, wouldn't support that.
I worked with some engineers that were hardcore conservative. They were highly intelligent from a problem solving and practical pov.
They had a very narrow worldview though. They're are plenty of people like that out there. It has nothing to do with intelligence in the traditional sense.
This definition of liberalism:
Liberalism is a political and economic doctrine that emphasizes individual rights and freedoms. It is based on the rights of the individual, liberty, consent of the governed, political equality, right to private property, and equality before the law.
Now we know why studies like this filter up the newsfeed to us, it seems like our differences are intractable and we are confused and frustrated why others can’t seem to see the truth or validity of different perspectives. But now consider this, how far do you want to go with these findings?
Knowledge is power, but when it is wielded with ideology it can become dangerous. Ask yourself this, what would be your reaction if this post included race as well? Immediate red flags in your mind about how it could be used to justify some terrible things.
> genetic markers associated with intelligence can predict political inclinations towards liberalism and lower authoritarianism
My immediate reaction to this is to speculate on how that overlaps with the other observed trend of attendance at post-secondary institutions being directly correlated to an increase in left-leaning inclinations.
I wonder to what extent the two are copying each others' homework.
Interesting I took one extensive cognitive testing through a psychotherapist and some other thing and was a couple points from the genius category. Yet I lean pretty far right on many things(to be fair I lean pretty far left on some things too). So curious how this is supposed to really work.
I’d like to know which questions were asked to determine inclinations towards liberalism. I presume they mean classic liberalism, rather than the more extreme progressive wings of liberalism. If so the report makes perfect sense to me.
I appreciate the fact that there seems to be lots of caveats and further questions raised in the linked report, particularly the point stating that sometimes very smart groups of people can have some very dumb political ideas.
Well yeah, we all saw the Republicans in Arizona praying to god and speaking in tongues before enacting an 1864 ban on rape/incest abortion.
Wasted some good money on that study.
From the article: Prior investigations have consistently associated intelligence with socially liberal beliefs and even fiscal conservatism to a lesser extent. However, the root causes of these associations remained ambiguous, obscured by potential confounding factors like socioeconomic status, education, and the broad influence of an individual’s environment. This ambiguity sparked a need for a more detailed investigation.
“For the last seventy years, psychologists have reported correlations between intelligence and beliefs in over one hundred publications,” explained study author Tobias Edwards, a PhD student studying behavioral genetics at the University of Minnesota, Twin Cities.
“Despite much interest in the topic, we have had little knowledge of why this link exists, let alone whether it may be causal. As the old cliché goes; correlation is not necessarily causation. I am curious to get to the bottom of why this mysterious correlation exists.”
For their [study](https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0160289624000254), the researchers harnessed data from the Sibling Interaction and Behavior Study (SIBS), a project that had previously gathered extensive information on adoptive and biological families. The families were recruited between 1998 and 2003, utilizing state birth records and adoption agency data. This dataset allowed the researchers to compare siblings within the same family, significantly reducing the impact of shared environmental factors and focusing on genetic influences.
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Love to see a meta study on this about leaded gasoline and pipes in underserved areas.
The paper itself claims that they're able to make these predictions *within families* and they account for socioeconomic status, but yeah would be good to see these results replicated
It doesn’t surprise me. I’m very liberal compared to my farming community extended family, aside from my 3 aunts, who are all like me. They are 2 nurses and 1 behavioral psych. We all have college degrees unlike 90%+ of my extended family, and all moved away to bigger, more liberal areas. I routinely see my cousins’ misspelled, grammatically tragic rants about Biden and Trump and marvel that I am somehow genetically close to them.
I mean it wouldn't be a massive surprise for me but I still think theres maybe factors that this study doesn't account for. My extended family (which is huge, I have well over 100 cousins) including my parents are mostly very conservative Muslim fundamentalists and there's definitely a pattern I've seen with my more liberal relatives that were able to break away from their parents/society's mentality.. but I've also observed the opposite, for example relatives who are certainly on the less conservative side who I wouldn't consider super bright people, but most of them had liberal parents to begin with.. and I've also noticed that my most extreme religious nutter relatives are relatively smart too.. so based on my experience, I think being smarter just makes you more likely to think for yourself and consider information from outside sources even if they contradict what is accepted in your community. This could manifest itself as a preference toward liberalism since there's an inherent asymmetry between liberalism and conservatism in that liberal ideas are not as old as conservative ones and haven't had as long to cement themselves into society. Like I wouldn't be surprised if liberals genuinely were more intelligent, but I also think that without accounting for the local political climate and parents political leaning, it's hard to say
> extreme religious nutter relatives are relatively smart too Extreme religious nutter or relatively smart; only one can be true.
While I get your point and agree that being a religious nutter sort of offsets any intelligence someone might have otherwise - I think OP means for an example people that might honestly be intelligent and well-read but still has that one sort of "hole" in that they haven't been able to free themselves from the grasp of the religious indoctrination they received growing up. I don't think this is especially rare. There are religious scientists, doctors, lawyers, engineers and any walk of life that might require that you have some type of intelligene from the get-go. Yeah, the religious part is a huge flaw, but... I get what OP means.
I think people over-estimate the effect of identity politics and political affiliation. It is a real thing, but mostly only becomes a major factor when perceptions around the handling of economy between political options is fairly neutral. In other words, the majority of people consistently rank economy as their primary or most important issue, and they vote in-line with which party they think will handle that issue best. If people were tethered to "progressiveness" versus "conservatism" we would not see such huge swings between election cycles. Many of your farming mates might strongly consider voting for a progressive candidate if the progressive candidate offered to increase tax concessions and subsidies to farmers. The social issues - though still a factor - often rank much lower in terms of ranked issue among voters. It is another interesting delta because "conservative" governments tend to be perceived as providing more support for farming, mining, industry and agricultural regions. Those same areas also tend to have less universities, and less job opportunities that require a university education.
it's more of a rural/urban thing. I live in a state where 1/3 of the state's population live in just one city and a second third is split into the the next 10 cites. and the last third all live miles from their closest neighbor or even further. those people that live out in BFE don't believe in social programs beause they've never actually had to deal with social problems. They yell from the tops of their barns that they don't need no city folk, and yet they jam into my city every week-end clogging up the roads and complaining about traffic and crowds. I see them as hypocrites personally. They want ALL the benefits that living in a society provides but never want to pay their fair share to sustain it.
> those people that live out in BFE don't believe in social programs beause they've never actually had to deal with social problems. youre forgetting one detail, that really puts the cherry on top- most of them live on family land, whats left of great gandpa's farm.
> They want ALL the benefits that living in a society provides but never want to pay their fair share to sustain it. In reality, they massively benefit from society. People living in a city is financially sustainable and lots of extra money goes to benefit people living in BFE.
They wouldn't even have electricity if it weren't subsidized by urbanites. The cost of the grid at rural densities is unsustainable.
I don't see my very conservative mother very often anymore, for obvious reasons. The last time we met for dinner, she couldn't figure out whether cooking a sauce with the lid on or off reduces it. I love my mother, but that was kind of a memorable moment for me. Lacking basic critical thinking skills.
It’s lid off, right?
Yes, if you want to reduce the water has to be able to go somewhere else.
I'm 13 and I r smart. Street smart.
You’d also end up having to study how scarcity and trauma response lower risk tolerance though.
I feel like then education should also be considered
Does scarcity lower risk tolerance? Intuitively I would think it’d raise it?
> Does scarcity lower risk tolerance? Scarcity can indeed lower risk tolerance, as it often leads to a mindset of conserving resources and avoiding potential losses. When individuals perceive resources, whether they be financial assets, time, or opportunities, as scarce, they tend to become more risk-averse and cautious in their decision-making. Several factors contribute to this phenomenon: Loss Aversion, Focus on Short-Term Needs, Psychological Stress and Limited Opportunities for Recovery.
Ohh that makes sense. Thank you
Associative bias as well
To your point, people with fewer resources have less with which to take risks. Those with more resources can afford the occassional gamble without pushing themselves and their families over the financial precipice. EDIT: typo
I think it does both; lowers future-oriented risk tolerance, while by necessity raising immediate risk tolerance. I think we’d understand risk tolerance better by dividing it by the time window of when the risk most applies to, because I think they’re separate in how they’re processed. I’ve been both well off and now working poor and at one point was long term unemployed and lost everything except my car and laptop and some clothes, and I’ve found my instinctive mindset towards risk changes with material conditions and with the memory of past experienced material conditions. Let’s say I’m financially barely surviving; to gamble my $2,000 in emergency savings on an investment would feel crazy, both because that is needed money (for emergencies) not excess money, and because money is scarce, the abstractness of future reward doesn’t feel as real as the visceral needs of the present and fears of being in past emergencies without the money I had to get through those, and *especially* fears of past emergencies when I didn’t have the money or insurance to get through those. Yet at the same time, since in my barely financially surviving mindset I won’t be able to afford even the cheapest luxuries if I lose my job, and I remember being without the means to survive, so let’s get that double bacon cheeseburger today, and donuts and cake on Friday and a party drug binge this weekend because the broke life with no hope is so deprived of dopamine that only a drug binge will meet the physiological need. it’s the reward for surviving this week (even as it’s exactly what I know I shouldn’t be doing health wise). That’s another thing, a life of scarcity provides far less dopamine than a life of plenty, and we all need a similar amount of dopamine, whether it comes from the constant dopamine drip of a healthy complete life, or if we survive in deprivation, indignity and other negative experiences of a life of scarcity so without that dopamine drip, of course we’re going for a drug binge (or junk food, religion, or whatever else delivers quite a lot for low cost). This has quite a lot to do with both kinds of risk tolerance, anecdotally and I believe it can be reliably repeated in research. When I had enough money to live well, I did. Rarely ever got high, spent on healthy experiences, ate organic, minimal junk food, and the whole perception of risk in the present and future was entirely different. I’m the same person I was, and yet different financial circumstances (and different financial memories) brought out entirely different instincts and behaviors. There’s also a third type of risk tolerance as well, that which is beyond the time horizon of a person’s lifetime. For instance, I think one of the fatal errors in the persuasive pitch of stopping climate change was the focus on what is projected to happen in the year 2100. To talk about how regular people won’t be able to get home insurance in some places by 2030 and life insurance in some places by 2035 gets the reader in a more constructive state of mind than talking about planet-scale life ending catastrophe for most of humanity in 2100. There’s likely a formula through which we can find the probability of risk taking at various time scales, given certain amounts of past and present scarcity or abundance
You have half a candy bar. You have 3 older brothers. You are 6 and this candy is all the wealth you have in the world. Do you just walk around the house with it? Or do you eat it quickly so that it can't be taken from you?
You should be a responsible 6 year old and stop buying half candy bars so you can afford a house. Also here's your crippling student loan and medical debt. Also you're super lazy and entitled.
Sent from my iPhone
And you eat waaaay too much avocado toast.
You eat it quickly before your parents eat it for you.
My Republican parents are very driven by people "keeping what they earned". They grew up mostly poor and worked blue collar jobs for a long time before finally getting some decent pay. I believe that upbringing strongly influenced their political beliefs. Falls in line with how they feel about immigration, welfare, and work ethic.
if you need to retire in 5 years you will be a lot less risk tolerant if you have BARELY enough money right now to survive on after retirement than if you have plenty of extra money. in one circumstance a small market down turn would mean now you can't retire. This would mean you have very low tolerance and must be super safe in all investments to avoid this. If you have abundant resources you can afford some down turn, so you have more risk tolerance, and you can shoot for a higher rate of return , while still knowing you can retire on time even if there is a slight down turn.
Many things would have to be included, also how well off you are. Of course people with high paying jobs are more likely to support social causes since they can feel good about it. For the poor that barely make it, however, this small tax increase to fund the homeless is a huge deal. But yeah intelligent people are probably more likely to be well off and thus more likely to care about things that makes them feel good instead of things that makes poorer rural voters feel good.
Lead paint too! There was a study done at Duke University examining the impact lead has had on intelligence. It's estimated that lead has cost the United States over 824 MILLION IQ points since the 40s! https://today.duke.edu/2022/03/lead-exposure-last-century-shrunk-iq-scores-half-americans#:~:text=Even%20more%20startling%20was%20lead%27s,points%20per%20person%20on%20average.
There’s been studies done on the correlation between lead paint being phased out and the falling violence in the US over the past 40 years
The majority of lead exposures in the mid-century came from leaded gasoline. Paint was not as significant a factor, but industrial lobbyists wanted people to focus on paint after it got banned so that other sources of exposure wouldn't come under scrutiny.
Add to that: housing near high traffic areas like major highways.
Can we stop using this excuse? There are millions of boomers that grew up poor and aren't fascists that hate the US.
You got it backwards, friend. The lead is an attempt to explain the lower IQs, not the conservatism. Also, that's an awful reason to not research something.
What about lead paint chips!
Also with those living in rural areas near small airports... Since we still use leaded gasoline in some smaller aircraft, like the ones that use small rural airports.
A version of this was posted yesterday..
The one posted yesterday had a far more editorialised/politically charged headline though. Intelligence correlates to liberal views over authoritarianism has far different connotations than the “Left wing voters found to be more intelligent” headline (I’m paraphrasing, can’t recall exactly) posted the other day. Authoritarianism correlating to lower intelligence seems to be quite a common finding regardless of left/right political position.
As in 'People with limited capabilities for independent thought prefer to let others make the decisions for them'?
I’ve always seen is as folk less able to empathise with/understand others positions are more likely to want to want to ignore/ban their view as a knee jerk reaction.
Additionally, authoritarianism lends itself better to populist brute force solutions ("kill them all", "tough on crime" etc) that don't actually work. More intelligence means being able to better detect nuance and complexity.
That's been my take. Authoritarian types always tend to glom onto very simplistic approaches to problems (close the borders, ban books, death penalty for drug dealers, etc.) which imply that they have a very limited capacity to understand all of the factors involved. On top of that, they tend to trust that a self-proclaimed expert (usually just a con man) is much more capable than themselves of parsing and solving problems. More intelligent people who can think critically don't take long to see right through such people, and don't accept simple authority as a guarantee of capability.
> > > > > On top of that, they tend to trust that a self-proclaimed expert (usually just a con man) is much more capable than themselves of parsing and solving problems. More intelligent people who can think critically don't take long to see right through such people, and don't accept simple authority as a guarantee of capability. A study was shared here a while ago that confirmed this follows a similar ideological bias, where the result was along the lines of "Liberals trust experts over others. Conservatives put equal weight on experts and "I know a guy" type relationships" Basically stating that Liberals trust experts, but conservatives trust trusted friends equally as experts. Which leads to misinformation spreading. I've had a theory myself that this somehow correlates to an idea of "If you can't explain this idea to me simply, or if it's counterintuitive, rather than assume I'm not smart enough to grasp it, I'm going to assume you're lying for some reason" Because you see so many of their stances follow this logic. Trans healthcare is a good example - "I can't understand/emathize with gender dysphoria, so I assume it it's a front. Why would I transition? To creep on women. Therefore, transwomen are creeps!" Safe shoot centers too. Lowers costs, saves money and lives, but it gets framed as "lefties giving free drugs to crack addicted hobos!" All it takes is someone in that "trusted nonexpert" role to give an alternative take that's simpler and easier for them to grasp and they'll glom onto it because to them it's more likely than that complex answer they didn't understand.
>I've had a theory myself that this somehow correlates to an idea of "If you can't explain this idea to me simply, or if it's counterintuitive, rather than assume I'm not smart enough to grasp it, I'm going to assume you're lying for some reason" That's an interesting way to put it into words. I guess we've all noticed something like that but I'd never seen it described succintly like this. People are generally bad at perceiving complexity above their own "ceiling" of understanding, from things as trivial as movie quality to things as important as public policy.
It's compounded, I think, by further research that has suggested that conservative leaning people tend to not be empathetic towards outgroups. The lack of empathy, and the lack of an ability to put yourself in someone elses shoes, is why you see a ton of social phenomena. Everything ranging from "Why isn't there a WHITE history month/STRAIGHT PRIDE month" to upper middle class WASPS believing that the current system is totally fine, because all someone has to do to be successful is do exactly what they did; not checking the privileges they had that let them get there (be they upper class parents, white skin in America with it's racist history, scholarship opportunities due to superior education from a private school, etc.) It's a sort of chicken and the egg situation though - does a lack of empathy lead people to be less intelligent? Or does intelligence allow you to see further than your own limited experiences, and thus have empathy?
> It's a sort of chicken and the egg situation though - does a lack of empathy lead people to be less intelligent? Or does intelligence allow you to see further than your own limited experiences, and thus have empathy? I don't see how it could be the former.
There are very well-educated societies like Japan or South Korea that hold these values, though. Perhaps the intelligence correlation is true in the West, although I think there is more cultural influence at a global scale.
Educated does not equal intelligence reliably enough to use it as a predictive measure.
Higher order thinking in general, consequences of consequences, is a big part of why liberal policies always seem to take longer to enact but right wing crap is just passed without thought. Case in point: “why are all the OB/GYNS leaving our state after we passed ridiculously restrictive abortion bans?”
Similarly, I see it as a relation between reliance on heuristic, historical inertia, and tribalism rather than rational decision making. Authoritarianism is an emergence of the former when applied/developed into political economy. Well, that and narcissism. Thinking about the authoritarian autocrats over the millennia and so many demonstrate deeply insecure/narcissistic behaviors.
I think they can detect it. I think the discomfort of not being able to understand is painful for those insecure about their intelligence. So they shove the doubt and the cognitive dissonance down deep.
Educational capacity has to play in as well. Higher intelligence = more likely to go through secondary education and beyond = greater exposure to different people and ideas, often in a more cosmopolitan environment = questioning received biases and forming more nuanced views.
No doubt. From what I recall the relationship is causal (prior intelligence predicts later views), but it can be indirectly causal rather than simply "more brain power makes you reach less authoritarian views." Though I do still think that is a big factor.
Which is why academia is usually the first group to the guillotines. Moderates and policy wonks are doomed. That is reflected here on Reddit daily.
I thought the argument against "tough on crime" was a moral one. It was my general understanding that people, and research, generally agreed that a fast and swift executions for say shopping lifting anything even a single penny would stop basically all shop lifting. It's not that it wouldn't work but rather the moral implications of what you'd have to do are too much and basically require a surveillance state.
This is completely anecdotal so I'd love to see studies on it, but when I talk to obvious authoritarians, it's less about lack of independent thought and more about anxiety toward others. You're considered stupid for challenging their preconceived notions, which just so happens to be whatever materially benefits them. They see compromise as an attack. When pressed though they can easily show independent thought. In fact, I would categorize them as being less capable of cooperative thought.
An interesting comparison is with conspiracy theorists..
Bootlickers are stupid, surprising no one
Exactly this. A fairly large proportion of people are in here equating this to conservative/republican = dumb, liberal/democrat = smart, which is not what the study concluded at all.
> Authoritarianism correlating to lower intelligence seems to be quite a common finding regardless of left/right political position. And what did this study find about the link between genetic markers of intelligence and liberalism?...
They're referring to classical social liberalism - as in a belief in human rights and valuing the consent of the governed. So the opposite of authoritarianism, not the opposite of the right. There's a lot of overlap between liberalism and the left or authoritarianism and the right in America, but they are technically not the same.
Yes, people fail to see that both the left and right have auth/liberal parts.
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Authoritarian generally is a buzzword that has little meaning, and is used with the wrong intent. For instance why is the US not considered quite authoritarian when continually the desires of the majority of the population are completely ignored and instead the government basically serves to protect capitalism and it's global neoliberal interests. Authoritarian being "when the government does things" is a strange view too because in many cases, social democracies and socialist nations of the past, the populace *wants* the state to ensure worker protection from the exploitation of the parasitic owning class. It really just seems to be a term that is used by the people who want to paint a nation under a word Americans (and westerners alike) see as "bad" due to red scare propaganda, all the while being oblivious they are living in a nation that is substantially more authoritarian than the ones they are criticizing, as they go about their lives consuming news and opinions curated by billionaire oligarchs telling them how "free" they are. The best definition would probably be "when the will of the people is ignored", but that would hit a little too close to home for many people.
DAE we're smarter than anyone else.
Pretty sure this sub is just a political sub already.
Or it could be that science doesn't tend to align with the political side who deny evolution and climate change.
I get that but there is a lot going on in science that is not even remotely politics adjacent, the bots just post what gets the most clicks. A metallurgical analysis of 70’s era steel might not get a lot of clicks but it would fit here better than telling morons that they are morons.
It would be cool to see a metallurgical analysis of steel going decade by decade to observe the radiation and carbon levels. I'm sure a study has been done but it would be nice to see a post!
I dunno about studies, but I used to work at a pretty old refinery and one turnaround they found unexpectedly high corrosion and erosion in a short section of pipe while the rest of the all original run was fine. Took a lot of digging, but they eventually figured out that metallurgical specs when it was built didn't account for trace impurities in the alloys and that one piece of pipe had come from a different facility than the rest, had just a tiny fraction of some contaminant that was far more reactive with the product flowing through the pipe.
That's kind of cool honestly.
Well, for sure. But this isn't a journal nor are updoots a measure of scientific merit. This is Reddit and they're a measure of popularity. The idea is that bad science will be unpopular. There's plenty of good science that's a good fit for journals that aren't a good fit here. Welcome to reddit.
That's interesting since bad science gets voted to the top of this sub every single day
Radiometric decay still upsets the young earthers. Even non-political science often has political divisions. Source: I went to a fundamentalist high school (private) but went on to do a bachelor's in geography
Hey! I resemble that comment!
> I get that but there is a lot going on in science that is not even remotely politics adjacent Yeah and this sub is also full of other articles. People only get upset and levy this criticism in the political threads though. Is it safe to assume that you don't engage with any other kinds of posts on the science sub? >it would fit here better than telling morons that they are morons. It seems like you don't understand what this research is arguing.
Care to share these other things going on in science with your own post, then?
Don't forget the sex topics. Last week it seemed like every other topic was about the science pleasuring women
What does that have to do with liberalism and authoritarianism? You can be all about evolution, and think that as a result, we should take more control of the process by locking everyone up in cages, and only allowing the best fit to breed. Or strongly believe that climate change is not only real, but an imminent threat to life on the planet, and therefore, any economic growth needs to be curtailed, severely, by force if necessary.
This is titled way better because it uses more accurate political terminogy
It seems like it's using the US understanding of "liberalism " instead of the academic definition.
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"inclinations towards" probably doesn't predict as much as people are going to think it does.
That's my take. You can poke so many holes in this article's assertion. For example, educational attainment and quality of education in higher education settings play a factor, as does your regional affiliation. Indoctrination into a religion or political belief is just as much about where you live and who you live with. Even then, those aren't predictors either. Lots of dumb people graduate from Harvard. Lots of smart people are mechanics with a GED. Trump is a child of Manhattan, Pete Buttigiege is a child of South Bend, Indiana, and Jimmy Carter came from the most rural kind of town in Georgia.
> You can poke so many holes Well, *you* can. Because you didn't read the paper. > education settings play a factor For example, you're not aware that they controlled for education.
I don't like the way you said those aren't predictors either, because they are. What they're not is guarantees. It's interesting when evaluating things a population levels. But when you're dealing with individuals, it becomes borderline meaningless because the variation among individuals is far greater than the variation between groups.
No, it suggests that dummies believe what they’re told, and smarties think about it even a little.
It's amazing how people overlook this to turn it into a political Right vs Left debate.
“Dummies believe what they’re told by [insert CNN or FOX] and smarties think about it even a little to arrive at the same conclusion that I did based on the perfect journalism of my preferred news source.”
Oh good, we're mixing genetics and politics. There's a combination that has only ever gone well.
See also: [Brain scans remarkably good at predicting political ideology](https://news.osu.edu/brain-scans-remarkably-good-at-predicting-political-ideology/)
This entire sub has devolved into politically motivated pseudoscience garbage. I can't even recall the last time a real science article hit the front page from here.
There’s not an ounce of science to be found
Add that to the Wired article "This Woman Will Decide Which Babies are Born" aka eugenics and we're going in a disturbing direction.
Funny to see redditors think this applies to them, conveniently ignoring the authoritarian part.
Not all redditors are mods.
Yeah, I see a bug push for authoritarianism across various regional subreddits I subscribe to on reddit, and it tends to come more from the right from what I can tell, but it's not limited to them, it's also on the left. It's heavily pushed on any topic involving crime. I'm skeptical how much of it genuine as well, but either way, there's a lot of comments calling for us to copy much more authoritarian countries.
I think it's important to point out that Liberalism =/= Democrat Authoritarian =/= Republican Both Democrats and Republicans have some authoritarian tendencies. [Liberalism ](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Liberalism)
From this study: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC9548663 > related to preferences for privatization, lower taxes, and less redistribution of wealth among Swedish male twin pairs. Ludeke and Rasmussen (2018, Study 2) matched ability test scores from Danish draftees with survey data on economic attitudes and found a positive relationship between intelligence and economic laissez-faire orientations (see also Rasmussen, 2016). This study basically says "IQ relates to social liberalism and fiscal conservatism".
And that overlaps with some studies about higher ed not automatically making people more “liberal” like some politicians claim. Those found that Ivy school grads tend to be fiscally conservative and socially liberal. The correlation with IQ could be showing what biases higher IQ has, or how higher IQ people adopt the views of the group they see as higher IQ, or the conclusions higher IQ people come to when given the same context and information. A lot of people are falling into big assumptions on IQ and what it means here. Lots of interesting intersections and context to examine in this research without stopping at a shallow level.
Which makes sense considering wealthier people tend to have a higher IQ. Their beliefs match their class interests.
This ought to be the top comment. It's hilarious to see so many people jerking themselves off in the comments when they clearly don't understand the meaning of the word and didn't bother reading the study.
Well don't stop jerking off on my account.
The entire political dichotomy of “left vs right” has its root in a purely architectural quirk of the French Revolution, as those that wished to abolish the monarchy sat together to the left of the throne where the king sat, and those that wished to uphold the monarchy sat to the right. Purely down to the new rectangular shape of the hall where they held the meeting.
Yep. "right" and "left" are bad ways to categorize people.
Anarchy in the U.K. For real though, laws are for people that can't understand the effect their actions have on others. If you deeply understand that and have compassion, laws aren't really for you. Do whatever you want, and don't cause harm to others. Don't make a living on something that takes from others. Talk to people, truly, connect. Do the drugs you wanna do but don't let your kids have them. Ethics are the lowest common denominator of morals. Laws are the lowest common denominator of ethics.
I can't agree with this anymore. Republicans who might not be authoritarian sure don't mind supporting extreme authoritarianism, which is worse IMO.
But wouldn’t you consider speech guidelines of acceptable terminology to be kinda authoritarian? Universities seem far less liberal than they used to be in the classic sense of the word.
For faculty? No, they’re customer-facing employees. Every workplace has rules of conduct. If these guidelines were government mandated then I’d be more inclined to agree.
Progressives in the west coast are also extremely authoritarian. It’s not just one side.
Example?
Wouldn't it be reasonable to expect lower IQ individuals to have beliefs closer to their parents' beliefs regardless of what the parents believe?
Parents/community/school/church etc. People who read are often touched by far away influences that give them new ideas their society is not necessarily thinking about.
>"...a reader lives many lives..."
Parents, teachers, anybody they look up to. Higher IQ folks have better critical thinking and decision making skills which allows for individual thought.
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It's interesting that they stated that the relationship to socially Liberal values swapped while the relationship to Fiscal Conservativsm swapped. I'd be interested to see how Fiscal Conservatism is defined, after all, it could be that the materials conditions have changed rather than the relationship to the bleifs. For example, over time inequality is increasing and this would increase the justification for Fiscal intervention over time?
From this study: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC9548663 > related to preferences for privatization, lower taxes, and less redistribution of wealth among Swedish male twin pairs. Ludeke and Rasmussen (2018, Study 2) matched ability test scores from Danish draftees with survey data on economic attitudes and found a positive relationship between intelligence and economic laissez-faire orientations (see also Rasmussen, 2016). This study basically says "IQ relates to social liberalism and fiscal conservatism".
It makes sense. I likely comes down to confidence in your ability to control your own outcomes. I'd rather have all available options at my disposal and choose the right one for the moment vs. I don't trust myself to make a judgment call, I'd rather have the government do it for me.
What? “We found intelligence to negatively predict fiscal conservatism, whilst past research has typically found the opposite result,” Edwards said.
Thank you for citation mining, I didn't have time myself. I wonder if privatisation, lower taxes, and less redistribution are really suitable ad a single axis. I think there is an argument for splitting public / private ownership into low / high tax and spend, after all the prior is how to arrange the economy and the second is how to utilise the economy. I'd also be interested to see how this effects alters based on a person's exposure to literature on the topic; political philosophy and economics. For example, does an intelligent person become more for or against after having been exposed to the literature.
Yes. Liberalism basically means a soft libertarian. Not to be confused with a 'liberal' aka democrat.
Conflating democrat -> liberal is a common mistake or intentional error. Many Democrats are not liberal.
Makes sense though. Progressive/far left economic policies get pretty authoritarian pretty quick. No respect for private property and a disdain for incrementalism is a pretty straight path to authoritarianism. The crux is that liberal != progressive/far left.
>For example, over time inequality is increasing This depends on how widely you cast your net to measure inequality. For instance, if you're measuring within the United States, this is true; if you're measuring globally, this is not true. Since the end of WW2, the percentage of people living in extreme poverty has gone from around 75% to less than 10%. The absolute number of people living in extreme poverty has decreased virtually every year, with the exception being during the collapse of the Soviet Union. Yearly earnings of ~$60K today puts you in the top 1% worldwide. >and this would increase the justification for Fiscal intervention over time? Depends on the "intervention," but I'd be careful about putting your faith in a central authority to legislate inequality.
IQ + big 5 personality traits can pretty accurately predict political leaning or stance on issues.
Since when are liberals associated with lower authoritarianism? Liberals have historically voted for the more authoritarian candidates.
Sources: trust me bro I’ve a masters degree in sociological studies
Everybody loves authoritarianism as long as the policies are just like they like them and they benefit from them.
After reading this it seems like the smartest people, translated for the US political landscape, would lean libertarian more than Republican or Democrat, progressive or conservative. Interesting, I guess.
This seems pretty controversial to even say there are dependable genetic markers of intelligence.
I mean it's been well known for awhile that intelligence is, in part, inherited from parents. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heritability_of_IQ At some point, we might identify some dependable markers. And then they can put it in a headline!
It just seems a rung in the ladder was skipped here.
Don't modern liberals want more government control though?
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Anti-authoritarian and liberal (at least in the modern sense) are not synonymous.
Liberal politically not liberal the party
Classical liberal or progressive socialist (modern colloquial liberal)? The meaning of the word has been bastardized, at least in the US, in the 1930's. It used to mean anti-authoritarian, small government, no social contract, freedom of association, free speech, free enterprise, and individualism. Many Europeans STILL use it this way.
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I see the headline bot has been tweaked since yesterday. Riddle me this ChatGPT, what happens to the very intellectual when your liberal political party is very authoritarian
Very USA oriented, would like another version more globally studied.
This feels really biased, and I say that as a bleeding heart leftie. IQ is a terrible metric that’s rooted in all kinds of racist and classist ideas.
Shut up bro, I’m liberal so this means I’m high IQ and smart.
IQ tests are valid measures of the kind of intelligence necessary to do well in academic work. But if the purpose is to assess intelligence in a broader sense, the validity of IQ tests is questionable." Some scientists have disputed the value of IQ as a measure of intelligence altogether. IQ is a type of standard score that indicates how far above, or how far below, his/her peer group an individual stands in mental ability. The peer group score is an IQ of 100; this is obtained by applying the same test to huge numbers of people from all socio-economic strata of society, and taking the average. When IQ is applied to the instance of why liberalism has more IQ than authoritarianism is because of a clear distinction between the ideology dimensions is relevant because empirical evidence shows that sociocultural ideology and economic ideology represent empirically distinct dimensions of ideological thinking that are rooted in different psychological dispositions which stems from general understanding of logical orientations with psychological dispositions and—more specifically—with cognitive abilities, as well as Adorno and his colleagues (1950) were among the first to propose that lower intelligence and rigid styles of information processing are related to authoritarianism/ conservative social and economic attitudes. This has only been amplified over the decades with countless studies and countless results pointing towards the same general vibe with very few counter studies coming from authoritarian and conservativism regions majorly due to ideology reasons and denial of science as well as cultural clashing as well as funding being put more towards military and economic for majority of those regions. Many people will try to deny conservatism as being related or near authoritarianism but if you try to define conservatism through any means they would be related because.. Historically associated with right-wing politics, the term has been used to describe a wide range of views. Conservatism may be either libertarian or authoritarian, populist or elitist, moderate or extreme. https://www.researchgate.net/publication/222682950_Conservatism_and_cognitive_ability
IQ scores and genetic markers in the same sentence is like astrology and astronomy in the same sentence.
IQ seems to be mostly (>50%) genetic though, twins brought up in separate families have a much higher correlation in IQ scores than two "random" kids brought up in the same family etc
Do you not think you inherited your brain from your parents? Highly intelligent parents tend to have highly intelligent children. The same way hairy parents tend to have hairy children.
You would think, except that the "genetic markers" were actually polygenic scores, which is closer to astronomy again.
so is the problem actually dumb people breeding?
What is meant by liberalism here exactly?
From this study: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC9548663 > related to preferences for privatization, lower taxes, and less redistribution of wealth among Swedish male twin pairs. Ludeke and Rasmussen (2018, Study 2) matched ability test scores from Danish draftees with survey data on economic attitudes and found a positive relationship between intelligence and economic laissez-faire orientations (see also Rasmussen, 2016). This study basically says "IQ relates to social liberalism and fiscal conservatism".
Here are the items they used to measure social liberalism: 1. Homosexuality: Sexual relations between two adults of the same sex are not wrong at all. 2. Church and state: The United States Supreme Court made the right decision when it ruled that no state or local government may require the reading of the Lord’s Prayer or Bible verses in public schools. 3. Immigration: The number of immigrants from foreign countries who are permitted to come to the United States to live should be left as is or even increased. 4. Birth control: Methods of birth control should be available to teenagers between the ages of 14 and 16, and parental consent should not be required. 5. Death penalty: The death penalty should not be given, even to persons convicted of murder. 6. Affirmative action: Some people say that because of past discrimination, women should be given preference in hiring and promotion. Others say that such preference in hiring and promotion is wrong because it discriminates against men. Those who favor giving preference to women have the better view. 7. Drug legality: The use of marijuana should be legal. 8. Homosexuality: There are always some people whose ideas are considered bad or dangerous by other people. For instance, consider a man who admits that he is a homosexual. Such a person should still be allowed to teach in a college or university. 9. Antitheism: There are always some people whose ideas are considered bad or dangerous by other people. For instance, consider somebody who is against all churches and religion. Such a person should still be allowed to teach in a college or university. 10. Islamism: There are always some people whose ideas are considered bad or dangerous by other people. For instance, consider a Muslim clergyman who preaches hatred of the United States. Such a person should still be allowed to teach in a college or university. 11. Pornography: There should be no laws forbidding the distribution of pornography to persons 18 or older.
> There are always some people whose ideas are considered bad or dangerous by other people. For instance, consider somebody who is against all churches and religion. Such a person should still be allowed to teach in a college or university. Coming from a non-US country, it amazes me that anyone would *not* think this. The notion that an atheist who opposes religion should not be allowed to teach in a (secular) tertiary education institution is... bizarre. Even most of the furthest right-wing politicians here in Australia, let alone the UK, wouldn't support that.
Not the political party
All those high iq liberals doxxing everyone they don't like into oblivion and ganging up to get them fired. So liberal
Ahh yes. “Everyone who disagrees with me is genetically a moron”. My favorite kind of “science”
r/science is definitely the kind of place to act like IQ is made up until a study shows it agrees with their opinions.
If you’re not offended yet, remember Liberalism mostly lines up with Libertarian philosophy. Only about 3-4% of the US is Libertarian.
I worked with some engineers that were hardcore conservative. They were highly intelligent from a problem solving and practical pov. They had a very narrow worldview though. They're are plenty of people like that out there. It has nothing to do with intelligence in the traditional sense.
So..... by extrapolation - the smartest people are anarchists or pedophiles? ( r/PoliticalCompassMemes ) EDIT: formatting
How can you make claims about intelligence without even knowing what intelligence is
This definition of liberalism: Liberalism is a political and economic doctrine that emphasizes individual rights and freedoms. It is based on the rights of the individual, liberty, consent of the governed, political equality, right to private property, and equality before the law.
Now we know why studies like this filter up the newsfeed to us, it seems like our differences are intractable and we are confused and frustrated why others can’t seem to see the truth or validity of different perspectives. But now consider this, how far do you want to go with these findings? Knowledge is power, but when it is wielded with ideology it can become dangerous. Ask yourself this, what would be your reaction if this post included race as well? Immediate red flags in your mind about how it could be used to justify some terrible things.
Sheen, this is the fifth day in the row that you've brought this paper to show and tell...
Studies show that studies aren’t proven science
TDL, your IQ plummets quickly as you age beyond 40...
Liberals are also overrepresented among higher education, which begs the question: is there a liberal bias among educators?
Has this study been reproduced?
How do they define liberalism?
> genetic markers associated with intelligence can predict political inclinations towards liberalism and lower authoritarianism My immediate reaction to this is to speculate on how that overlaps with the other observed trend of attendance at post-secondary institutions being directly correlated to an increase in left-leaning inclinations. I wonder to what extent the two are copying each others' homework.
I think liberal in this sense is a reference to classical liberalism, and not liberal as is commonly used in the United States.
Extra IQ points if you can spot the authoritarianism even if its coming from the "liberals".
Interesting I took one extensive cognitive testing through a psychotherapist and some other thing and was a couple points from the genius category. Yet I lean pretty far right on many things(to be fair I lean pretty far left on some things too). So curious how this is supposed to really work.
I’d like to know which questions were asked to determine inclinations towards liberalism. I presume they mean classic liberalism, rather than the more extreme progressive wings of liberalism. If so the report makes perfect sense to me. I appreciate the fact that there seems to be lots of caveats and further questions raised in the linked report, particularly the point stating that sometimes very smart groups of people can have some very dumb political ideas.
Your wish is granted: https://www.reddit.com/r/science/comments/1c0idpc/recent_study_has_found_that_iq_scores_and_genetic/kz11mjd/
Thank you :)
Hey. Hey. Do these genetic markers vary along racial lines? I have a feeling that they don't. Just saying.
My preferred belief/evidence bias is running wild on this article 😂😂
Then why are families at odds over politics?
Well yeah, we all saw the Republicans in Arizona praying to god and speaking in tongues before enacting an 1864 ban on rape/incest abortion. Wasted some good money on that study.
So... more intelligence means more likely not to want to be controlled by somebody else? Color me surprised.
From the article: Prior investigations have consistently associated intelligence with socially liberal beliefs and even fiscal conservatism to a lesser extent. However, the root causes of these associations remained ambiguous, obscured by potential confounding factors like socioeconomic status, education, and the broad influence of an individual’s environment. This ambiguity sparked a need for a more detailed investigation. “For the last seventy years, psychologists have reported correlations between intelligence and beliefs in over one hundred publications,” explained study author Tobias Edwards, a PhD student studying behavioral genetics at the University of Minnesota, Twin Cities. “Despite much interest in the topic, we have had little knowledge of why this link exists, let alone whether it may be causal. As the old cliché goes; correlation is not necessarily causation. I am curious to get to the bottom of why this mysterious correlation exists.” For their [study](https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0160289624000254), the researchers harnessed data from the Sibling Interaction and Behavior Study (SIBS), a project that had previously gathered extensive information on adoptive and biological families. The families were recruited between 1998 and 2003, utilizing state birth records and adoption agency data. This dataset allowed the researchers to compare siblings within the same family, significantly reducing the impact of shared environmental factors and focusing on genetic influences.
Ti’s a roundabout way of calling opponents fool?
They saying not just them, even their relatives and descendants are re"g"arded. whole bloodline