[News] Liberals and Atheists Smarter? Intelligent People Have Values Novel in Human Evolutio

[Moontanman]

Liberals and Atheists Smarter? Intelligent People Have Values Novel in Human Evolutionary History, Study Finds

 

ScienceDaily (Feb. 24, 2010) — More intelligent people are statistically significantly more likely to exhibit social values and religious and political preferences that are novel to the human species in evolutionary history. Specifically, liberalism and atheism, and for men (but not women), preference for sexual exclusivity correlate with higher intelligence, a new study finds.

 

Liberals and atheists smarter? Intelligent people have values novel in human evolutionary history, study finds

[Pyrotex]

Well, that was an interesting article. The only datapoint I have is, of course, my own life. My IQ as measured in the 7th and 9th grades was rather high -- say about the uppermost 1%. And even at the age of 14 I began to question religion, god, and the "normal" opinions that everybody was "supposed to have". Like racism, for example. I habitually tested everything against the touchstone of reason, and even the most common "common sense" I rejected if it failed the tests. So I grew up an atheist and with strong liberal leanings in matters of social and civil rights.

[maikeru]

Neo-cons aren't gonna like this.

[Donk]

Speaking as a liberal-leaning almost-genius, I like these findings! :)

 

But to be fair, the same study could also lead to this conclusion:

 

The higher your IQ, the more likely you are to question the dominant mindset of your society.

 

Doesn't make nearly as good a headline, but if the research had been conducted in a liberal-leaning society, would the results have been reversed?

[CraigD]

Neo-cons aren't gonna like this.

Especially these hard statistical results, from the article:

Data from the National Longitudinal Study of Adolescent Health (Add Health) support Kanazawa's hypothesis. Young adults who subjectively identify themselves as "very liberal" have an average IQ of 106 during adolescence while those who identify themselves as "very conservative" have an average IQ of 95 during adolescence.

...

Young adults who identify themselves as "not at all religious" have an average IQ of 103 during adolescence, while those who identify themselves as "very religious" have an average IQ of 97 during adolescence.

The most interesting idea I found in the article, though, is this definition of the ubiquitous and controversial terms conservative and liberal:

In the current study, Kanazawa argues that humans are evolutionarily designed to be conservative, caring mostly about their family and friends, and being liberal, caring about an indefinite number of genetically unrelated strangers they never meet or interact with, is evolutionarily novel.

This strikes me intuitively as true, and perhaps more relevant than the “Conservatives have the Strict Father model, liberals have the Nurturant Parent model.