How is that for a provocative, comment-inducing article title? That’s a new piece in Intelligence by Noah Carl, the abstract is this:
It is well known that individuals with so-called liberal or leftist views are overrepresented in American academia. By bringing together data on American academics, the general population and a high-IQ population, the present study investigates how much of this overrepresentation can be explained by intelligence. It finds that intelligence can account for most of the disparity between academics and the general population on the issues of abortion, homosexuality and traditional gender roles. By contrast, it finds that intelligence cannot account for any of the disparity between academics and the general population on the issue of income inequality. But for methodological reasons, this finding is tentative. Furthermore, the paper finds that intelligence may account for less than half of the disparity on liberal versus conservative ideology, and much less than half the disparity on Democrat versus Republican identity. Following the analysis, eight alternative explanations for liberal and leftist overrepresentation are reviewed.
Do please note that the “intelligent” point of view need not be the correct one, it is simply the view held by individuals who measure as intelligent.
Most of all, modern America has a not-very-self-aware academic culture, which is far more insular than it likes to believe. A good deal of what American academics believe springs from their culture, not from their intelligence per se.
For the pointer I thank Daniel B. Klein.
So far my go-to academic on the science of liberals vs. conservative has been Jonathan Haitd (he used to be at UVA but has since moved to NYU). This article talks about him tackling the disparity in academia: http://theweek.com/articles/441474/how-academias-liberal-bias-killing-social-science But more-so his book “Righteous mind” lays out a very elegant model of fleshing out just was a liberal, conservative, or even libertarian is. Its truly some brilliant work.
As a social psychologist he gets off a few jokes on economists in there, but I thinks its all in good fun.
Liberals are smarter. They know things the rest of us can’t fathom. As in Caitlin Jenner is a woman and Obama is a successful president.
That sort of sentiment is actually what prompted Haidt to develop Moral Foundation Theory, he was tired of seeing lazy rationalizations like that among other social psychologists, and realized political considerations created a divergence in human psychology from other fields such as animal psychology and evolutionary psychology.
In his model, there is no link between politics and intelligence, but rather each foundation is really just a heuristic we use to reason with in a world with too much information. Each foundation has an evolutionary purpose. In conservatives (and moreso in traditional societies) you need to use all six moral foundations. In western societies the living standard is better and we can get away with shedding some of these, liberals tend to get away with using only three. Libertarians, even fewer, they lean more on just two foundations.
I think it goes without saying that any disparity in the representation in professions between demographics is ipso facto evidence of unfair discrimination.
Systematic political bias pervades our institutions, creating an unlevel playing field in life
The same sort of disparity can be seen in many occupations, for example most military officers, bankers and CEOs are Republicans.
“for example most military officers, bankers and CEOs are Republicans.”
Evidence?
OK, we can start drafting progressives into the military.
Yes, they tend to respect authority, order, and tradition, and be more religious, gullible, conspiracy oriented, and closed from personality tests, though there is significant overlap.
and be more religious, gullible, conspiracy oriented –
So, Oliver Stone, Michael Moore, James Fetzer, and the Christic Institute were just in everyone’s imagination. Thanks for the education.
Lord, some of what you just wrote is bullshit.
Suddenly the comment pages of a dozen Leftist media outlets are converted to the validity of IQ tests.
IQ tests are meaningful when it is convenient, like science in general
Really? Can you link to one?
I was gonna go the other way and say IQ’s just a social construct, anyway!
Yes, because genes don’t contribute anything at all… or except to morphology, but intelligence is strangely immune to being inherited.
IQ and intelligence aren’t one and the same thing.
White people in higher average IQ states like Massachusetts tend to be more liberal, so it’s probably true to some extent.
I think Massachusetts is an outlier since it is seriously dominated by It’s larger city, economic powerhouse and capital Boston. We know cities tend to be more liberal to begin with but on top of that Boston has 2 of the top universities in the world (MIT and Harvard) and several other notable universities. Massachusetts also has an unfortunate combination of high bureaucracy and low transparency which makes it more technocratic than democratic relying on expert opinions usually from high profile academics in the neighborhood ala Elizabeth Warren types.
When John Kerry jumps on a plane the collective IQ of the Hub City takes a dive.
Again, I know of an arts and sciences faculty that has not a single identifiable Republican among the tenured faculty in four of its six social science departments. The fifth department has one man (whose research is dedicated to making the case for open borders). The tenured faculty sixth department actually is about 1/3 Republican. It is interesting that all five registered Republicans in that department are over 60.
This does raise the question of how much of this is the intelligent leaving the GOP. It wasn’t always the know nothing party.
An adherent of the party responsible for the ruin of inner-city education, the ruin of inner-city law enforcement, the ruin of civil service examinations, the introduction of racial-patronage-uber-alles into higher education, not to mention the reflexive repair to babble about ineffectual harassment of gun owners as a response to crime and dimwitted collective security babble in response to external enemies is accusing someone else of being a know-nothing. Thanks for the laugh.
I would like to see you try to substantiate any single one of the claims you just made.
The academics that I know well have had a life path of school, followed by more school, followed by more school with a capstone of teaching school (at some very well respected institutions I might add). They are all liberal.
The small business owners I know well have struggled, working multiple jobs and weathering severe downturns before finding a niche that lends them some stability. They are mostly conservative.
It would be a tough sell to convince me that the academic group is “smarter” than the small business group, even if the academic group is certain of it.
My experiences suggest that Tyler’s comments on the piece are accurate.
From the point of view of foreigners or foreign-born academics, I think most conservative stand points sound just outright bizarre or stupid (guns, going to church, etc), so much that, it is really hard to take them seriously. There are lots of foreigners in academia, and in some departments, it is more than 50%.
Don’t worry, American conservatives take themselves so seriously that they have no problems dismissing any outside opinions.
” take themselves so seriously that they have no problems dismissing any outside opinions”
Unlike so many liberals?
After many years of listening/reading this crap: Of many qualities that the extremists of the right AND left share is the absolute belief that their respective side’s shit doesn’t stink. (And of course, their respective opinions are infallible as well)
From the point of view of foreigners or foreign-born academics, I think most conservative stand points sound just outright bizarre or stupid
That’s an argument for sending those foreigners home.
Or an argument for figuring out a way to deport our white trash somewhere.
So guns and church are bizarre and stupid, thanks for enlightening us. Whatever happened to the good old days when bizarre and stupid referred to molesting farm animals or bigamy (or Scientology)?
You’re volunteering to leave? Perhaps prior_approval would like company in Krautlandia.
“Or an argument for figuring out a way to deport our white trash somewhere”
Too right! And if we could ship out the pretentious liberals and urban trash along with them, America might actually become a nice place to live in.
Moreno Klaus December 18, 2015 at 4:04 am
From the point of view of foreigners or foreign-born academics, I think most conservative stand points sound just outright bizarre or stupid (guns, going to church, etc), so much that, it is really hard to take them seriously.
Well whatever else you can say about the Communists, the Nazis, the Fascists, their ideas were really well worked out. And gained the respect of generation after generation of European intellectuals.
If it is a choice between people who own guns and go to Church on Sunday or people who taught Pol Pot, I will take the Southern Baptists any day of the week. As will most of the world’s population as they tend to flee from societies the people you admire create to societies full of gun-owning Church-going stupid conservatives.
Why is anything practically Pol Pot if it’s not right wing enough for you?
Various ways to assess intelligence. I bet you could find a metric where the conservative business owners come out as smart or smarter.
Probably only by bending the notion of an intelligence test all out of shape.
What business are you current running?
What do you do for a living Art Deco? I can’t imagine trolling blogs pays very well, especially since you don’t seem to be working for the Russians or Chinese.
Intelligent people with marketable skills tend to enter the labor marketplace and not pursue graduate work. Those without marketable skills tend to go on to graduate school and then to academia.
Maybe liberalism is an emergent property of having no marketable skills? Robert Nozick looked at why liberals are so often opposed to capitalism – because the market doesn’t reward you for being good at school, so many of those who are good at school are drawn to an anti-capitalist, liberal political philosophy which satisfies their egos.
Oh, yeah, the troglodyte is the salt of the Earth. Well, I guess repeating it for money, as right-wing sites use to do, IS a marketable skill after all. So is reheating and repacking Mises’ Anti-Capitalist Mentality straw men (by the way, what was Mises’ –or Nozick’s or Hayek’s– “marketable skill”? What was Feynman’s or Einstein’s or Pasteur’s?). Evidently the reason people opposed racial segregation (i.e. “states’ rights”) in the past and oppose letting poor people starve or non-rich people die or be ruined for lack of healthcare today is the eggheads’ bitterness for all those school years not being the jackpot they had dreamt of!
* repackaging
you re-read your post and thought the problem was repacking for repackaging?!?
No, it was a correction I intended to do after finishing the post, but forgot to do. Clearly, it is not much of a “marketable skill”, unlike, say, reheating Mises’ leftovers, but…
Or maybe they think they world is more complicated that econ 101, and also are non-psychopaths who care about people who for whatever reason are not well served by purely market processes.
I take it you don’t know many academics.
who presumably are the ones teaching econ 101?!
Maybe he had a psychopath teach him Econ 101? At my first University — I was educated in Canada, then the UK and also America — we had a Marxist teach Econ 101! I would say one would have to be a psychopath to ignore the suffering of Cubans, Albanians, North Koreans, East Germans, etc., in the 70s and 80s.
I learned Econ 101 from Bruce Hamilton and Carl Christ, who taught the introductory microeconomics and macroeconomics, respectively. Neither were psychopaths.
Nathan W seems to fancy that academe is populated with people whose moral and ethical sense and internal equilibrium compare well to the general population and compare well to businessmen, whom he fancies are psychopaths. Nathan W always plays a tool. No clue why.
Thor – I did my introductory economics courses at U of T, which has a fairly right wing economics faculty. They rarely mentioned, and never emphasized, the ceterus parabus, the econ 101 type models. I did my graduate studies in a French language university. Pulling out some extreme examples of totalitarianism is by no means an argument that pure free markets are the best way. As with most things, a mixed approach is sensible … a bit of A a bit of B, depending on context, market imperfections and the values of a society.
I edit and translate economics and finance research for a living, and so I have a pretty good idea of what happens when economists stop thinking that ceterus is parabis. At a more advanced level, economics is a far less heartless field.
Art – I’m not saying that you have to be a psychopath to get value out of econ 101. They are, say, 80-90% of the story. But the other 10-20% of the story involves people and situations for which free market solutions plain and simply are not working. I would consider it somewhat psychopathic to be completely indifferent to the poor, those who can’t access health care, decent education, etc. It’s one thing to say “that’s expensive, and I care, but not enough to want to pay for it”, and a completely different thing to say “helping people will lead to a weak society and moreover it would be better to rid our society of people who need help”. Everyone needs help sometimes.
Moreover, Art, you are being an ass as usual and claiming that I hold stupid notions which a) I don’t, and b) do not reflect what I said. The people I would consider as psychopathic are those who are completely indifferent to the suffering of others, a completely different story from those who care, but are just too lazy or greedy to do anything about it.
I edit and translate for academics.
Is the disparity noted on majority held positions?
It finds that intelligence can account for most of the disparity between academics and the general population on the issues of abortion, homosexuality and traditional gender roles.
That is however they slice intelligence and academics, they skew toward current majority beliefs?
yeah, that’s real provocative and edgy…NOT…
you want provocative and edgy? Here ya go: academia/liberal-arts exists in order to increase the supply of workers and consumers and thus increase GDP and corporate profits. Not really “leftist,” if you ask me.
How so? Civil rights act and the anti-white multiculturalism propaganda regime? Works to increase the supply of labor faster than the demand for labor increases. Demand and supply—wages are thus lowered. No coincidence that since 1970 the wages of white males have declined.Oh, look, corporate profits and the stock market went up, too.
Yeah, that academia sure is leftist, all right.
Now go get yer shine box and yer pat on the back from the pseudo-leftist media.
Insular, at GMU? Say it ain’t so. Distinguishing “liberal” and “conservative” on campus is often very difficult, at least as I define those two terms – are those who would limit speech “liberal”? I suppose it’s true that academia has always been insular, but more so today with the right-leaning political orientation of many programs (economics, business, etc.) and left-leaning “studies” programs that did not exist in my time; I imagine such programs are the equivalent of the Fox News echo chamber. As for GMU, I have complimented GMU for being different (different in a way that appeals to those whose financial support counts) and therefore relevant at a time when higher education will soon find itself in crisis as customers (a/k/a students) choose a different path, a path with potential rewards that justify the price. The reality is that as colleges and universities become less dependent (reliant) on public sources for support and more dependent (reliant) on private sources, the more they will respond to the expectations (demands) of the sources; and those sources are not likely to favor a liberal orientation. That’s not meant as a criticism but a fact. My fear is that those sources will not tolerate contrary views, much as the Republican base today will not tolerate contrary (conservative but not conservative enough) views in politics, those having contrary views considered apostates to be rooted out. As for the “liberals” on campus, I suspect their stridency is a reflection of their powerlessness.
You are aware that a significant number of GMU’s students are federal, Commonwealth, and employees of several NoVa counties (think teachers, for example), right? The school derives a quite significant amount of its revenue from those taxpayer funded students.
I’m curious, but not enough to buy the paper.
What is the metric of intelligence being used? Simply being published means you have life experience in academia, and is not necessarily a measure of raw intelligence. As someone else noted above, someone in business has a different life experience set–and applied themselves in a different way. It’s not a measure of actual intelligence.
And did the paper consider the possibility that liberalism in academia is, in essence, the price one must pay for entrance into academia? Meaning if academia is overwhelmingly liberal, and you want to be a professor, it’s far easier to emulate the professors that surround you.
I’m not an academic, but I do share a house with one. I am struck by how narrow the path into academia is — there is a very specific set of requirements which appear to be applied fairly rigidly, and practical experience in the field is treated as essentially irrelevant. I get the impression this wasn’t true a generation or two ago.
“Students in majors with higher average quantitative GRE scores are less likely to attend graduate school, even though such
students presumably are more likely to be successful in graduate education. The opposite happens for verbal skills—students in majors with higher average verbal GRE scores are more likely to attend graduate school. This leads to a sorting effect whereby students whose cognitive skills would suggest lower earnings at the bachelor’s level are more likely to attend graduate school.” (Link1 below)
Graduate school is the gateway to academia.
As Thomas Sowell said: “Verbal coups have long been a specialty of the left…. The words games of the left — from the mantra of “diversity” to the pieties of “compassion” — are not just games. They are ways of imposing power by evading issues of substance through the use of seductive rhetoric.” (Link2 below)
Link1: http://www2.econ.iastate.edu/research/webpapers/paper_12843_07022.pdf
Link2: http://townhall.com/columnists/thomassowell/2004/08/06/the_lefts_vocabulary/page/full
Exactly. This is an exercise in combined self-pity and self-aggrandizement by people who generally make very little money and toil in anonymity, all the while believing that if society were ordered according to all Truth and Justice (concepts in which ironically they no longer believe), they would naturally be at the top. Face it, the majority of academics are self-hating misanthropes who never had the balls to leave the only environment they ever knew — school. There’s some truth to the saying that those who can’t do, teach. Really, Plato was onto this before anyone else, but I think he was actually making fun of them.
“Face it, the majority of academics are self-hating misanthropes who never had the balls to leave the only environment they ever knew — school.”
Ha ha ha. I really love how the troglodyte reeks of desesperation. “Me intelligent, the eggheads bad, no balls, hate selves”. I am sure Mr. “Nigel” already is a millionaire and does not “toil in anonymity” (whatever it may mean, they guys who got the latest Nobel Prize in Medicine surely toil in anonymity– as most people outside Academia not called Obama, Trump or Taylor Swift do–, so what? As for the proportion of people whose contributions are welcomed by their peers, there is no reason, except wishful thinking, to believe it is lower inside the ivory walls than it is outside
Why not run down the thread and identify the posts given display to professors’ vanity and conceits?
Be my guest. How many of them treat non-professors as “self-hating misanthropes” who (as opposed to misanthropes who only hate other people, like the people who wrote those comments) “toil in anonymity” ?
Why would they? The conceits of academics do not take that form. In truth, the insult seems non sequitur re academics.
That there is systemic variation from one occupation to another is unremarkable, but variation is not what you see in re the arts-and-sciences faculty or adjacent faculties. If higher education were not so heavily subsidized or not so consequential in sorting the labor market, it could be ignored. Right now, you have faculties entirely encased in Pauline Kael’s ‘special world’, and their reaction to the empirical data which demonstrates it underlines the point.
In short: “my biases are as good as reality, other people’s not so much”.
quit digging.
Boy, when you are siding with “face it, the majority of academics are self-hating misanthropes who never had the balls to leave the only environment they ever knew — school”, your best hope is to keep digging and hope you reach China.
Boy, when you are siding with “face it,
Evidently your research programme does not require comprehending anything anyone says to you in three sentences.
“Evidently your research programme does not require comprehending anything anyone says to you in three sentences.”
Even if it didn’t (if I were in a research progrmme), it would be still better than repackaging old Conservative strawmen to make troglodytes fell better about themselves (well, I read Lewrockwell, TownHall and Newsmax, so I know it is a “marketable skill”, as profitable as selling snake oil, just least regulated)
“The opposite happens for verbal skills—students in majors with higher average verbal GRE scores are more likely to attend graduate school.”
If you can’t use words, how are you going to get published? How are you going to communicate your findings in an understandable way?
Intelligence is a lot more than getting a high score on a standardized test.
Based on the abstract (I’m not going to read the whole paper), it seems like the author’s findings can be rather parsimoniously explained as follows:
1. IQ correlates positively with libertarian political views (i.e., pro-choice, pro-gay rights, anti-redistribution, etc.). This is a well-known fact. IQ also correlates positively with educational attainment and income. The relation between these four attributes is difficult to untangle.
2. People whose income is low relative to their IQ and educational attainment (i.e., academics) tend to diverge from the libertarian views one would otherwise predict on economic issue, but not on social issues. The reason for this divergence seems to me rather easy to untangle, but YMMV.
with libertarian political views (i.e., pro-choice, pro-gay rights, –
—
You appear to maintain an understanding of what is meant by ‘gay rights’ that was current around about 1967, when the issue at hand was the maintenance (or repeal) of laws on consensual sodomy; or, at a stretch, 1977, when the employment of homosexuals by the public schools was an issue here, there, and the next place. “Anti-discrimination” law may be many things. “Libertarian” it is not. Favoring abortion on demand is not ‘libertarian’ either, bar in the sense that some notions of freedom of contract justify the slave trade; it requires denying the personhood and immunity of the unborn.
I cry when seeds fail to sprout. Nature is such a cruel beast. Most of the time it happens without human intervention.
So, your argument is that people die of natural causes every day, ergo I can dismember you or soak you in caustic brine?
No, Art, and you aren’t too stupid to understand the obvious difference which can never be bridged. If you are ok with abortion its because you feel that a blastocyst is not a person. If you are not, it’s because any fertilized egg is a person. It’s that simple. You either believe in the personhood of fertilized eggs or not. Almost every person who believes in supporting a person’s right to terminate a pregnancy believes it should not be allowed after a certain point in the pregnancy. People are different in where they draw that line, but it tends to center around 3-4 months.
Either you know this and are doing your usual disingenuous bloviating, or you don’t know it and are irredeemably stupid. I really don’t think you are that stupid.
msgkings December 18, 2015 at 2:43 pm
Almost every person who believes in supporting a person’s right to terminate a pregnancy believes it should not be allowed after a certain point in the pregnancy. People are different in where they draw that line, but it tends to center around 3-4 months.
No they do not. Almost everyone who believes in abortion wants a fig leaf to cover their cowardice or their ambivalence. No more. They do not believe anything. They simply do not want to think about it or risk losing friends by siding with the Red Necks.
As can be seen by the fact that nowhere is there an actual enforceable 3-4 month limit. What there is is a fig leaf to let people claim they are fine with what’s going on but what is going on is abortion on demand up to, and in Gosnell’s case after, birth.
You can see this by the complete indifference of anyone to abortions at 8 months. No one asked the Democrats about this. No one ever refuses to vote for a Democrat because they support this. It is a non-issue with the Democrat media and the Democratic voters. They are fine with it. They just don’t want it to be rubbed in their faces and they want to win the middle ground. So they pretend.
Sister, I’m not stupid just because you’re hopelessly confused.
@ Art: as I said, you aren’t stupid. You are disingenuously bloviating per usual.
@SMFS: what a crock of shit. Pro tip, abortion is not the only thing people vote Dem or Rep on.
SMFS – I don’t think there are very many people at all who LIKE abortion. But men forcing women to go to term is ridiculously anti-freedom, especially when the people who wish to force women to go to term rarely support the social programs which would help these aborted fetuses to succeed were they to have been born.
I’m not sure how forcing others to act on your (religious) beliefs using government power is libertarian.
Looking at statistics for documented terminations, abortions are equal to miscarriages, but that’s just the known miscarriages, not the certainly more common terminations that occur naturally to prevent grossly defective fetuses.
And among the “defectives” would be the XXX, XXY, SrY XX, which result in girls with penises and boys with vaginas. Given fetuses to 6-8 weeks develop identically no matter XX or XY, explain why you believe that the mind does not become serial by hormones in the fetus development that is just as likely to mismatch sex in the mind as put penises on girls?
I’m not sure how forcing others to act on your (religious) beliefs using government power is libertarian.
Hold still. I’m going to put a bullet in your head. Get your rosaries off my trigger finger.
Blastocysts can’t be killed, they aren’t people.
“…the “intelligent” point of view need not be the correct one…”
The fight isn’t always to the strong nor the race to the swift, but that’s the way to bet.
When one group of really smart people makes a compelling argument for something that happens to be in their own best interest, and another really smart group counters with a compelling argument for something that is *not* in their own best interest, I will side with the latter every time. Cognitive dissonance, confirmation bias, etc.
But most of all, right-leaning libertarians have a not-very-self-aware culture, which is far more insular than it likes to believe. A good deal of what they believe springs from their culture, not from their intelligence per se.
You can always count on Tyler getting riled up by these articles. Happens every time.
” right-leaning libertarians have a not-very-self-aware culture”
I think we all err this way, but I find right-leaning libertarians will be able to pass a cultural turing test much easier than the progressives do. They/We need to be able to given the low numbers of such.
I typically find progressives (not here though) to give up in them middle of a political argument with comment that they don’t know much about the subject. Didn’t stop them from having a strong opinion. Not always right, but never in doubt.
When one group of really smart people makes a compelling argument for something that happens to be in their own best interest, and another really smart group counters with a compelling argument for something that is *not* in their own best interest, I will side with the latter every time. Cognitive dissonance, confirmation bias, etc.
Would that apply to, say, an academic who makes an argument for giving more money to universities?
“When one group of really smart people makes a compelling argument for something that happens to be in their own best interest, ”
This sounds like a pretty fair description of the paper that is the topic of the post.
Steven Pinker weighs in via David Henderson opines:
http://econlog.econlib.org/archives/2015/12/in_the_second-l.html#comments
Just change one word, and it reads so much accurately – ‘A good deal of what American academics believe springs from their funders, not from their intelligence per se.’
A position which any orthodox and well funded adherent of the Virginia School would agree with, obviously.
Are you Prior Approval in disguise?
LOL…just now figuring that out? I’m quite curious why he changed his name here, but since he’s one of those jerks who refrains from interacting with other posters I’ll probably never know.
The odd thing about p_a, is that when he actually does interact he can make some pretty good points, but that most of his posts are the epitome of trollishness.
Yeah that’s fairly accurate.
‘A good deal of what American academics believe springs from their funders,
Yeah, quite a lucrative gig, crunching numbers in SAS to donate editorial matter to Economic Development and Cultural Change
Seems like a rehash of this paper from June (also from the journal Intelligence), which was widely discussed back then:
“Scholarly elites orient left, irrespective of academic affiliation”: http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S016028961500080X; the basic point was that being smarter explained why liberals were more likely to care about others. This earlier paper is also referenced in the Noah Carl paper discussed here.
As others have pointed out here in the comments, you can indeed find studies that show that liberals are more intelligent, or that conservatives are more intelligent, or that centrists are more intelligent. I think Rindermann’s 2012 paper offers the best summary: http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0160289611001425
I think the definition of liberal and conservative is important. Most papers find conservatives not as smart as liberals, but Republicans are smarter than Democrats. The key is that Republicans include many classical liberals and libertarians which tend to be the smartest and are not conservative by some definitions.
Yep, +1
Here is the paper on Republicans being smarter than Democrats on average from the same author of the article Tyler posted.
http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0160289614001081
Carl (2014) analysed data from the U.S. General Social Survey (GSS), and found that individuals who identify as Republican have slightly higher verbal intelligence than those who identify as Democrat. An important qualification was that the measure of verbal intelligence used was relatively crude, namely a 10-word vocabulary test. This study examines three other measures of cognitive ability from the GSS: a test of probability knowledge, a test of verbal reasoning, and an assessment by the interviewer of how well the respondent understood the survey questions. In all three cases, individuals who identify as Republican score slightly higher than those who identify as Democrat; the unadjusted differences are 1–3 IQ points, 2–4 IQ points and 2–3 IQ points, respectively. Path analyses indicate that the associations between cognitive ability and party identity are largely but not totally accounted for by socio-economic position: individuals with higher cognitive ability tend to have better socio-economic positions, and individuals with better socio-economic positions are more likely to identify as Republican. These results are consistent with Carl’s (2014) hypothesis that higher intelligence among classically liberal Republicans compensates for lower intelligence among socially conservative Republicans.
Yes, but white liberals don’t count nonwhites in their IQ comparisons. They just compares whites to whites, and white liberals tend to have higher IQs than white conservatives.
” libertarians which tend to be the smartest”
Don’t you mean, ” libertarians which tend to believe they are the smartest “?
Breaking news: liberal academic writes paper arguing that liberal academics are smarter than everyone else.
On the social science faculty I know best, there were, ca. 2011, about 60 tenured professors. Of these, six were identifiable Republicans. Of these six, five were born prior to 1951. No, that is not explained by the correlation between psychometric scores and social attitudes.
Perhaps it is a sign of intelligence to put one’s self in a position to keep minimum hours at a congenial campus crawling with good-looking people of both sexes instead of spending your day tearing apart and reassembling big diesel engines or troubleshooting broken heating systems or designing workable gas distribution networks.
http://nailheadtom.blogspot.com/2015/05/blue-collar-vs-white-collar-conditions.html
I can’t see how it’s not!
Tyler – It looks like it’s time for another Keith Stanovich post (or two). We can start with a repost of this one: http://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2009/02/papers-i-need-to-read.html
Some questions about the study’s premises:
Are academics a significant portion of the highly intelligent cohort?
Are the “liberal” views attributed to academics more or less common amongst academics in fields that actually require a high level of intelligence? Are academics outside those fields more intelligent than the general body of college graduates?
Are the “liberal” opinions really liberal? Related, is indifference considered support of a given position?
My guess is much of academic leftism is the product of ideological inbreeding and confirmation bias, with some self-interest thrown in (it’s clearly not a good idea to “out” yourself as conservative in some fields). that spills over to similarly credentialed groups outside academia. A little. Where does GSS data that disagrees with the findings fit in?
I’m not astonished that a study by someone pursuing a doctorate in sociology found that liberals are more intelligent than conservatives.
“Intelligence tests” typically measure ones performance on a collection of common cultural “facts”, not really problem solving ability or critical thinking skills.
Moreover, academia comes up with IQ tests which, surprisingly, show that academics do well. I think that more often, academics use jargon and “tests” as a way of raising entry barriers and curtailing supply. Success in the real world is not correlated with test taking ability.
So, yes, it is probably true that performance on tests that academics come up with highly correlates with academics opinions on other subjects.
Which commonly used intelligence tests are like that? Most academics hate IQ tests because blacks do poorly on average.
You clearly don’t understand why academics don’t like IQ tests.
Assuming that everything were equal, but with some minor social differences, let’s say that blacks don’t try very hard at stupid tests that have nothing to do with anything. This along invalidates the notion of using IQ tests to validate anything.
And there are plenty more reasons.
Education and intelligence are not synonymous. Many people with PhDs in the soft social sciences, fine arts, languages, performance arts, education, etc are muddle headed idiots and pretentious poseurs in a circle jerk with one another.
Fact is, leftists let their ideologies control their hiring and mentorship practices. They screen our right wing applicants and students as less intelligent and throw obstacles in their path, perhaps deliberately or through negligence or omissions. The net result is that you get faculty committees, boards, Senates etc packed with liberals who hire, promote and support like minded people.
Intelligent conservatives working in productive industries dont have the time or inclination to take IQ tests to massage their own egos.
Perhaps conservatives raise similar barriers elsewhere, but I haven’t seen it. Or perhaps the volume of the liberals I work with exaggerates their true proportions. By that I mean volume of sound, not number.
+1.
The vast majority of postgrad degrees are diploma mill merchandise held by people who automatically get paid more for having one; they shouldn’t be confused with education.
And this, to whatever extent comprehensive or valid, proves what? Didn’t some of the smartest people in history support extremely obnoxious ideas and ideologies? Didn’t bertrand russel want nuclear war with USSR? How many brilliant german/austrian scientists supported nazism (heisenberg, von braun..). Wasn’t almost every ‘intelligent’ person in the 70s a socialist?
Russell wanted to surrender to the USSR to avoid the possibility of being killed in a nuclear war.
“A good deal of what American academics believe springs from their culture, not from their intelligence per se.” Tyler Cowen
If we add to that pithy observation that “cultures” of groups are formed upon sufficient commonalities of motivations of individuals in the group, we may get even closer to understanding what we are observing.
I think if they had tested “openness to new ideas” they would have found a much stronger correlation. It’s a good trait to have if you are an academic, and it tends to go along with being on the left. Conservatism, is by its nature, an appreciation of the merits of established ideas and systems.
think if they had tested “openness to new ideas” they would have found a much stronger correlation. It’s a good trait to have if you are an academic, and it tends to go along with being on the left.
In your dreams.
Sick burn, bro.
Academics (and people who are identified as being smart) are on average more knowledgeable and thoughtful than the general population although academics do not always agree, are not always correct in their beliefs and disagree among themselves. Academics are more likely to know what language is spoken in Brazil, know the dominant Muslim sect in Turkey versus Iran, and believe in evolution. These differences between academics and the general population are not due to liberal bias or being in an ivory tower. For similar reasons, when it comes to moral values, one would expect more or less the same relationship between academics and the general population. Academics would on average think more deeply than the general population and would be more knowledgeable about the facts. Being more knowledgeable about the facts of the situation is important because facts often influence our moral stance. Our attitude towards the death penalty can be influenced by how much the death penalty deters, our attitude towards helping the poor can be influenced by our understanding of why the individuals are poor, and out attitude about homosexual marriage can be influenced by our understanding of why individuals are homosexual.
Factual knowledge is important only in how that knowledge is put to use. Knowledge, and the ideas that spring from it, is meaningless until it’s been transformed from thought to action. Even the most intelligent academicians achieve nothing until the lower orders translate their ideas into physical movement.
Academics (and people who are identified as being smart) are on average more knowledgeable and thoughtful than the general population –
More knowledgeable about their subjects. Seldom more knowledgeable about the general run of things. Not more thoughtful, either. Just more articulate in stating their prejudices.
And that explains why so many Republicans think Obama is a Kenyan Muslim. They are more knowledgeable about the general run of things.
“Academics (and people who are identified as being smart) are on average more knowledgeable and thoughtful than the general population”
Hah! What a bunch of pretentious BS. It’s amazing how many PhD types, who have spent a lifetime studying a tiny subset of knowledge, soon feel that they are experts at all they survey. And “thoughtful”? Seriously? How about child-liberal self-aggrandizing?
Sometimes having a high IQ leads you to believe that you are so much better than other people that you have the right to takeover their lives.
Isn’t that the ENTIRE basis of progressive ideology?
I fail to see the relevance of this study. An actually interesting bit of data would be how intelligent academics compare with intelligent non-academics. They’re views compared to the general population just doesn’t seem very useful information to me.
There could be due to the fundamental nature of left and right. Leftism is very intellectual. Almost all left-wing policies involve massively complex ways of reordering society. Right-wing solutions tend to involve massively simple solutions at the government level. For healthcare, the left devises a Rube Goldberg machine. It will try to plan the entire economy. The right would largely abolish healthcare rules and economic regulations. The whole goal of right-wing government is to have most functions carried out outside of government, to have the intelligent in the actual fields. Smart people become doctors, not healthcare bureaucrats designing and controlling a healthcare system. Both want the smartest people in charge, they disagree over how those people are selected.
Democrats voters highly value intelligence. Republican voters highly value wisdom. Democrats think Republicans are stupid in the sense of lower IQs. Republicans think Democrats are stupid in the sense of lacking common sense. Democrats discuss all the complex reasons why a foreign enemy may be an enemy. Republicans discuss how to kill the enemy.
The cultural effects in academia are now creating feedback. I know conservative people of very high intelligence who abandoned the academic career path wholly because of politics. Considering the left is now purging academics who are insufficiently leftist, it was probably a good idea. One can only imagine how far left academia will be in 20 more years.
Conservatism is, by design, intended to avoid the problems caused by not being as smart as you think you are.
Where do you get the idea that academia is being purged?
Look at ideological self-identification by academics 100 years ago and today. Learn something for once instead of depending on your deeply held leftist biases, Nate.
Thomas – what leads you to hold the opinion that I have deep leftist biases? Please be specific.
Changing ideological self identification of academics doesn’t mean there’s a purge. A simple explanation is that people who value money highly go into business and therefore follow the low tax mantras, whereas people who are more interested in serious investigations of major social challenges go into academics, find that the problems are very complex and not being solved by non-interventionist ideas, and therefore tend to politically lean in the direction of parties which are in favour of tackling major social challenges.
Another possible explanation is that 100 years ago, private money was more important for the work of academics, whereas today, any dedicated intelligent person who wants to become an academic can do so, get tenure, and then research whatever they please (with the exception that if they want more money it will have to be research in something that is supported by additional public or private funding).
No purge is necessary for change.
Moreover, I have no idea of how to search for information about ideological affiliation of academics 100 years ago compared to today. So please enlighten me.
There seem to be two main components to intelligence, the verbal and mathematical. Up until 1900, both were similarly rewarded economically.
IQ tests seems to be slanted towards the mathematical, as is economic compensation.
As per above, people from the highest-IQ majors are least likely to continue onto graduate school, most likely due to the enormous economic opportunities available to them outside. (As a side effect, this means the grad schools of high-IQ programs are full of foreigners, because the visa programs let them work.
The result is an undergraduate population full of a mixture of people with high verbal and high mathematical skills.
The math ones leave for the private sector, the verbal ones stay in the academy and make much less.
The result is a verbal elite believes themselves to be the intellectual equal of the mathematical elite, when they find their incomes are no different from the working class. Thus the verbal elite resents the mathematical elite (the 1%) and the working class (flyover country)
Liberals are angry that their social and cultural skills and status do not translate into economic gain, and thus aim to use their control of social and cultural institutions to redistribute money to them.
Libertarians are angry that liberals are managing to succeed at doing so.
“Just an observation. I can think of one or maybe two exceptions in the comments section on this site, namely people who are exceptionally bright and also talented assemblers of information. But for most of you, if you are leaving more than two or three comments on a blog post — you probably don’t have that much to say.” — Tyler Cowen
I wonder if he meant Art Deco?
I wonder if he meant Art Deco?
As opposed to the two individuals who follow me around every thread and offer 1 sentence insults, or the third individual who offers three sentence insults and appropriates my handle?
Yes as opposed to them. He meant you.
Gee, Art being annoyed that people insult him. I wonder why people might think it’s OK? You’re one of the most consistently insulting people here.
If you reduce your prodigious and mostly worthless output, we will have less of you and less of your hangers on — malicious and otherwise. It’s a win-win.
And two of my stalkers demonstrate the worth of their commentary by making repeat appearances.
Art – You seem unable to say “I disagree with you and here’s why”. Instead, your form is (couched in large words) “you and people like you are ideologically blinded, stupid and/or naive”.
You are routinely an ass, and the furthest I ever go is to point it out. Adults are able to disagree without calling each other names, and you routinely demonstrate the maturity of a verbose 13 year old.
In the legal world, Supreme Court clerks are all extremely smart cookies. Yet clerks for the conservative justices are way more likely to go into private sector whereas most of the liberals become professors. So I think other things are at play here.
What other things? They have debts to pay off, a project which would be hampered by the time spent looking for an academic job they won’t get and, on the odd chance they should land one, by opportunity cost incorporated into working in academe, and, at the end of the day, by their time unemployed after they’re denied tenure.
As Steve Sailor would say,
It is obvious that the IQ can be explained because
Liberals are White
And
Conservatives are Black.
Those that ‘can’ do. Those that “can’t” teach.
Teaching is a noble profession. Many people want to teach because they want to teach, not because they can’t do.
There’s nothing noble about teaching. It’s agreeable salaried employment with much better benefits than most occupations receive. There is especially nothing self-sacrificial about higher education, which has much lower teaching loads and better working conditions than primary and secondary schooling. Quit pretending these bourgeois were out teaching in a mission school in Burma, or billeted at some shabby Indian reservation or some disorderly pedagogic hellhole in Detroit.
Sorry that you had such crappy teachers.
Most teachers really care about children, otherwise they wouldn’t have gone into teaching.
My guess is that the overrepresentation of liberals and leftists in academia is explained, in part, by the idea that the marketplace requires the making of a profit (and all that that implies) while tenured academia does not.
No, no no.
There are many stupid people in academia. They teach made-up subjects like “Women’s Studies”.
Here’s a perfect, concrete example:
Only one of the Duke “Group of 88” teachers (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Group_of_88) who falsely accused people of rape (and were never held accountable) was a teacher in a “hard science”
> The department with the highest proportion of signatories was African and African-American Studies (AAAS), with 80%. Just over 72% of the Women’s Studies faculty signed the statement, Cultural Anthropology 60%, Romance Studies 44.8%, Literature 41.7%, English 32.2%, Art & Art History 30.7%, and History 25%.[citation needed]
I would bet that IQs fall off rapidly in Academia when you leave the Math and Physics departments and enter the “Women’s Studies” departments.
Maybe academics are more intelligent than the rest of us, but I can’t understand why smart people are so attracted to socialism. It’s such an inelegant system of government. The free market is so much more elegant, with invisible hands, natural consequences, the agency of the individual. Socialism is the helicopter parent, the nosy neighbor, the freeloading brother-in-law.
Just make sure that ‘intelligence’ is nothing more than what IQ measures
and does not indicate anything more than that. This is because a lot of
folks actually think that IQ discorrelates with common sense, which is
a far better indication of intelligence insofar as many folks are concerned.
Maybe if the right wing would come back from the deep end, more academics would affiliate with them more.
Say, focus on free speech for the purpose of good governance (protect whistleblowers but deter hate speech), focus on enabling individuals to take personal responsibility (good education for everyone, but no racial quotas), freedom to put what I want to into my body (legalize drugs and then disseminate non-Reefer Madness style information about downsides), actually support the free market (less IP protection and less corporate subsidies), and be a little bit less gung ho about bombing foreign nations. Also, not letting the evangelicals control so much of the agenda much help.
Then, I think you would get a lot more academics being right wing.
Come back from the deep end and a larger number of smart people will support you.
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It is well known that individuals with so-called liberal or leftist views are overrepresented in American academia. By bringing together data on American academics, the general population and a high-IQ population, the present study investigates how much of this overrepresentation can be explained by intelligence. It finds that intelligence can account for most of the disparity between academics and the general population on the issues of abortion
Why would high IQ correlate with pro-abortion? Some kind of soft eugenics, perhaps?
Do please note that the “intelligent” point of view need not be the correct one
For example the big population scare in the 1970’s was driven mostly by high IQ people and low IQ people never bought in. Paul Ehrlich and those who agreed with him were/are very intelligent. It is hard to explain why an idea so far off the truth would attract mostly above average IQ folks. Thank God for Julian Simon.
Also many communists where very intelligent as were eugenicist before them.
True, but who was right after all, “on the issues of abortion, homosexuality and traditional gender roles.”? Not the conservatives/talibans thats for sure.
That is some nice question-begging. But why stop there when you can throw in a random guilt-by-association with terrorists?
How would you determine in an objective way who was right on any of those issues, given that the disagreement is on morality.
You’re given to saying self-indicting things.
Conservative probably got it right on abortion and gender roles (not enforcing roles, but that they exist).
Progressives on homosexuality.
Are those the kinds of questions with “right” answers?
The abortion debate boils down to a subjective moral judgement on the definition of when life begins.
Homosexuality, such as it is still being “debated”, boils down to a question about which types of relationships should enjoy favorable treatment by the government.
“Traditional gender roles” are another subjective question of personal preferences. There are plenty of smart women who choose to prioritize raising their young children over working 60 hours a week in a law office. Conservatives seem to prefer raising their own children. Liberals seem to prefer allowing strangers to raise their children. There isn’t necessarily a “right” answer here, it’s about individual preferences.
I am a gay-married Republican who believes in Abortion when it is self-defense (ectopic pregnancy, or impregnated against your will, etc.). Just like I can shoot an intruder in my house in self-defense.
So there!
If you were Santa’s little brother you’d be an ass, too.
Indeed. It takes an extraordinarily high iq to support abortion. Whaddyamean, I put that in there and something happens! Kill it!
Even worse from the standpoint of seeking bias, the Agreement is on moral questions.
– on moral questions the political center is created by agreement, nothing more
– “smart academics hold mainstream views” is not nearly so sexy
– much of our percieved polarization is rooted in this kind of reporting, in which people are told they hold left/right rather than mainstream views
– minority views are overrated (speculative)
As Hawkeye Pierce used to say, “We know what causes that now.”
For people who have actually been born, but are dependent, what is the conservative logic on the value of those lives? How much will conservatives pay to preserve the lives of the dependent? How much would a conservative like Sarah Palin pay to preserve the life of Steven Hawking, given she believed he would be euthanized in the UK?
And does carpet bombing not kill the unborn “children” when killing their mothers?
Somehow “pro-life” does not apply those billions who have been born.
What is ‘right’ on homosexuality?
AIDS.
Letting people behave however they feel is natural, so long as it doesn’t hurt anyone, and not discriminating against them in any way, such as tax and insurance preferences previously given to heterosexual couples.
“Conservatives seem to prefer raising their own children. Liberals seem to prefer allowing strangers to raise their children”
Well, in fairness, your statement should say, “Wealthy liberals have no problem in allowing strangers to…” which is just an example of the liberal/libertarian individualist mindset. The petty wants of the individual, supersede the needs of anyone else, including their own children.
My in-laws are a great real-world example of this phenomenon. Three couples and a solo-lesbian; all “successful” in every sense of the term. All East coast Liberals. One thing they have in common? They ALL raised incredibility screwed up kids. Sure, some of them went to Ivy League schools (the parents are very proud of that), however: The kids/young adults need constant therapy and prescription drugs just to deal with life. One kid’s kid is a hard core drug addict/thief who traded sex for a place to sleep. Another one can’t even come home without breaking down. Yet another (under 16) is psychopath that their own mother is afraid of!
You know another thing that these successful liberal parents have in common? Raising all of these fucked up kids wasn’t their fault!