
Conservatism and cognitive ability are negatively correlated - finin
http://ebiquity.umbc.edu/blogger/2009/04/25/conservatism-and-cognitive-ability-are-negatively-correlated/
======
space_cowboy
More food for the poisonous group-think infecting my generational and cultural
peers. Why engage with the arguments of people that disagree with you, when
they're just stupid and/or evil? Best just to mock them and revel in a
comfortable sense of smug superiority. Everybody agrees with you, so your
dishonest behavior will be reinforced and rewarded.

~~~
timr
I agree wholeheartedly. It's far too easy these days to immerse yourself only
in the opinions with which you already agree, and to dismiss anything that is
challenging or different.

Here's the thing: if you're going to start looking for challenging opinions,
it's best to start in places other than talk radio and television news. Stop
dismissing credentials. Stop vilifying academic research. Stop rewarding
people who are merely controversial, or who play on petty emotional impulses
or thinly-veiled bigotry.

Start rewarding depth of analysis, argument and complexity, because the world
is a complicated place, full of colors and shades of gray, and no sound bite
can possibly encompass it all.

~~~
derefr
> Stop dismissing credentials.

Err, isn't this the opposite of what you should be doing? Credentials are
cached judgements of merit; bypass the cache and judge the merit of the
arguments for yourself.

~~~
timr
Cached judgments of merit? Give the strained engineering metaphors a rest.
This has nothing to do with caching, and has everything to do with filtering
out bad information.

For any sufficiently complicated subject, your average person lacks the
knowledge, experience or intelligence to weigh arguments solely on their
merits. It isn't popular to say here to a bunch of opinionated techies, but
credentials are a way of bypassing limitations in our own knowledge.

Said another way: there are subjects that must be learned through experience.
I am more inclined to believe the opinions of a World Bank economist than I am
to believe the comments of JoeThePlumber123456 in some online libertarian
forum.

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robotrout
As a conservative, I concede some negative correlation could be present here.
Certainly not a strong one, but perhaps a statistically measurable one.

There are a couple of reasons off the top of my head for this. Our
institutions of higher learning are, I think this is not in debate, generally
left leaning. Kids that go there are smart enough to go to college, but they
are kids, and some of them will be swayed left in that atmosphere, even if
they might not have been if not exposed to it. That alone should skew the
distribution as the article indicates. There's also the religious aspect,
where intellectuals tend to be less religious, and by definition then, less
conservative.

I'm not sure what someone would do with this information, other than use it to
make statements that would not generally be accurate.

~~~
kingkongrevenge
When you boil cultural conservatism down to its essence, as separate from the
concepts of economic liberty which conservatives lean towards, the basic idea
is that there is wisdom in the prevailing traditions and cultural attitudes.
The wisdom can defy thoughtful analysis. It's the concept that society is the
way it is because a process of darwinian selection has settled on the
arrangement and it is dangerous to wantonly mess with this complex system.

I would not be surprised that higher IQ people tend towards a certain
arrogance that is dismissive of the idea that cultural traditions and
attitudes carry value that defies individual understanding. Away from the
cultural conservatism and towards market liberalism you often see the same
thing: certain smart people can't cope with idea that there's a complex, self
regulating system that defies understanding and should not be messed with.

~~~
nostrademons
"It's the concept that society is the way it is because a process of darwinian
selection has settled on the arrangement and it is dangerous to wantonly mess
with this complex system."

An economist sees a $100 bill on the sidewalk. He neglects to pick it up
because it can't possibly be real. If it were, an efficient market dictates
that somebody would already have picked it up. A five year old follows behind,
picks it up, and exclaims "Look ma, I just found $100." The economist turns
around and says, "See? I was right."

Just because Darwinian selection gives better results than any individual
decision does not absolve you from making individual decisions. It works
because of the presence of mutations: take away the mutations, and evolution
ceases to give useful results. You see the same problem in finance: the market
is efficient only to the extent that people do not believe it is efficient,
because once people start believing that it's efficient, they'll invest in
index funds and nobody will actually scout out the information needed to drive
good stocks higher and bad stocks lower.

In short, I think that culture is a complex, self-regulating system, and that
alone is why it should be messed with.

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tokenadult
The obligatory link for any discussion of a report on a research result like
that is the article by Peter Norvig, director of research at Google, on how to
interpret scientific research.

<http://norvig.com/experiment-design.html>

Checking this blog entry point by point against Norvig's checklist would be
good mental exercise.

~~~
lutorm
I would worry about publication bias here, since it's a metastudy and few
people would publish such a study showing that, would you know, there's
nothing going on...

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jgranby
The definition of Conservative used is laughable. Religious belief has nothing
to do with whether you're a conservative or not, and there's no mention of
small government, lower taxes, which _are_ what conservatism is about. The
definition seems to be a caricature of America's religious right, but the
sample is of _foreign_ students in the US. In other words, the definition is
based on a subset of American conservatives, which has no equivalent in many
of the countries that the students will have come from.

~~~
space_cowboy
>"there's no mention of small government, lower taxes, which are what
conservatism is about."

I disagree. I believe Conservatism is context-dependent.

In the 1700's, Conservatism would have meant resisting the Democratic
revolutions in places like the US and France. That's why Edmund Burke's pieces
against the revolution in France are still considered important tomes in
Conservative thought.

Modern American Conservatism is weird. It was not meant to preserve the old
order, but to rebuild an order that no longer existed. Limited government was
thoroughly eradicated by the New Deal, which the Conservative movement was
born in opposition to. Thus, it is in some ways a "Revolutionary
Conservatism", which is slightly oxymoronic.

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johngunderman
I find it interesting that the test groups were students at community colleges
and foreign applicants. Wouldn't it be far better to judge "intelligence" from
students at a four year university, or those studying higher education? And
just students? To me, this paper seems to be written to prove a hypothesis,
not to test it.

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russell
I'm getting more liberal as I get older. It's good to know that I will also be
getting smarter.

~~~
hvs
Correlation does not imply causation.

~~~
jibiki
(Yes, that's the joke...)

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gojomo
Important note: the study's definition of 'conservative' does not map directly
to 'conservative in domestic US politics'.

Also, it is from a study by a Singapore-based academic, based on a pool of
foreign students seeking entry to the US, and community college students
(unclear where).

Less-intellectual but traditional-hopeful-and-hard-working conservatives could
easily be overrepresented in such a study population.

~~~
rw140
Yes - their sample selection is a little interesting. As their definition of
conservatism included valuing hard work, I wonder if all the study has shown
is that 'if you work hard, then you don't have to be as intelligent in order
to get into the same university as someone who works less hard'.

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topynate
Something I always look at in these kinds of studies is what the sample group
is. There's a statistical phenomenon called "explaining away" which often
causes spurious correlations. For example: measure the athletic and
intellectual abilities of American college students. You'll find a fairly
strong negative correlation, even though in the general population there's no
correlation or a weak positive correlation.

Why? Admission to college has two possible (but non-exclusive) explanations,
athleticism and intellect. These explanations "compete" to explain the fact
that a given student got in. Roughly speaking, the presence in the general
population of unintelligent non-athletes contributes a positive term to the
(near-zero) correlation. These people are removed from the student population,
so the total correlation is lower, and hence negative.

Now, this experiment studied student applicants to American universities. If
both intelligence and social conservatism in some way cause people to apply to
American colleges, a negative correlation between these traits will be induced
in the pool of applicants. Off the top of my head, one such cause might be
that people with higher social status are more likely to apply to university,
and high social status correlates positively with increased acceptance of the
social order. I find this rather more plausible than the easy conclusion that
"conservatives are dumb", even though it's a more complex causal chain.

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ckinnan
To look at this politically, the more educated an American, from high school
dropout through college graduate, the more likely they are to vote
Republican-- a pattern that flips dramatically at the very top. College grads
are more likely to be GOP but folks with graduate degrees are fairly strongly
Democratic. Even in the Democratic wave in 2008 this general pattern held
true-- Obama only beat McCain by 2 points among college graduates, and it was
the first time a modern Democrat candidate beat a Republican candidate among
college graduates.

[http://elections.nytimes.com/2008/results/president/national...](http://elections.nytimes.com/2008/results/president/national-
exit-polls.html)

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tvchurch
Who cares about this article? Let's get back to hacking, and hacking-related
news.

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patrickg-zill
This has been bogus "research" since the 1960s.

