February 28, 2010
Liberals and Atheists Smarter?
From Science Daily:
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.
The study, published in the March 2010 issue of the peer-reviewed scientific journal Social Psychology Quarterly, advances a new theory to explain why people form particular preferences and values. The theory suggests that more intelligent people are more likely than less intelligent people to adopt evolutionarily novel preferences and values, but intelligence does not correlate with preferences and values that are old enough to have been shaped by evolution over millions of years."
"Evolutionarily novel" preferences and values are those that humans are not biologically designed to have and our ancestors probably did not possess. In contrast, those that our ancestors had for millions of years are "evolutionarily familiar."
More here.
Posted by Abbas Raza at 05:46 AM | Permalink
Comments
I want to look at the cross-tabs on the study. Conservatism is also correlated with education (in the U.S.), and education is correlated with some sets of IQ test results. Knowing which IQ test was used, and the cross tabs with State/region, would allow one to evaluate the proposed causal link that the author is, as far as I can tell, offering without a lot of evidence. Evolutionary psychologists seem to be good at that. Maybe it's genetic.
Or maybe it's just that Kanazawa, the author of this study, is firmly in the camp of Richard Lynn on these issues, and has made questionable claims about IQ and social ills many times. He also believes we should have nuked the Middle East after 9/11:
"Here's a little thought experiment. Imagine that, on September 11, 2001, when the Twin Towers came down, the President of the United States was not George W. Bush, but Ann Coulter. What would have happened then? On September 12, President Coulter would have ordered the US military forces to drop 35 nuclear bombs throughout the Middle East, killing all of our actual and potential enemy combatants, and their wives and children. On September 13, the war would have been over and won, without a single American life lost.
Yes, we need a woman in the White House, but not the one who’s running."
(emphasis in the original)
Yikes. Not that that shows any underlying racist tendencies or something. I know, I know, political views shouldn't matter in science...but sometimes they do.
Posted by: Cyrus Hall | Feb 28, 2010 9:59:43 AM
How does a thought experiment about perceiving parts of the middle east the same way Americans presumably thought of the japanese/germans in world world II relate to a study about how those with higher IQ's tend to seek out evolutionarily novel things? It would seem that having some kind of sophisticated, culturally sensitive perspective on terrorists is a bit more of a evolutionarily novel idea than believing the whole region to be against us and nuking it....yet he proposed nuking them. Perhaps this shines a little credibility on his results then?
Posted by: chris | Feb 28, 2010 8:31:00 PM
"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"
Does this strike anyone else as a rather odd definition of conservative and liberal?
Posted by: Sagredo | Feb 28, 2010 10:20:08 PM
chris -
The relation is poor at best, non-existent at worst. It does indicate this is a man who makes strong categorical distinctions between two large populations, despite the fact each is very heterogeneous, which is never a good sign in social science. But in the end, I just have a hard time taking seriously theories on evolution from someone who is clearly not very evolved. I admit, it's a bit of a smear job on my part.
Posted by: Cyrus Hall | Mar 1, 2010 2:43:28 AM
My immediate instinct is to separate the data-gathering from the evpsych. If he administered tests to a number of people, analyzed the data and did regressions, that part of the paper stands or falls separately from his caveman theorizing.
Posted by: prasad | Mar 1, 2010 4:15:30 AM
It would seem that having some kind of sophisticated, culturally sensitive perspective on terrorists is a bit more of a evolutionarily novel idea than believing the whole region to be against us and nuking it?
Maybe he thinks that atavism in defense of evolutionarily novel preferences is no vice.
Posted by: Vicki Baker | Mar 1, 2010 11:01:46 AM
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