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People who voted for Brexit ‘more likely to be less intelligent’, study claims
- DarkNova6 3y agoAnd “more likely to be manipulated” too?
- bena 3y agoThat’s actually a large part of it. People with lower intelligence are also worse at critical thinking. They often defer that to someone else despite what they may say or even believe.
- my_almonds 3y ago[flagged]
- hunglee2 3y agoMassively unhelpful study which nevertheless raises an important point about the democratic system of governance - intelligence not being a factor in making critically important decisions - which would appear to be an un-smart way of doing things
- pacifika 3y agoIs a study unhelpful if it leads to helpful questions?
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- hunglee2 3y agofair point!
- yostrovs 3y agoThere's no evidence that people with a higher IQ do better at choosing where to vote on the ballot. Germany, for example, was a highly educated society in the 1930s, one of the most educated in the world. They voted for Hitler.
- mcny 3y agoThis is very subjective. France may officially disagree but I think most reasonable people will at least partially agree that the Treaty of Versailles was a disaster and was the actual cause of what happened next. > Prominent economists such as John Maynard Keynes declared the treaty too harsh, styling it as a "Carthaginian peace", and saying the reparations were excessive and counterproductive. On the other hand, prominent Allied figures such as French Marshal Ferdinand Foch criticized the treaty for treating Germany too leniently. This is still the subject of ongoing debate by historians and economists. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Treaty_of_Versailles https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Treaty_of_Versailles
- hunglee2 3y agoyes true. Maybe the issue is not intelligence but the voting
- my_almonds 3y ago[flagged]
- amelius 3y agoAnd what about the people who initiated Brexit?
- progne 3y agoImagine a democracy in which you vote your IQ from an official test. If your IQ was measured at 114 your vote counts 114 times, etc. This seems obviously unfair. But would it improve the results? My intuition fails me here, I can't predict. I wonder if that rule would have swung Brexit the other way? That would give an idea of the magnitude of the difference.
- pard68 3y agoThough not a measure of IQ, the USA used to require landownership as the litmus test for voting. It might be a similar enough metric.
- elmerfud 3y agoNot a valid comparison. Imagine, if you will, a world with no income tax, no sales tax, because those things were very difficult (if not impossible) to reliably know. Instead what you could know is real estate ownership, because that was tracked by the government. Then you also had a new country that was frustrated with taxation without representation. So you form those who represent the country as those who pay taxes. The availability of land in those days it was easy enough for anyone who wanted to get it. It was also a way to turn a citizen in to a tax payer. Equating this to IQ is similar in the same way that ice cubes and electrical arcs are the same.
- Wowfunhappy 3y agoThe people with high IQ may vote to further the interests of people with high IQ, effectively oppressing the people with low IQ.
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- draw_down 3y ago[dead]
- Gud 3y agoThese things are always brought up when supposedly right wing voting happens(=against the interests of the ruling class). I wonder who knows best what’s best for the common man, himself or University of Baths “school of management“? I’ve only even here for a few months for work, but I’ve never been in a more classist country than the UK. It’s shocking. I am happy for the British public. They might be stupider than their overlords, but at least they brought the power back slightly closer to themselves.
- arbuge 3y ago> I’ve never been in a more classist country than the UK. It’s shocking. Genuinely curious... How does this manifest itself in practice there?
- icegreentea2 3y agoActual study: https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0289312 https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal...
- frankbreetz 3y ago[flagged]
- ipaddr 3y agoFrame this north American style. The poorest voted for it because it was in their interests
- rhombocombus 3y agoThey voted for it because they were propagandized into believing it was in their interests.
- mytailorisrich 3y agoHigh immigration into the UK has been depressing wages at the lower end of the scale (edit: and perhaps not only but I'm thinking that people who earn a good living don't think too much about whether all those foreign professionals dampen salary increases) The "working class" voted to control immigration but were taken for a ride because those in charge actually want more immigration.
- theironhammer 3y agoThe Brexiteers were naive. Anyone with half a brain wouldve known the elites would switch immigration from EU to third world which is exactly what they did post Brexit.
- kcplate 3y agoAhh yes, the old “the poor are too stupid…” argument.
- rhombocombus 3y agoNowhere did I say stupid… everyone is susceptible to propaganda, and to deny its influence in this particular circumstance seems naive.
- kcplate 3y agoYou don’t have to use a specific word to pull out an old political trope.
- my_almonds 3y ago[flagged]
- josevalerio 3y agoPlease don’t Reddit my HN
- stranded22 3y ago[flagged]
- vermooten 3y ago[flagged]
- nvm0n2 3y ago[flagged]
- WiSaGaN 3y agoThis gives me the vibe of “Chinese most dishonest because of not sending email after finding wallet”.
- underseacables 3y agoThis is such bull crap. The way a person votes should not be an indicator of their intelligence. To try to put that label on someone is demeaning both to the person, and to the right to vote in a free democracy.
- bena 3y agoIt should not be, which is why it’s notable when it is. I think you’re mixing up the causal link here. Voting for Brexit is not being used as proof of lower intelligence. But there is a clear divide. If one has lower intelligence, that person is more likely to have voted for Brexit.
- underseacables 3y agoThat's impossible to know. It's making an assumption based on a predetermined belief that lower intelligence votes for things others more "righteous" disagree with. There is no causal relationship between voting and intelligence, and it's elitist to believe so. Many highly intelligent people voted for Brexit, but they are deemed "lower intelligence" by those who voted against it. It's like saying only low intelligent people vote liberal. It's impossible to measure, purely assumed. Just because someone disagrees does not mean they are lower intelligence. I think the whole study is ballocks.
- bena 3y ago> It's making an assumption based on a predetermined belief that lower intelligence votes for things others more "righteous" disagree with. In this case, it's not an assumption. The majority of Brexit voters were less intelligent. That's just how it is. It doesn't necessarily mean they were wrong however. > Many highly intelligent people voted for Brexit, but they are deemed "lower intelligence" by those who voted against it. One does not necessarily follow the other. It really feels like you're trying to defend a Brexit vote more than anything else here. And I get it, everything bad about it that was claimed came to fruition while none of the good happened. And people were explicitly told that what the problems would be and that the other side was at best wishful thinking. People can point to receipts and say "Look, we literally told you so". But, the voters listened to people they listened to their entire lives. They trusted those people. And they disregarded people they saw as contrarian. Because that's where politics was going at the time, high polarization where conformity to one's "side" being the most important factor. Often at the expense of actual policy. It's now so bad that if one side has a completely reasonable, middle of the road, easy to implement take, the other side has to reject simply because it came from "the wrong side". But things like Brexit were indicators of this polarization taking hold.
- ulizzle 3y agoThis is some seriously brazen propaganda. I'll give them points for courage.
- my_almonds 3y ago[flagged]
- tzs 3y agoIt's important to distinguish between Brexit and voting for Brexit. The question on the referendum was: > Should the United Kingdom remain a member of the European Union or leave the European Union? and the options were: > Remain a member of the European Union and > Leave the European Union Let's assume for the sake of argument that the UK could in fact do better outside the EU. Let's also assume that most economists, trade experts, business groups, politicians, etc from all across the political spectrum agreed with this. Let's even assume that the consensus among all those experts was so strong that you'd pretty much have to be an idiot to think the the UK should remain in the EU. It would still be dumb to vote "leave" on that particular referendum because it doesn't say anything about how Brexit is to be implemented. For things like this whose implementation is very complicated and there are many ways to get it wrong and negate many or even most of the benefits you were hoping to get from it there needs to be at least two separate referendums. The first referendum directs the government to work out how it will be implemented--writing all necessary legislation, negotiating all necessary treaties and trade agreements, and so on. The second referendum would be on whether or not to accept that implementation.
- tim333 3y agoWhile there was a split with more educated voting remain and working class voting leave, I don't think it was down to "cognitive ability in processing and discounting misinformation." More things like well off graduates benefiting from hiring cheap Polish plumbers, while British plumbers etc suffered from that.