6 ms·

Conservatism and cognitive ability are negatively correlated

23 points by finin 17y ago

russell 17y ago
I'm getting more liberal as I get older. It's good to know that I will also be getting smarter.
- hvs 17y ago
  Correlation does not imply causation.
  - jibiki 17y ago
    (Yes, that's the joke...)
tokenadult 17y ago
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 http://norvig.com/experiment-design.html Checking this blog entry point by point against Norvig's checklist would be good mental exercise.
- lutorm 17y ago
  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...
deleted 17y ago
[deleted]
space_cowboy 17y ago
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 17y ago
  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 17y ago
    > 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.
    - amr 17y ago
      By the time one earn those "cached judgements of merit", he/she is less likely to be interesting. I turn off caching and judge for myself:-) As for the study, I find it silly.
    - timr 17y ago
      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.
  - dkarl 17y ago
erlanger 17y ago
I wonder if age and raw cognitive ability are negatively correlated. I wonder if age and conservatism are positively correlated. I wonder how many significant lurking variables are ignored in the study.
patrickg-zill 17y ago
This has been bogus "research" since the 1960s.
johngunderman 17y ago
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.
robotrout 17y ago
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.
- astine 17y ago
  It doesn't really matter how smart someone is, they tend to take on the opinions of their peers unless they are very strong willed. If smart people congregate together, it's likely that they will begin to hold similar opinions. So it's no real surprise if people who are smarter hold similar opinions. Of course, there's still something to be said about open-mindedness being an attribute of minds capable of handling ambiguity.
- kingkongrevenge 17y ago
  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.
  - 17y ago
gojomo 17y ago
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 17y ago
  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'.
jgranby 17y ago
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 17y ago
  >"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.
- dkarl 17y ago
  You'll never get consensus on what "conservative" means; conservatives themselves will never agree completely, just as liberals will never agree on liberalism, Marxists on Marxism, etc. It's a political question. If we accept the paper's definition for the sake of argument, then maybe we can have an interesting discussion about it. Of course, it's a given that the definition and the means of measurement determined the results, so the definition used in the paper is extremely important to interpreting the results. Whether the definition is correct, however, isn't important.
ckinnan 17y ago
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-exit-polls.html http://elections.nytimes.com/2008/results/president/national...
tvchurch 17y ago
Who cares about this article? Let's get back to hacking, and hacking-related news.
topynate 17y ago
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.

23 points by finin 17y ago

russell 17y ago

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

hvs 17y ago
Correlation does not imply causation.
- jibiki 17y ago
  (Yes, that's the joke...)

tokenadult 17y ago

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 http://norvig.com/experiment-design.html Checking this blog entry point by point against Norvig's checklist would be good mental exercise.

lutorm 17y ago
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...

deleted 17y ago

[deleted]

space_cowboy 17y ago

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 17y ago
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 17y ago
  > 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.
  - amr 17y ago
    By the time one earn those "cached judgements of merit", he/she is less likely to be interesting. I turn off caching and judge for myself:-) As for the study, I find it silly.
  - timr 17y ago
    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.
- dkarl 17y ago

erlanger 17y ago

I wonder if age and raw cognitive ability are negatively correlated. I wonder if age and conservatism are positively correlated. I wonder how many significant lurking variables are ignored in the study.

patrickg-zill 17y ago

This has been bogus "research" since the 1960s.

johngunderman 17y ago

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.

robotrout 17y ago

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.

astine 17y ago
It doesn't really matter how smart someone is, they tend to take on the opinions of their peers unless they are very strong willed. If smart people congregate together, it's likely that they will begin to hold similar opinions. So it's no real surprise if people who are smarter hold similar opinions. Of course, there's still something to be said about open-mindedness being an attribute of minds capable of handling ambiguity.
kingkongrevenge 17y ago
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.
- 17y ago

gojomo 17y ago

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 17y ago
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'.

jgranby 17y ago

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 17y ago
>"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.
dkarl 17y ago
You'll never get consensus on what "conservative" means; conservatives themselves will never agree completely, just as liberals will never agree on liberalism, Marxists on Marxism, etc. It's a political question. If we accept the paper's definition for the sake of argument, then maybe we can have an interesting discussion about it. Of course, it's a given that the definition and the means of measurement determined the results, so the definition used in the paper is extremely important to interpreting the results. Whether the definition is correct, however, isn't important.

ckinnan 17y ago

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-exit-polls.html http://elections.nytimes.com/2008/results/president/national...

tvchurch 17y ago

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

topynate 17y ago

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.