Are conservatives who pound on liberals smart?

This man is not a conservative. 

Some conversations are just better to avoid, but I'm tired of hearing a few ideological dummies pounding on the rest of us.  The following article and related graphs may shed some insight into the reason cosmopolitan, educated, mixed-culture San Francisco Bay Area people are more likely to be more liberal than conservative. Although not considered in this article,  it is observable that most of us are  more moderate in our views, and not extreme regardless of political affiliation. Extreme is the fringe.

                                                       

      From Time Magazine, 2/26/10, John Cloud.  "Study: Are Liberals Smarter than Conservatives?" The same article was carried by American Scientist.
 
"The notion that liberals are smarter than conservatives is familiar to anyone who has spent time on a college campus. The College Democrats are said to be ugly, smug and intellectual; the College Republicans, pretty, belligerent and dumb. There's enough truth in both stereotypes that the vast majority of college students opt not to join either club. But are liberals actually smarter? A libertarian (and, as such, nonpartisan) researcher, Satoshi Kanazawa of the London School of Economics and Political Science, has just written a paper that is set to be published in March by the journal Social Psychology Quarterly. The paper investigates not only whether conservatives are dumber than liberals but also why that might be so. 


The short answer: Kanazawa's paper shows that more-intelligent people are more likely to say they are liberal. They are also less likely to say they go to religious services. These aren't entirely new findings; last year, for example, a British team found that kids with higher intelligence scores were more likely to grow into adults who vote for Liberal Democrats, even after the researchers controlled for socioeconomics. What's new in Kanazawa's paper is a provocative theory about why intelligence might correlate with liberalism. He argues that smarter people are more willing to espouse "evolutionarily novel" values — that is, values that did not exist in our ancestral environment, including weird ideas about, say, helping genetically unrelated strangers (liberalism, as Kanazawa defines it), which never would have occurred to us back when we had to hunt to feed our own clan and our only real technology was fire."  Read more.


Graph above from Discover magazine.
Related article The American, 10/21/09.

Posted by Kathy Meeh