Posted on 08/27/2012 1:46:08 PM PDT by SeekAndFind
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.
(Excerpt) Read more at time.com ...
If one needs an answer or a response, it might be that reality itself is more often than not "conservative." That's to say that liberals may pick up quickly on unorthodox theories, but people and events tend to follow the same patterns -- patterns which correspond to old and time-worn conservative ways of thinking.
You could go back to James Burnham's adoption (through Pareto) of Machiavelli's division of political actors into foxes and lions. The foxes are clever and adaptive and good at thinking on their feet. They have what Pareto called the "instinct for combinations."
The lions are slower moving and more cautious, but also more reliable, and brave in standing by tried and true old values. According to Pareto, they are dominated by the "instinct for persistent aggregates." The foxes are (more or less) liberal and the lions tend (other things being held equal) to be conservatives.
Social scientists really haven't moved very far in this matter beyond Machiavelli's 500 year old speculations. But beware: to survive in political life (as Machiavelli knew) one has to be both lion and fox, and to know when to be a lion and when to be a fox.
Self id is never a good measure because it doesn’t adjust for peer group bias. There was a study not long ago that showed that many who self id as liberal really are not when you query them on a break down of what they really believe. The reason sciences skew towards liberalism is because the liberals have taken over the sciences & academia. If you want to get ahead in academia or the sciences their is a benefit to identifying as a liberal. If you measured attitudes 50 to 100 years ago you would undoubtedly find conservatives dominating the sciences and society. Also there is the age factor. People tend to identify as more conservative as they take on more responsibility, get married, etc.
This study is really more a study in typical one dimensional studies that dominate survey pseudo-science which is usually designed to of course make liberals feel good about themselves. A few years ago there was a study that showed that conservatives are more engaged and have a wider breadth of knowledge than their liberal counterparts.
I’m not worried. This is just another attempt to leverage social pressure to make the young in particular feel more comfortable about identifying as a liberal.
As long as the studies are done by liberals (I don’t buy the “libertarian” dodge in the story), conservatives will always be as stupid as cranberries.
Are they intelligent or are they intellectual? There is a difference. And when did they stop calling it the theory of evolution? When and where did they find proof?
I put two blog posts up on FR which you might find interesting, if you go for this kind of stuff. Liberals are just the r-selected psychologies within our species. For the full theory, click on my profile.
http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-bloggers/2922000/posts
http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-bloggers/2923050/posts
Well that would require people who have common sense to do the study and since most studies are done by those who haven’t even heard of the words and forget if they even know the meaning, its not hard to figure out why they have never differentiated between book smarts and common sense. You can also chalk that up to our relatively peaceful existence we have had in our country. One doesn’t need much common sense when you live in an era of plenty and things just happen to be on the shelf whenever you go into a store, energy at the pump or outlet, etc. Our school system has really accelerated this decline in real world knowledge and to be frank, good old fashion curiosity. Welcome to the Brave New World, well at least for as long as it lasts since the common sense that build our technological society, is needed to sustain it and to grow it. I am not looking forward to the downward slide, 20th century Europe was no picnic.
In case after case the politicians threaten to cut that which hurts the most in order to frighten voters into going along with their schemes. It's easy for them when they have created such a large voting block of moochers.
AWESOME STATEMENT!
To the fact that most if not all of the DUmmies cannot post anything without cursing all one needs to do is go by their leader Skinner. He started a thread with just one word, which would be enough to get banned here, and that thread title was “F**K”.
That right there showes to me the intelligence of the liberal.
In a way they are. They are sustaining themselves like leeches off of poor saps who keep working.
Go Galt as best you can. Starve the leeches.
Ideally we could really probably take the whole thing down. Work hard a few years, save up enough not to work 2-3 years, be fired from work, collect unemployment and other benefits as long as possible. Overwhelm the system until it collapses.””
Smart does not equate to lazy and parasitic. You have some good ideas here, if we could only reach critical mass and overwhelm the system.
If all makers stopped generating taxable income we could shut down the entitlement system. When mostly everyone is taking and nobody’s making, the benefits, they must stop flowing. What’s easier to cut, benefits from losers that don’t work and want to mooch off soceity, or military defense and the genuinely needy like the elderly and truly disabled. Moochers get cut off.
Makers going galt can form their own networks over craigslist to barter for equivalent trades and equivalent services (ie helping out a friend). Can find useful free stuff out there. Easy peasy.
here’s a link showing the numerous flaws of the study http://ironshrink.com/2010/04/are-liberals-more-intelligent-than-conservatives-another-broken-study-says-it-is-so/
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