Thread: Study Claims Conservatives and Racist are Less Intelligence

I wonder if this study takes into account racially aware Chinese, Korean, Israelis, and Japanese, all groups with very noted and high IQs? This is just more "Pick on Whitey" nonsense.

Less intelligent people are possibly drawn to conservative ideologies because such beliefs feature "structure and order," which make it easier to comprehend a complicated world. Conservative ideologies tend to stress resistance to change and this can lead to prejudice, an experts says.

The study from Brock University in Ontario, published in Psychological Science, showed that people who score low on I.Q. tests in childhood are more likely to develop prejudiced beliefs and socially conservative politics in adulthood.

Conservatives and racists less intelligent says study - TNT Magazine

Ah, psychological "science"... ;-)

So cognitive ability can't be what controls performance in schools or society, but it can explain racism. lol

Anyway...The best way to understand what's wrong with this claim is to read the study, because one post cannot possibly contain the web of errors that has been spun.
Bright Minds and Dark Attitudes

The study doesn't actually demonstrate that lower intelligence is a CAUSE of conservatism, which is of course what everybody is trying to claim. It's just a correlation, and I think there are a couple statistical reasons for this correlation.

The simplest way to explain is, take a random group of people from society. Their average IQ will be 100. Then take a random group of college students. Their average IQ will be slightly higher, because people below a certain IQ level generally can't get into college.

People who don't have a certain amount of money also often can't or didn't go to college. That's a key difference - the lower IQ group will be poorer. So the lower-IQ group will tend to have more exposure to social problems and will actually have to live in ethnically diverse areas. So they're not measuring prejudice, they're measuring the consequences of direct experience, which is the opposite of prejudice.

The most important difference, though, is something we all know: that college is basically signing up for indoctrination. It's a rigged study - if I teach black dogs to roll over and then do a study that finds rolling over is linked to black fur I'd be laughed out of town. It's no different if we teach smarter kids to be socially liberal anti-racists and then do a study on conservatism and racism.


These are the kind of things that they're lightning quick to point out in defence of non-whites but I'm not holding my breath for the critics to jump on this one. Long story short, the study assumes (among many other things) that conservatism is an ideology, but liberalism is not. It's a textbook example of bias! What an embarrassing mistake to make in a study about prejudice!