Liberals Smarter Than Conservatives
 

On 3/10/2010 6:50 PM, Jim Austin wrote:
On Feb 26, 9:39 pm,
wrote:
http://www.time.com/time/health/arti...968042,00.html
"Study: Are Liberals Smarter Than Conservatives?"
[
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.
....
]

Probably something else many wingers have problems with: fire.
Like the wheel, money, ...

It's just so easy to lie, steal& murder. Why bother with much of
anything else, right?
--
Cliff

Actually, there might be something to that.

Even the smartest of persons equate intellectual capacity with
intellectual conformity. People are told that smart people are
liberal, and a lot of them buy it.

It takes intellectual independence to subscribe to some non-liberal,
non-left ideology while in college, and there's not a whole lot of
intellectual independence on college campuses, not even among the
smart set.


I'm curious where you get those ideas? Have you been in college lately
yourself? I was in college as of 2003 and I didn't find any of what you
said to be true. It's a fact that the people teaching college courses
are very highly educated people. All my professors had Ph.D.s. It's also
a fact that most highly educated people are also highly intelligent. Not
all of them but most. So when you are in college you are dealing with
smart and educated people. Are most of them liberal, yes. But I never
got any particular political agenda when I was there. The teachers were
teaching their particular specialty not their own ideology. So it didn't
matter if you were a liberal or a conservative they were teaching the
class and not anything else. Not only that, intellectual independence is
encouraged. The problem that conservatives have in college is that they
come up against smart people who know the facts and know how to argue an
issue. When conservatives come up against people like that they don't do
very well because most conservative arguments are not based on facts but
on beliefs. The truth is most conservatives find they are out of their
league in college and can't win an argument against most people they run
into there who are just as smart as they are and probably better
educated. Besides that most conservatives take business when in college
and they have plenty of other conservatives to hang around with.

Hawke