Conservatism and cognitive ability are negatively correlated

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.

As a conservative, I concede some negative correlation could be present here. Certainly not a strong one, but perhaps a statistically measurable one.<p>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.<p>I'm not sure what someone would do with this information, other than use it to make statements that would not generally be accurate.

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.<p><a href="http://norvig.com/experiment-design.html" rel="nofollow">http://norvig.com/experiment-design.html</a><p>Checking this blog entry point by point against Norvig's checklist would be good mental exercise.

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 <i>are</i> what conservatism is about. The definition seems to be a caricature of America's religious right, but the sample is of <i>foreign</i> 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.

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.

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

Important note: the study's definition of 'conservative' does not map directly to 'conservative in domestic US politics'.<p>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).<p>Less-intellectual but traditional-hopeful-and-hard-working conservatives could easily be overrepresented in such a study population.

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.<p>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.<p>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.

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.<p><a href="http://elections.nytimes.com/2008/results/president/national-exit-polls.html" rel="nofollow">http://elections.nytimes.com/2008/results/president/national...</a>

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

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