(http://www.psychologytoday.com/) )
____________________________________
Why Liberals Are More Intelligent Than Conservatives
By Satoshi Kanazawa
Created Mar 21 2010 - 11:02pm
(http://www.psychologytoday.com/basics/laughter)
Harriet Hayes: I don't even know what the sides are in the culture
wars.
Matt Albie: Well, your side hates my side because you think we think
you
are stupid, and my side hates your side because we think you are
stupid.
Studio 60 on the Sunset Strip, Nevada Day, Part I
It is difficult to define a whole school of political ideology
precisely,
but one may reasonably define liberalism (as opposed to conservatism)
in the
contemporary United States as the genuine concern for the welfare of
genetically unrelated others and the willingness to contribute larger
proportions of private resources for the welfare of such others. In
the modern
political and economic context, this willingness usually translates
into paying
higher proportions of individual incomes in taxes toward the
government
and its social welfare programs. Liberals usually support such
social
welfare programs and higher taxes to finance them, and conservatives
usually
oppose them.
Defined as such, liberalism is evolutionarily novel. Humans (like
other
species) are evolutionarily designed to be altruistic
toward their genetic kin, their friends and
allies, and members of their deme (a group of intermarrying
individuals) or
ethnic group. They are not designed to be altruistic toward an
indefinite
number of complete strangers whom they are not likely ever to meet or
interact with. This is largely because our ancestors lived in a
small band of
50-150 genetically related individuals, and large cities and nations
with
thousands and millions of people are themselves evolutionarily novel.
The examination of the 10-volume compendium The Encyclopedia of World
Cultures, which describes all human cultures known to anthropology
(more than
1,500) in great detail, as well as extensive primary ethnographies of
traditional societies, reveals that liberalism as defined above is
absent in
these traditional cultures. While sharing of resources, especially
food, is
quite common and often mandatory among hunter-gatherer tribes, and
while
trade with neighboring tribes often takes place, there is no evidence
that
people in contemporary hunter-gatherer bands freely share resources
with
members of other tribes.
Because all members of a hunter-gatherer tribe are genetic kin or at
the
very least friends and allies for life, sharing resources among them
does not
qualify as an expression of liberalism as defined above. Given its
absence in the contemporary hunter-gatherer tribes, which are often
used as
modern-day analogs of our ancestral life, it may be reasonable to
infer that
sharing of resources with total strangers that one has never met or
is not
likely ever to meet – that is, liberalism – was not part of our
ancestral
life. Liberalism may therefore be evolutionarily novel, and the
Hypothesis
would predict that more intelligent individuals are more
likely than less intelligent individuals to espouse liberalism as a
value.
Analyses of large representative samples, from both the United States
and
the United Kingdom, confirm this prediction. In both countries, more
intelligent children are more likely to grow up to be liberals than
less
intelligent children. For example, among the American sample, those
who identify
themselves as "very liberal" in early adulthood have a mean childhood
IQ of 106.4,
whereas those who identify themselves as "very conservative" in early
adulthood
have a mean childhood IQ of 94.8.
Even though past studies show that women are more liberal than men,
and
blacks are more liberal than whites, the effect of childhood
intelligence
on adult political ideology is twice as large as the effect of either
sex
or race. So it appears that, as the Hypothesis
predicts, more intelligent individuals are more likely to
espouse the value of liberalism than less intelligent individuals,
possibly
because liberalism is evolutionarily novel and conservatism is
evolutionarily
familiar.
The primary means that citizens of capitalist democracies contribute
their
private resources for the welfare of the genetically unrelated others
is
paying taxes to the government for its social welfare programs. The
fact
that conservatives have been shown to give more money to charities
than
liberals is not inconsistent with the prediction from the
Hypothesis;
in fact, it supports the prediction. Individuals can normally
choose and select the beneficiaries of their charity donations.
For example,they can choose to give money to the victims of the
earthquake in Haiti,
because they want to help them, but not to give money to the victims
of the
earthquake in Chile, because they don't want to help them. In
contrast,
citizens do not have any control over whom the money they pay in
taxes benefit.
They cannot individually choose to pay taxes to fund Medicare,
because
they want to help elderly white people, but not AFDC, because they
don't want
to help poor black single mothers. This may precisely be why
conservatives
choose to give more money to individual charities of their choice
while
opposing higher taxes.
Incidentally, this finding substantiates one of the persistent
complaints
among conservatives. Conservatives often complain that liberals
control
the media or the show business or the academia or some other social
institutions. The Hypothesis explains why conservatives are
correct in their complaints. Liberals do control the media, or the
show
business, or the academia, among other institutions, because, apart
from a few
areas in life (such as business) where countervailing circumstances
may
prevail, liberals control all institutions. They control the
institutions
because liberals are on average more intelligent than conservatives
and thus they
are more likely to attain the highest status in any area of
(evolutionarily
novel) modern life.
".....if by a liberal they mean someone who looks ahead and not
behind,
someone who welcomes new ideas without rigid reactions, someone who
cares
about the welfare of the people- their health, their housing, their
schools,
their jobs, their civil rights, their civil liberties.. if that is
what they
mean by a "liberal" then I am proud to be a liberal. ": John F.
Kennedy
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