Is A Person’s IQ Related To Their Political Ideology?
The study of intelligence is one of the areas that has generated the most clashes of points of view both in psychology and in social sciences in general.
Defining what intelligence is is in itself a battlefield, and if it is also intended to relate the concept of IQ with the political ideology of each person, the controversy is served. The reason is clear: a high IQ is a trait that all defenders of political positions want to associate with their cause, because intelligence is not simply a personal characteristic, but also carries a strong moral value: being intelligent is good.
But, beyond all the biased opinions and value judgments, there are some investigations that, although they have limitations and could be victims of certain biases in their design, They try to address the issue of the relationship between IQ and political ideology in the least subjective way possible. So… are people on the left smarter? The cento ones, perhaps? Let’s see what has been found through these studies.
The left, the right and their relationship with the IQ
In general, if we had to say whether people on the left or right were more intelligent and we only had to give an answer without going into details, we would have to admit that There are more studies that link higher IQ with left-wing ideologies than studies that do the same with right-wing positions. However, within this simplistic view of the results obtained through research there are several things that must be taken into account.
The first of them is that there are many studies that have reached contradictory results. There are two possible reasons that explain this. The first is that Classifying political ideologies into “left and right” is a way of oversimplifying reality, and the second is that the culture of each country and region seems to play a very important role in the way in which intelligence and ideology are related. Next we will see what this means.
What does it mean to be conservative?
One of the best-known theories when it comes to explaining how IQ and political positioning interact is the one that distinguishes between progressive and conservatives.
According to Lazar Stankov, for example, Conservative people are characterized by a certain cognitive rigidity: They value very positively the constant following of the rules and respect for authority, traditions and orthodoxy when interpreting texts. In short, they adopt a framework of rules that is already given to them by certain authorities or pressure groups.
This way of following rules can be seen as the antithesis of the concept of intelligence, which is related to the ability to find creative ways to behave in novel situations through a good dose of mental agility, which is why Stankov and other researchers have proposed that people with less intelligence are more seduced by conservative political positions. Besides, Stankov himself found correlations between a low IQ and a high score in conservatism so this theory was reinforced.
However… Doesn’t this relationship between ideology and intelligence depend on the cultural context of each country? Information is now available from studies that indicate how the history of a country or region affects how the dominant “default” ideology is more to the right or to the left. Thus, while in Brazil there is a strong attachment to ideological centralism due to the country’s historical instability, in Russia conservatism is more related to Stalin’s orthodox communism, while in the US the conservative character is related to anti-communism and the defense of military interventions outside the country.
Another aspect to take into account when seeing how IQ and ideology are related is the following question: can it be said that there is only one left and only one right? There are several studies that show that within the groups of people identified as conservative or progressive there are details that show to what extent these two categories have subgroups that are very different from each other. For example, You can be economically liberal and socially conservative This is what happens, for example, in people ascribed to right-wing positions related to the rejection of non-Western ways of life and left-wing values who in turn defend the existence of the free circulation of money.
At the same time, people who see themselves as defenders of centrist policies can be seen as members of a third group with their own characteristics that distinguish them from people with extreme ideologies. In this sense, there are both studies that relate a high IQ with a moderate center position and others that find the opposite phenomenon: high intelligence associated with people with more radical positions on both the right and the left. Rindermann and his team of researchers found the first type of result, while Kemmelmeier found the second.
Why is this happening? There are many possible factors that could explain this difference, but one of them possibly has to do with the characteristics of the groups of people who were studied in each of these studies.
Sophisticated political tastes
While Rindermann, who saw a relationship between high IQ and moderate ideology, studied people with an average level of intelligence, Kemmelmeier studied people with higher than normal IQs
This would suggest that people with a normal intellectual level would be more seduced by what is moderate, while the most intelligent would be more likely to explore more sophisticated ideas that are far from what is socially established, finding ways in which these can help them. seduce. It is a probable explanation, since also A relationship has been found between a high IQ and a greater tendency to affirm that they have well-defined political positions while people without a defined political ideology tend to obtain lower intelligence scores.
In conclusion
Although very interesting results have been obtained throughout various investigations, conclusive results have not yet been obtained that allow us to affirm with a good degree of security that people of a certain political ideology are more intelligent.
Cultural factors and nuances within political spectrums are so important that it is difficult to find universal trends.
