somalia is a conservative paradise. quite projecting.
gee duh, whoda ever thunk:conservatism has been linked to low
i.q.'s:)))Low-intelligence adults tend to gravitate toward socially
conservative ideologies the study found:Those ideologies in turn
stress hierarchy/resistance to change attitudes that can contribute to
prejudice
and you have proven these articles correct:))))))))))))))))))))))))))
Low IQ & Conservative Beliefs Linked to Prejudice
By Stephanie Pappas | LiveScience.com – 3 hrs ago
• 20 photos - Wed, Jan 25, 2012
See latest photos »
There's no gentle way to put it: People who give in to racism and
prejudice may simply be dumb, according to a new study that is bound
to stir public controversy.
The research finds that children with low intelligence are more likely
to hold prejudiced attitudes as adults. These findings point to a
vicious cycle, according to lead researcher Gordon Hodson, a
psychologist at Brock University in Ontario. Low-intelligence adults
tend to gravitate toward socially conservative ideologies, the study
found. Those ideologies, in turn, stress hierarchy and resistance to
change, attitudes that can contribute to prejudice, Hodson wrote in an
email to LiveScience.
"Prejudice is extremely complex and multifaceted, making it critical
that any factors contributing to bias are uncovered and understood,"
he said.
Controversy ahead
The findings combine three hot-button topics.
"They've pulled off the trifecta of controversial topics," said Brian
Nosek, a social and cognitive psychologist at the University of
Virginia who was not involved in the study. "When one selects
intelligence, political ideology and racism and looks at any of the
relationships between those three variables, it's bound to upset
somebody."
Polling data and social and political science research do show that
prejudice is more common in those who hold right-wing ideals that
those of other political persuasions, Nosek told LiveScience. [7
Thoughts That Are Bad For You]
"The unique contribution here is trying to make some progress on the
most challenging aspect of this," Nosek said, referring to the new
study. "It's not that a relationship like that exists, but why it
exists."
Brains and bias
Earlier studies have found links between low levels of education and
higher levels of prejudice, Hodson said, so studying intelligence
seemed a logical next step. The researchers turned to two studies of
citizens in the United Kingdom, one that has followed babies since
their births in March 1958, and another that did the same for babies
born in April 1970. The children in the studies had their intelligence
assessed at age 10 or 11; as adults ages 30 or 33, their levels of
social conservatism and racism were measured. [Life's Extremes:
Democrat vs. Republican]
In the first study, verbal and nonverbal intelligence was measured
using tests that asked people to find similarities and differences
between words, shapes and symbols. The second study measured cognitive
abilities in four ways, including number recall, shape-drawing tasks,
defining words and identifying patterns and similarities among words.
Average IQ is set at 100.
Social conservatives were defined as people who agreed with a laundry
list of statements such as "Family life suffers if mum is working full-
time," and "Schools should teach children to obey authority."
Attitudes toward other races were captured by measuring agreement with
statements such as "I wouldn't mind working with people from other
races." (These questions measured overt prejudiced attitudes, but most
people, no matter how egalitarian, do hold unconscious racial biases;
Hodson's work can't speak to this "underground" racism.)
As suspected, low intelligence in childhood corresponded with racism
in adulthood. But the factor that explained the relationship between
these two variables was political: When researchers included social
conservatism in the analysis, those ideologies accounted for much of
the link between brains and bias.
People with lower cognitive abilities also had less contact with
people of other races.
"This finding is consistent with recent research demonstrating that
intergroup contact is mentally challenging and cognitively draining,
and consistent with findings that contact reduces prejudice," said
Hodson, who along with his colleagues published these results online
Jan. 5 in the journal Psychological Science.
A study of averages
Hodson was quick to note that the despite the link found between low
intelligence and social conservatism, the researchers aren't implying
that all liberals are brilliant and all conservatives stupid. The
research is a study of averages over large groups, he said.
"There are multiple examples of very bright conservatives and not-so-
bright liberals, and many examples of very principled conservatives
and very intolerant liberals," Hodson said.
Nosek gave another example to illustrate the dangers of taking the
findings too literally.
"We can say definitively men are taller than women on average," he
said. "But you can't say if you take a random man and you take a
random woman that the man is going to be taller. There's plenty of
overlap."
Nonetheless, there is reason to believe that strict right-wing
ideology might appeal to those who have trouble grasping the
complexity of the world.
"Socially conservative ideologies tend to offer structure and order,"
Hodson said, explaining why these beliefs might draw those with low
intelligence. "Unfortunately, many of these features can also
contribute to prejudice."
In another study, this one in the United States, Hodson and Busseri
compared 254 people with the same amount of education but different
levels of ability in abstract reasoning. They found that what applies
to racism may also apply to homophobia. People who were poorer at
abstract reasoning were more likely to exhibit prejudice against gays.
As in the U.K. citizens, a lack of contact with gays and more
acceptance of right-wing authoritarianism explained the link. [5 Myths
About Gay People Debunked]
Simple viewpoints
Hodson and Busseri's explanation of their findings is reasonable,
Nosek said, but it is correlational. That means the researchers didn't
conclusively prove that the low intelligence caused the later
prejudice. To do that, you'd have to somehow randomly assign otherwise
identical people to be smart or dumb, liberal or conservative. Those
sorts of studies obviously aren't possible.
The researchers controlled for factors such as education and
socioeconomic status, making their case stronger, Nosek said. But
there are other possible explanations that fit the data. For example,
Nosek said, a study of left-wing liberals with stereotypically naïve
views like "every kid is a genius in his or her own way," might find
that people who hold these attitudes are also less bright. In other
words, it might not be a particular ideology that is linked to
stupidity, but extremist views in general.
"My speculation is that it's not as simple as their model presents
it," Nosek said. "I think that lower cognitive capacity can lead to
multiple simple ways to represent the world, and one of those can be
embodied in a right-wing ideology where 'People I don't know are
threats' and 'The world is a dangerous place'. ... Another simple way
would be to just assume everybody is wonderful."
Prejudice is of particular interest because understanding the roots of
racism and bias could help eliminate them, Hodson said. For example,
he said, many anti-prejudice programs encourage participants to see
things from another group's point of view. That mental exercise may be
too taxing for people of low IQ.
"There may be cognitive limits in the ability to take the perspective
of others, particularly foreigners," Hodson said. "Much of the present
research literature suggests that our prejudices are primarily
emotional in origin rather than cognitive. These two pieces of
information suggest that it might be particularly fruitful for
researchers to consider strategies to change feelings toward
outgroups," rather than thoughts.
You can follow LiveScience senior writer Stephanie Pappas on Twitter
@sipappas. Follow LiveScience for the latest in science news and
discoveries on Twitter @livescience and on Facebook.
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
its so easy to fool a conservative:after all, conservatism is a form
of mental illness:)a 2007 selective exposure study found Republicans
overwhelmingly chose to read fake articles labeled with the Fox News
logo:but chose a story running under a CNN or NPR logo just 10
percent
of the time
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/chris-mooney/want-to-understand-republ_...
Chris Mooney
Author, 'The Republican War on Science' and 'The
Republican Brain'
Want to Understand Republicans? First Understand Evolution
Posted:
02/ 8/2012 10:26 am
Earlier this week, yesterday's Republican primary champ Rick Santorum
called global warming a "hoax." Yes, a hoax. In other words,
apparently scientists are in a global cabal to needlessly alarm us
about what's happening with the climate -- and why would they do such
a thing?
Well, presumably to help advance an economy-choking agenda
of global
governance -- or perhaps, to line their own pockets with
government
research grants. Seriously.
Santorum's absurd global
warming conspiracy theory is the kind of
thing that absolutely
outrages liberals -- but to my mind, they really
ought to be getting
used to it by now. From global warming denial to
claims about "death
panels" to baseless fears about inflation, it
often seems there are
so many factually wrong claims on the political
right that those who
make them live in a different reality.
So here's an idea: Maybe they
actually do. And maybe we can look to
science itself -- albeit,
ironically, a body of science whose
fundamental premise (the theory
of evolution) most Republicans deny
-- to help understand why it is
that they view the world so
differently.
In my last piece here, I
commented on the growing body of research
suggesting that the
difference between liberals and conservatives is
not merely
ideological in nature. Rather, it seems more deeply rooted
in
psychology and the brain -- with ideology itself emerging as a kind
of by-product of fundamentally different patterns of perceiving and
responding to the world that spill over into many aspects of life,
not
just the political.
To back this up, I listed seven published
studies showing a consistent
set of physiological, brain, and
"attentional" differences between
liberals and conservatives. Later
on my blog, I listed no less than
eleven studies showing genetic
differences as well.
Last month, yet another scientific paper on this
subject came out --
from the National Science Foundation-supported
political physiology
laboratory at the University of Nebraska-
Lincoln. The work, published
in Philosophical Transactions of the
Royal Society B (free version
here), goes further still in helping us
understand how biological and
physiological differences between
liberals and conservatives may lead
to very different patterns of
political behavior.
As the new research suggests, conservatism is
largely a defensive
ideology -- and therefore, much more appealing to
people who go
through life sensitive and highly attuned to aversive
or threatening
aspects of their environments. By contrast, liberalism
can be thought
of as an exploratory ideology -- much more appealing
to people who go
through life trying things out and seeking the new.
All of this is reflected, in a measurable way, in the physiological
responses that liberals and conservatives show to emotionally
evocative but otherwise entirely apolitical images -- and also to
images of politicians, either on their own side or from across the
aisle.
To show as much, the Nebraska-Lincoln researchers had liberals
and
conservatives look at varying combinations of images that were
meant
to excite different emotions. There were images that caused
fear and
disgust -- a spider crawling on a person's face, maggots in
an open
wound -- but also images that made you feel happy: a smiling
child, a
bunny rabbit. The researchers also mixed in images of
liberal and
conservative politicians -- Bill and Hillary Clinton,
Ronald Reagan
and George W. Bush.
While they did all of this, the
scientists measured the subjects'
"skin conductance" -- the
moistening of their sweat glands, an
indication of sympathetic
nervous system arousal -- as well as where
their eyes went first and
how long they stayed there.
The difference was striking:
Conservatives showed much stronger skin
responses to negative images,
compared with the positive ones.
Liberals showed the opposite. And
when the scientists turned to
studying eye gaze or "attentional"
patterns, they found that
conservatives looked much more quickly at
negative or threatening
images, and spent more time fixating on them.
Liberals, in contrast,
were less quickly drawn to negative images --
and spent more time
looking at positive ones.
Similar things have
been found before -- but the big breakthrough in
the new study was
showing that these tendencies carried over perfectly
to the different
sides' responses to images of politicians.
Conservatives had stronger
rapid fire physiological responses to
images of Bill and Hillary
Clinton -- apparently perceiving them much
as they perceive a threat.
By contrast, liberals showed stronger
responses to the same two
politicians, apparently perceiving them much
as they perceive an
appetitive or positive stimulus.
As the authors concluded, "The
aversive in life is more
physiologically and cognitively tangible to
some people and they tend
to gravitate to the political right."
What
does this mean?
To my mind, it means it is high time to grapple with
a fact that we
like to conveniently ignore: the left and the right
are deeply
asymmetrical actors in our politics. If we could
acknowledge this, it
might explain an awful lot.
For instance,
consider a few observations that seem to take on new
resonance in
light of the latest research:
The Tea Party hates President Obama
much more intensely than liberals
love him. Or to state things less
judgmentally, there is an "intensity
gap," as the Pew Research Center
puts it, between the right's
political base and that of the left.
As
of last May, for instance, 84 percent of staunch conservatives
strongly disapproved of Obama's job performance, but only 64 percent
of solid liberals approved of it. Meanwhile, 70 percent of staunch
conservatives viewed Obama very unfavorably, but only 45 percent of
solid liberals had very favorable views of him.
What's going on here?
To conservatives, the new research implies,
President Obama may
literally be an aversive and threatening stimuli
(or, perhaps, a
disgust-evoking one). They fixate on him, and respond
to him,
physiologically, in a defensive fashion.
For liberals, in contrast,
Obama was surely once very appealing,
perhaps circa 2008, and excited
positive and appetitive emotions. But
they've since grown bored or
disillusioned with him and gone on to
sample many other things in the
environment -- like Occupy Wall Street
-- always exploring and
searching for the new. (All of which,
incidentally, may translate
into a very serious electoral disadvantage
this fall.)
Conservatives
opt for Fox News much more strongly than liberals opt
for any single
outlet. In a 2007 "selective exposure" study by
Stanford researcher
Shanto Iyengar, it was found Republicans
overwhelmingly chose to read
fake articles labeled with the "Fox News"
logo, but chose a story
running under a CNN or NPR logo just 10
percent of the time. By
contrast, Democrats in the study didn't like
Fox, but also didn't
show a strong affinity for a particular
alternative news source --
they seemed to sample information sources
more widely.
What's going
on here? One possibility is that in a political
environment filled
with perceived threats, Fox helps conservatives
feel secure by giving
them ideologically consistent and reassuring
information.
Alternatively, perhaps Fox's constant negative framing of
liberals,
and of other news sources, appeals to or even excites
conservatives,
whipping them up for political battle.
Either way, liberals just
don't seem to need an outlet like Fox.
Again, they're busy chasing
after the new and different -- out
exploring, rather than hunkering
down.
The big question lying behind all this, of course, is why some
people
would have stronger and quicker responses than others to that
which is
perceived as negative and threatening (and disgusting). Or
alternatively, why some people -- liberals -- would be less threat
aversive than others. For as the University of Nebraska-Lincoln
researchers note: "given the compelling evolutionary logic for
organisms to be overly sensitive to aversive stimuli, it may be that
those on the political left are more out of step with adaptive
behaviors."
And thus are we drawn to the only context in which we can
make any
sense of any of this -- the understanding that we human
primates
evolved. As such, these rapid-fire responses to aversive
stimuli are
something we share with other animals -- a core part of
our life-
saving biological wiring.
And apparently, they differ in
strength and intensity from person to
person -- in turn triggering
political differences in modern
democracies. Who knew?
For now, I'll
leave it to others to speculate on the root causes of
these
differences. But whatever those may be, the perceptual gap
between
left and right certainly seems less than "adaptive" at the
present
moment. It may be the fault of biology that we're now
misfiring so
very badly -- clashing in ways that, as with the debt
ceiling fiasco,
could have gravely harmed everybody in America,
regardless of their
particular ideology.
The Nebraska-Lincoln scientists interpret their
results as a powerful
argument in favor of greater political
tolerance and understanding --
and I agree with them. Politics isn't
war, and it isn't zero sum. It
requires negotiation and compromise.
Surely our public debates should
be guided by something more than
threat responses and fight-or-flight.
So how do we get beyond our
political biology? Well, the implication
for liberals seems obvious:
If they want to fare better politically,
they need to learn to go
against their instincts and stay focused and
committed.
And the
lesson for conservatives? Well, here it is tougher. You see,
first
we'd have to get them to accept something they often view as
aversive
and threatening: The theory of evolution.
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
it is based on empirical fact:the journal Psychological Science which
revealed that people with conservative beliefs are likely to be of
low
intelligence:Conservatism Thrives on Low Intelligence/Poor
Information:the effects of the Conservative appeal to stupidity are
making themselves felt
http://www.alternet.org/story/154082/Conservatism_Thrives_on_Low_Inte...
Conservatism Thrives on Low Intelligence and Poor Information
There
is plenty of research showing that low general intelligence in
childhood predicts greater prejudice towards people of different
ethnicity or sexuality in adulthood.
February 12, 2012 |
Self-deprecating, too liberal for their own good, today's
progressives stand back and watch, hands over their mouths, as the
social vivisectionists of the right slice up a living society to see
if its component parts can survive in isolation. Tied up in knots of
reticence and self-doubt, they will not shout stop. Doing so requires
an act of interruption, of presumption, for which they no longer
possess a vocabulary.
Perhaps it is in the same spirit of liberal
constipation that, with
the exception of Charlie Brooker, we have
been too polite to mention
the Canadian study published last month in
the journal Psychological
Science, which revealed that people with
conservative beliefs are
likely to be of low intelligence.
Paradoxically it was the Daily Mail
that brought it to the attention
of British readers last week. It
feels crude, illiberal to point out
that the other side is, on
average, more stupid than our own. But
this, the study suggests, is
not unfounded generalisation but
empirical fact.
It is by no means the first such paper. There is
plenty of research
showing that low general intelligence in childhood
predicts greater
prejudice towards people of different ethnicity or
sexuality in
adulthood. Open-mindedness, flexibility, trust in other
people: all
these require certain cognitive abilities. Understanding
and accepting
others – particularly "different" others – requires an
enhanced
capacity for abstract thinking.
But, drawing on a sample
size of several thousand, correcting for both
education and
socioeconomic status, the new study looks embarrassingly
robust.
Importantly, it shows that prejudice tends not to arise
directly from
low intelligence but from the conservative ideologies to
which people
of low intelligence are drawn. Conservative ideology is
the "critical
pathway" from low intelligence to racism. Those with low
cognitive
abilities are attracted to "rightwing ideologies that
promote
coherence and order" and "emphasise the maintenance of the
status
quo". Even for someone not yet renowned for liberal reticence,
this
feels hard to write.
This is not to suggest that all conservatives
are stupid. There are
some very clever people in government, advising
politicians, running
thinktanks and writing for newspapers, who have
acquired power and
influence by promoting rightwing ideologies.
But
what we now see among their parties – however intelligent their
guiding spirits may be – is the abandonment of any pretence of high-
minded conservatism. On both sides of the Atlantic, conservative
strategists have discovered that there is no pool so shallow that
several million people won't drown in it. Whether they are promoting
the idea that Barack Obama was not born in the US, that man-made
climate change is an eco-fascist-communist-anarchist conspiracy, or
that the deficit results from the greed of the poor, they now appeal
to the basest, stupidest impulses, and find that it does them no harm
in the polls.
Don't take my word for it. Listen to what two former
Republican
ideologues, David Frum and Mike Lofgren, have been saying.
Frum warns
that "conservatives have built a whole alternative
knowledge system,
with its own facts, its own history, its own laws
of economics". The
result is a "shift to ever more extreme, ever more
fantasy-based
ideology" which has "ominous real-world consequences
for American
society".
Lofgren complains that "the crackpot outliers
of two decades ago have
become the vital centre today". The
Republican party, with its
"prevailing anti-intellectualism and
hostility to science" is
appealing to what he calls the "low-
information voter", or the
"misinformation voter". While most office
holders probably don't
believe the "reactionary and paranoid
claptrap" they peddle, "they
cynically feed the worst instincts of
their fearful and angry low-
information political base".
The
madness hasn't gone as far in the UK, but the effects of the
Conservative appeal to stupidity are making themselves felt. This
week
the Guardian reported that recipients of disability benefits,
scapegoated by the government as scroungers, blamed for the
deficit, now find themselves subject to a new level of hostility and
threats from other people.
These are the perfect conditions for a
billionaires' feeding frenzy.
Any party elected by misinformed,
suggestible voters becomes a vehicle
for undisclosed interests. A tax
break for the 1% is dressed up as
freedom for the 99%. The regulation
that prevents big banks and
corporations exploiting us becomes an
assault on the working man and
woman. Those of us who discuss man-
made climate change are cast as
elitists by people who happily
embrace the claims of Lord
Monckton, Lord Lawson or thinktanks funded
by ExxonMobil or the Koch
brothers: now the authentic voices of the
working class.
But when I survey this wreckage I wonder who the real
idiots are.
Confronted with mass discontent, the once-progressive
major parties,
as Thomas Frank laments in his latest book Pity the
Billionaire,
triangulate and accommodate, hesitate and prevaricate,
muzzled by what
he calls "terminal niceness". They fail to produce a
coherent analysis
of what has gone wrong and why, or to make an
uncluttered case for
social justice, redistribution and regulation.
The conceptual
stupidities of conservatism are matched by the
strategic stupidities
of liberalism.
Yes, conservatism thrives on
low intelligence and poor information.
But the liberals in politics
on both sides of the Atlantic continue to
back off, yielding to the
supremacy of the stupid. It's turkeys all
the way down.
----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
i am shocked:not only has conservatism been tied to low I.Q./low
functioning individuals/but also research shows that low-effort
thought promotes political conservatism:political viewpoints of
patrons with high blood alcohol levels were more likely to be
conservative
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/04/07/conservative-politics-low-effort-thinking_n_1410448.html?ref=mostpopular
Conservative Politics, 'Low-Effort' Thinking Linked In New Study
The Huffington Post | By David Freeman
Posted: 04/ 9/2012 10:44 am Updated: 04/ 9/2012 2:16 pm
Conservatives and liberals don't seem to agree about much, and they
might not agree about recent studies linking conservatism to low
intelligence and "low-effort" thinking.
As The Huffington Post reported in February, a study published in the
journal "Psychological Science" showed that children who score low on
intelligence tests gravitate toward socially conservative political
views in adulthood--perhaps because conservative ideologies stress
"structure and order" that make it easier to understand a complicated
world.
Ouch.
And now there's the new study linking conservative ideologies to "low-
effort" thinking.
"People endorse conservative ideology more when they have to give a
first or fast response," the study's lead author, University of
Arkansas psychologist Dr. Scott Eidelman, said in a written statement
released by the university.
Does the finding suggest that conservatives are lazy thinkers?
"Not quite," Dr. Eidelman told The Huffington Post in an email. "Our
research shows that low-effort thought promotes political
conservatism, not that political conservatives use low-effort
thinking."
For the study, a team of psychologists led by Dr. Eidelman asked
people about their political viewpoints in a bar and in a laboratory
setting.
Bar patrons were asked about social issues before blowing into a
Breathalyzer. As it turned out, the political viewpoints of patrons
with high blood alcohol levels were more likely to be conservative
than were those of patrons whose blood alcohol levels were low.
But it wasn't just the alcohol talking, according to the statement.
When the researchers conducted similar interviews in the lab, they
found that people who were asked to evaluate political ideas quickly
or while distracted were more likely to express conservative
viewpoints.
"Keeping people from thinking too much...or just asking them to
deliberate or consider information in a cursory manner can impact
people's political attitudes, and in a way that consistently promotes
political conservatism," Dr. Eidelman said in the email.
The study was published online in the journal "Personality and Social
Psychology Bulletin."
What do you think? Are conservatives less intelligent than liberals--
or more intelligent? And is conservatism a matter of lazy thinking?