The English philosopher John Stuart Mill once opined that he "wasn't calling Conservatives stupid it was just that most stupid people were Conservatives." A new study by Gordon Hodson and Michael Busseri from Brock University in Ontario Canada, published on January 5, 2012, lends credence to Mills lament.
In an analysis of two large scale, nationally representative United kingdom data sets and one from the United States, the researchers found that lower general intelligence in childhood predicts greater racism in adulthood and this effect was largely mediated through conservative ideology. In the American cohort of this study, poor abstract reasoning skills were highly predictive of antihomosexual bias and were mediated through authoritarianism and low levels of contact with victims of the prejudicial attitudes and beliefs.
Hodson and Busseri (2012) go on to identify reasons for this result. Individuals who endorse social conservatism have greater cognitive rigidity. In addition those who endorse right-wing ideologies are more fearful and anxious that out-groups will cause social disintegration of moral standards and traditions. Individuals with lower cognitive abilities may gravitate to social conservatism as a source of stability through demands for maintenenace of the staus quo. These also provide the rationale for the authoritarianism of right wing conservative groups, such as Rush Limbaugh's statements about telling his "Dittoheads" what to think."
The authors point out that people with lower cognitive ability and lower ability to use abstract reasoning, would have difficulties being able to "walk a mile in someone else's shoes. It is also responsible for lack of empathy and understanding another persons perspective. These things all seem to require higher order abstract reasoning.
The study notes that in the past studies of prejudice have always focused on the behavior. There has been very little study of the link between prejudice and intelligence. The authors conclude their study by noting that concervative ideology represents a critical pathway through which lower childhood intelligence provides a strong predictor of prejudice. These ideologies perpetuate gross inequality by demands for maintenance of the status quo for protection of a sense of stability and order. These results are true independently of education and socioeonomic status.
Exposing right-wing concervative ideology and lack of inter-group contact as the sources of the connection between lower intelligence, particularly in terms of abstract reasoning, and prejudice, advances our understanding of prejudice, while giving us new knowledge suggesting new alternatives for confronting prejudice than those unsuccessfully tried so far.
the online version of this study can be found at:
http://pss.sagepub.com/content/early/2012/01/04/0956797611421206
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