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| A billboard put up by a 'birther' campaigner convinced that President Obama was not born in the United States. (photo: Bob Daemmrich/Alamy) |
08 February 12
elf-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. READ MORE
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