Lack Of Intelligence Doesn't Hurt Conservative Candidates With Conservative Voters

"You don't have to pass an IQ test to be in the Senate, though," giggled conservative Arkansas Senator Mark Pryor on the big screen. He was unseated by an undistinguished right-wing extremist, Tom Cotton, 476,309 (56.5%) to 332,669 (39.5%). I don't know how much his remarks to Bill Maher played into his defeat. I don't know how much Arkansas voters care about IQ test results or intelligence in their elected officials at all for that matter. And this week, a neighboring state's governor, Rick Perry, was playing up on that sentiment in his "I'm back and I'm different this time" plea for support in his quest for the 2016 GOP presidential nomination. Perry's polling support hovers around 2% among GOP voters-- better than Rick Santorum, tied with Bobby Jindal.

But Perry's handlers are telling big donors he's kicked his drug addiction problems and he's telling interviewers his awkward, stumbling nature and low IQ don't matter in a Republican primary. He says "life experience is more important than book smarts in a president." Book smarts, though, isn't what IQ measures. IQ measures human intelligence and conservatives, by nature, are extremely distrustful of any such thing. General intelligence refers to the ability to reason deductively or inductively, think abstractly, use analogies, synthesize information, and apply it to new domains. We'll get to that in a minute. Back to Perry first.

"Running for the presidency's not an IQ test. It is a test of an individual's resolve. It's a test of an individual's philosophy. It's a test of an individual's life's experiences," Perry said in an interview at the Governor's Mansion, which he's leaving as his term ends. "And I think Americans are really ready for a leader that will give them a great hope about the future."

Perry said he probably has less "margin for error" after he famously couldn't remember one of the federal agencies he said he'd ax during a November 2011 Republican debate. But "I think, over the course of the last two years, people realize that what they saw in 2011 is certainly not the person they're looking at at 2013, 2014, 2015," he said.

Perry also said he'd have no problem convincing Republicans that he can win in 2016, saying potential backers "are pouring in here to sit down with us, to talk to us."

"The policy individuals that have said 'listen, we want to come help you become even better prepared as we go forward' is already the answer to that," he said.

A few years ago Professor Satoshi Kanazawa of the London School of Economics published a piece, Why Liberals And Atheists Are More Intelligent, in the Social Psychology Quarterly that turned political conservatives off to intelligence permanently. His study found that higher intelligence directly correlates with liberal political ideology. "General intelligence, the ability to think and reason, endowed our ancestors with advantages in solving evolutionarily novel problems for which they did not have innate solutions," says Kanazawa. "As a result, more intelligent people are more likely to recognize and understand such novel entities and situations than less intelligent people, and some of these entities and situations are preferences, values, and lifestyles." He argues that humans are evolutionarily designed to be conservative, caring mostly about their family and friends, and being liberal, caring about an indefinite number of genetically unrelated strangers they never meet or interact with, is evolutionarily novel. So more intelligent children may be more likely to grow up to be liberals. Here's how Time covered the report back in 2010, noting that Kanazawa is a libertarian and non-partisan.

The notion that liberals are smarter than conservatives is familiar to anyone who has spent time on a college campus. The College Democrats are said to be ugly, smug and intellectual; the College Republicans, pretty, belligerent and dumb. There's enough truth in both stereotypes that the vast majority of college students opt not to join either club.

...What's new in Kanazawa's paper is a provocative theory about why intelligence might correlate with liberalism. He argues that smarter people are more willing to espouse "evolutionarily novel" values-- that is, values that did not exist in our ancestral environment, including weird ideas about, say, helping genetically unrelated strangers (liberalism, as Kanazawa defines it), which never would have occurred to us back when we had to hunt to feed our own clan and our only real technology was fire.

Kanazawa offers this view of how such novel values sprang up in our ancestors: Imagine you are a caveman (if it helps, you are wearing a loincloth and have never shaved). Lightning strikes a tree near your cave, and fire threatens. What do you do? Natural selection would have favored the smart specimen who could quickly conceive answers to such a problem (or other rare catastrophes like sudden drought or flood), even if-- or maybe especially if-- those answers were unusual ones that few others in your tribe could generate. So, the theory goes, genes for intelligence got wrapped up with genes for unnatural thinking.

It's an elegant theory, but based on Kanazawa's own evidence, I'm not sure he's right. In his paper, Kanazawa begins by noting, accurately, that psychologists don't have a good understanding of why people embrace the values they do. Many kids share their parents' values, but at the same time many adolescents define themselves in opposition to what their parents believe. We know that most people firm up their values when they are in their 20s, but some people experience conversions to new religions, new political parties, new artistic tastes and even new cuisines after middle age. As Kanazawa notes, this multiplicity of views-- a multiplicity you find within both cultures and individuals-- is one reason economists have largely abandoned the study of values with a single Latin phrase, De gustibus non est disputandum: there's no accounting for taste.

Kanazawa doesn't disagree, but he believes scientists can account for whether people like new tastes or old, radical tastes or Establishment ones. He points out that there's a strong correlation between liberalism and openness to new kinds of experiences. But openness to new experience isn't necessarily intelligent (cocaine is fun; accidental cocaine overdose is not).

So are liberals smarter? Kanazawa quotes from two surveys that support the hypothesis that liberals are more intelligent. One is the National Longitudinal Study of Adolescent Health, which is often called Add Health. The other is the General Social Survey (GSS). The Add Health study shows that the mean IQ of adolescents who identify themselves as "very liberal" is 106, compared with a mean IQ of 95 for those calling themselves "very conservative." The Add Health study is huge-- more than 20,000 kids-- and this difference is highly statistically significant.

No, that isn't Michele Bachmann above. Still Perry... celebrating. Hard to fathom though, that in the middle of the fight to keep the government open/deregulate Wall Street, the White House not only hosted a Christmas Party, but invited dangerous right-wing radicals to it. I hope they all got thoroughly patted down. Even Michele Bachmann, who is being allowed to walk away from a serious criminal investigation in return for her retirement from Congress, was permitted to attend.

Why would she even bother? She wanted to tell President Obama, in person, to nuke Iran, which has over 77 million inhabitants, more than the population of Iraq and Afghanistan combined. Throw in Libya and Qatar and we're still not there yet. First she promised her family she wouldn't make a spectacle out of herself when it was time to pose with the president for photos. But as soon as they had left the stage, that special Bachmann derangement gene kicked in.

“I turned to the president and I said, something to the effect of, ‘Mr. President, you need to bomb the Iranian nuclear facilities, because if you don’t, Iran will have a nuclear weapon on your watch and the course of world history will change,’” she told the Washington Free Beacon.

“And he got his condescending smile on his face and laughed at me and said, ‘Well Michele, it’s just not that easy.’ And I said to him, ‘No, Mr. President, you’re the president, it will happen on your watch, and you’ll have to answer to the world for this.’ And that was it and then I left. Merry Christmas,” she said with a laugh.

...Bachmann now plans to travel across the country, giving speeches and writing op-eds ahead of what she called a “consequential” election in 2016. Presumptive Democratic nominee Hillary Clinton will simply continue Obama’s widely criticized domestic and foreign policies, Bachmann said. Republicans for their part need to ensure that they do not nominate a candidate who is “changing their stripes just for an election.”

“If we get a very bold conservative who has a strong identification of where they want to take the country, both economically and in terms of national security, we do have a chance to have a major course correction for America in the future,” she said.