I love this :^O:^O:^O
In plain English - for any stupid right-wing people reading this - if you're bright you'll become a lefty and if you're dumber than a bag of hammers you'll veer to the right. Why? Because apparently people with low IQs are drawn towards political creeds that "provide psychological stability" and "a sense of order", which they're more likely to find in conservatism than in PC circles.
It is testament to the arrogance of many modern liberals that they seized upon this study as cast-iron confirmation of their moral superiority. From The New York Times to The Guardian, commentators who have always felt instinctively better than the rabble could now claim scientific proof it was true.
The study shows conservatism is "the refuge of the dim", British columnist George Monbiot said. "It feels crude, illiberal to point out that the other side is more stupid than our own", he said, before crudely and illiberally pointing out precisely that.
Another commentator says the study could be a great debate winner: "Next time you call a group of right-wingers idiots, you can back yourself up with one word: Science!" In short, why go to all the intellectual bother of having hard arguments with people when you can just throw a scientific paper at them and say: "Case closed: you're stupid!"
There's a brilliant irony to this use and abuse of science to prove liberal superiority: these supposedly clever liberals didn't once stop to think that maybe the Canadian study is flawed, and that maybe it is a bit dodgy, when you consider the darker moments of the 20th century, to use so-called science to demonstrate one's moral supremacy over other groups of people.
No sooner had these commentators' self-congratulatory columns rolled off the presses than academic experts - people who know a thing or two about stats - were questioning the findings of the Canadian study. William M Briggs, Professor of Statistical Science at Cornell University in New York, described the study as "a contender for the worst use of statistics in an original paper ever".
Ominously titled Bright Minds and Dark Attitudes, the study was carried out by two researchers at Canada's Brock University. They reached their conclusion that "less intelligent children come to endorse more socially conservative ideologies as adults" by looking at research into about 16,000 people in Britain in the past 50 years.
These individuals' IQs were measured at age 10 or 11; then later in life, between 30 and 33, they were asked about their ideological outlook. Lo and behold, the ones who were dumb as kids had morphed into right-wing adults.
Yet as Briggs and others point out, the research is based on a flawed understanding of IQ. Our intelligence levels are not fixed by the ages of 10 or 11. Some people become bright later in life, often in their teens.
In only measuring IQ at 10 or 11, and then political attitudes in the 30s, the Canadian study will have placed many of these late-developing intelligent people in the low-IQ box, so even people who are actually quite clever, yet who become right-wing, can end up being categorised as "less intelligent children" who became "socially conservative adults".
What's more, as Briggs points out, many of the questions asked of the subjects when they hit their 30s are so vague that, in effect, it was left to the researchers to work out whether their answers made them "conservative" or "liberal".
Briggs says the study is a "textbook example of confused data, unrecognised bias, and ignorance of statistics".
If liberals are so clever, why did they fall for such flimsy "science"? In the irony to end all ironies, their feverish embrace of this study rather confirms that its conclusions are inaccurate and that liberals can be as dim-witted as anyone else.
Even worse, there's something very dubious about using science to try to claim political superiority. Did these liberals not pay attention in history class? If they had, they would know that, in modern times, only the most reactionary groups of people, from anti-democrats to eugenicists to a certain German political party, mashed together pseudoscience and talk of "low IQ" to try to prove that certain people are inferior.
Indeed, when Monbiot says the Canadian study confirms what good people already knew - that the Western world is full of "misinformed, suggestible voters" - he breathes life back into a virulent strain of 19th-century snobbery.
Monbiot says modern-day conservative politicians are forced to "appeal to stupidity", which sounds a lot like a complaint made by a right-wing American thinker in the late 1800s, who said the problem with mass democracy is that politicians "are compelled to discard their political knowledge, their deliberate judgment, their calm and conscientious reflection all must be withdrawn or brought down to a conformity with those who possess the least of these qualities".
For decades, eugenically minded authoritarians argued against the inclusion of black people and workers in democratic politics on the basis that they were of "bad odour and low intelligence". Monbiot's claim that, today, "low-information" sections of society lack the "cognitive abilities" and "capacity for abstract thinking" to take part in serious politics is simply a more PC version of that old low political outlook.
We have witnessed something very worrying in response to the Canadian study: a new trend among left-wingers to rehabilitate some of the worst prejudices of the old authoritarian right.
Brendan O'Neill
The Australian
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