A rather interesting study was conducted by Gordon Hodson and Michael A. Busseri from Brock University regarding the explanation of adherence to prejudices and support for authoritarian-conservative ideology based on a person’s cognitive abilities. This work analyzed two large representative datasets from the United Kingdom: the 1958 National Child Development Study (NCDS) and the 1970 British Cohort Study (BCS). Both datasets contain data on the cognitive abilities of the participants, as well as their attitudes toward racism and social conservatism. Cognitive abilities were assessed using standardized measures when NCDS participants were 11 years old and BCS participants were 10 years old; attitudes toward social conservatism and racism were assessed at ages 33 and 30, respectively. In total, 15,874 people participated in these studies.
As a result of forming statistical models, it was found that a lower level of general intelligence in childhood predicts a greater tendency toward racist prejudices in adulthood and, furthermore, adherence to social conservatism largely mediates this effect. This model is particularly convincing because in both the NCDS and BCS, the measurement of childhood intelligence preceded the assessment of adult prejudices by at least two decades. Moreover, all predictive effects were independent of socioeconomic status and education.
A secondary analysis was also conducted based on a dataset from a 2010 American study by Kayler, in which 254 students participated. It was confirmed that a low level of abstract thinking predicts anti-homosexual prejudices. This relationship is partially mediated by both support for right-wing authoritarianism and a low level of intergroup contact. The results of this analysis align with the results of the analysis of the NCDS and BCS datasets: the hypothesis about the influence of cognitive abilities on adherence to prejudices was confirmed by sample data from another country. This means that the tendency toward prejudice and authoritarian conservatism can be confidently explained by a person’s low cognitive abilities.
Another study was conducted by Satoshi Kanazawa from the London School of Economics and Political Science. He uses the “savannah principle,” according to which human behavior, remaining to some extent adapted to the ancestral environment of early Homo in the savannah, can lead to problems in a modern (industrial or post-industrial) environment. In a 2010 article, Kanazawa proposed the savannah-IQ interaction hypothesis. This hypothesis suggests that smarter people are more likely to acquire and maintain evolutionarily novel values and preferences than less smart people. He used data from a national longitudinal study of adolescent health. A sample of 15,197 adolescents from 80 high schools and 52 middle schools in the USA was taken (their first survey was conducted in 1994-1995, the last in 2001-2002). Data from the General Social Surveys (GSS) were also taken as a sample of adult US citizens, with 1,500 people for each annual survey and 3,000 for each biennial survey. The results of the study confirmed that people with higher IQs are more likely to be liberals than conservatives.
Incidentally, some might object that this study is merely a fabrication by a liberal scientist; however, Satoshi Kanazawa was once even suspended from writing articles for claims regarding the difference in intelligence levels between different races, and the London School of Economics banned him from publishing in non-peer-reviewed publications for 12 months, so he can hardly be accused of being linked to the current social-liberal movements of the West.
