Beliefs and Attitudes 2

Intelligence promotes liberalism - McCourt et al. (1999)

Less intelligent = more likely to support right-wing authoritarian views

Low cognitive skills promote conservatism - Stankov (2009)

Conservatism and cognitive ability negatively correlated.

Does education promote liberal attitudes - Deary et al. (2008, 2008)

2 longitudinal studies.

Childhood intelligence predicts adulthood intelligence.

• Higher childhood intelligence = more likely to hold liberal views

• Those who voted Greens/LibDem as adults did better as kids in intelligence tests

Men and women similar

Deary et al. (2008) 💡 - structural equation modelling of childhood intelligence - indirect path

g predicts education (0.42)

Education moderately predicts liberal attitudes (0.23)

USA elections 2012-24

2012 - complex, least and most-educated voted Democrat.

2016 - huge, simple effect - Democrat advantage for postgrads is 40% in Wisconsin

2020 - College graduates favoured Biden

2024 - Linear effect of education

2016 and 2024 - most-educated voted for left wing candidate

Indirect effect via education promotes liberalism

More intelligent = More educated

More educated = More liberal

= Intelligence predicts liberalism, indirectly, via education

Deary et al. (2008) 💡 - structural equation modelling of childhood intelligence - direct path

Strong direct path from latent trait g to latent trait liberal attitudes (0.45)

Deary et al. (2008) 💡 - structural equation modelling of childhood intelligence - occupational social class

Although…

1. Direct - g predicts occupational social class

2. Indirect - g predicts education, and education predicts occupational social class

… Occupational social class does NOT predict liberal attitudes

Deary et al. (2008) 💡 - structural equation modelling of childhood intelligence - conclusions

Clear, direct relationship between childhood intelligence and adult liberal attitudes, NOT mediated by education or social class.

Ultimately this is a causal relationship

Deary et al. (2008) 💡 - structural equation modelling of childhood intelligence - alternative explanations

1. People with higher ability tend to read more - if print media is more likely to be produced by people who hold antitraditional views, may be a causal path from intelligence to social views via cultural exposure

2. People with higher ability have a more sophisticated view of what attitudes are considered ‘acceptable’ to researchers

Adolescent intelligence and political orientation - Kanazawa (2010)

Adolescent intelligence predicts subsequent political orientation.

Intelligence promotes atheism - 2 points

 1)      Intelligence dampens religious attitudes

2)      Intelligence has a stronger effect on orthodoxy/traditionalism than on religious attitudes.

BASO: intelligence places more obstacles to accepting conservatism than it does to accepting religious faith.

Why might intelligence undermine religious beliefs? - Zuckerman et al.(2013)

1. Intelligent people less likely to conform - so can resist religious dogma

2. Intelligent people higher in analytical thinking than intuitive thinking

3. Intelligence confers some of the benefits of religion (better social bonds) so religion less necessary

Intelligence-religion association - Zuckerman et al. (2013)

Negative correlation between intelligence and strength of religious beliefs.

Association stronger in…

1. College students and general pop than pre-college students (stronger as age)

2. For religious beliefs than behaviours (don’t believe in a god, but still go to church, still follow religious festivities)

Intelligence in adulthood positively correlated with… - Kanazawa (2010)

• Liberalism

• Atheism

• View that men should be monogamous

Kanazawa suggests that intelligence is an adaptation to deal with ‘evolutionarily novel’ thinking.

Analytical thinking promotes religious disbelief - Gervais and Norenzayan (2012)

Well-established dual-process idea of human thinking

1. System 1 - relies on frugal heuristics = yields intuitive answers

2. System 2 - relies on deliberative analytical processing

System 2 often overrides system 1, when analytic tendencies are activated and cognitive resources are available for system 2.

Found negative correlations between analytical thinking task and religious belief:

• Intrinsic religiosity, intuitive religious belief, supernatural agents

Alford et al. (2005) - 👶Genetics

All 28 of MZ correlations are sig larger than their DZ correlations

• Mean heritability estimate for all items = 0.32

• Mean estimate of shared environment influence = 0.16

1/3 variance in political beliefs/attitudes is accounted for by genes.

Genetics important in shaping political attitudes and ideologies BUT more modest role in forming party identification.

Obedience to traditional authority (Ludeke et al., 2013)

Single heritable factor.

Might explain a lot of the variance in beliefs/attitudes relating to authoritarianism, conservatism and religiousness.

Hatemi et al. (2009) 🕰 - changes over the lifetime

Longitudinal twin study

Variance explained by each of the 3 causal influences:

• Genetic influences absent/minimal early on - at same time that shared environmental influence is v strong

• Genetic influence gets stronger as you age (because lifestyle changes of leaving the parental home)

• Shared environment is a strong early influence that wanes later in life

• Influence of unique environment about same over lifetime.

BASO: Shared environmental influence decreases AND genetic influence increases over time.