Belief and attitudes 2

Causal influences: Liberals vs Conservatives - the influence of ability - intelligence - intelligence promotes liberalism - overview

• intelligence drives attitude formation

• that is when considering social, moral, and political situations, those with greater cognitive skills are able to form more induvidualistic and open minded attitudes than those of less cog ability

Causal influences: Liberals vs Conservatives - the influence of ability - intelligence - intelligence promotes liberalism -McCourt et al 1999 -

McCourt et al 1999 found a: negative correlation of r = -0.37 between IQ and Right-wing Authoritarianism.

I.e. the less intelligent participants were in the sample, the more likely they were to espouse right-wing authoritarian views.

BUT... This was a cross-sectional study. Is relationship causal?

More convincing if we could find suggestion of a causal relationship between intelligence and political attitudes

Low cognitive skills promotes conservatism - Stankov (2009) intelligence - conservatism and cog ability

• Includes large amount of foreign students applying to US University

• Western measures of conservatism & cognitive tests (3 tests), but high % of the sample are from non-western countries

• Found that constent neg relationship between how well they do on tests and conservatism

• Again, cross-sectional study: idea is more convincing if we could find suggestion of a causal relationship between intelligence and political attitudes…

Intelligence promotes liberalism - Deary,Batty and Gale (2008) - Childhood intelligence (10 yrs) tested with 4 tests in schools predicts in subsequent adulthood (~30yrs)

• Political attitudes

• Political party preference (to some extent)

• Those who endorse liberal/non-traditional attitudes as adults did better as kids in intelligence tests

• Those having voted or likely to vote for Greens and Liberal Democrats as adults did better as kids in intelligence tests

  (while BNP (far right like reform) -voters were below average intelligence)

Intelligence promotes liberalism - Deary,Batty and Gale (2008) - structural equation modelling - longitudinal study

• statistical technique for inferring causal relationships between latent & observed variables, only allows you to see the strength of the relationship, not the causally

  found that the indirect path from g to liberal attitudes

• 1) g predicts education (0.42)

• 2) Eduction moderately predicts liberal attitudes (0.23)

structural equation modelling allows you to see the strength

and magnitude of one variable to another, but cannot determine causality

• derived from the latent trait e.g. general intelligence

• Derived from the latent trait of latent/ non traditional attitudes

Does education promote left/liberalism attitudes? US sample

2016 0- democratic advantage for post-grads is +40% in Wisconsin

2012 - Complex: least and most education vote democrat, both votes: most educated vote for the left-wing candidate

Intelligence promotes liberalism - Deary,Batty and Gale (2008) - Use temporally-constrained path analysis to estimate strength of presumed-causal relationships between those traits and actually-observed variables:

notably the strong, direct path (r = +0.45) from latent trait g to latent trait liberal attitudes.

• although g predicts education, and education predicts occupational social class, however occupational social class doesn’t predict liberal attitudes

Intelligence promotes liberalism - Deary,Batty and Gale (2008) - Summary

Intelligence promotes liberalism: USA too - Kanazawa (2010)

• uses USA data to show that school-age Intelligence is positively correlated with Liberalism in adulthood.

• So the study can correlate:

a)intelligence-at-school-age with

b)politics-as-adults

Intelligence promotes liberalism: USA too - Kanazawa (2010) suggests that intelligence is an adaptation

to deal with ‘evolutionarily novel’ thinking & Liberalism is an example of an ‘evolutionarily novel’ idea.

Intelligence promotes liberalism: USA too - Kanazawa (2010) - method - series of questions

e.g in terms of politics do you consider yourself conservative, liberal or middle of the road?

• intelligence measure using peabody picture vocabulary test, measure of verbal intelligence, not general intelligence

• correlation between PPVT scores and Ravens progressive matrices is not bad, and get better as kids get older (but not a classic iq test)

Intelligence promotes liberalism: USA too - Kanazawa (2010) - results

• adolescent intelligence predicts subsequent political orientation

• 12 IQ points between most conservative and most liberal groups (C mean = 94.8 IQ, L - 106.4)

Intelligence promotes liberalism - summary

Intelligence promotes atheism: Argyle (1958)

“Intelligent students are much less likely to accept orthodox beliefs, and rather less likely to have pro-religious attitudes”

1) As per political orthodoxy, intelligence dampens religious attitudes

2) However, intelligence has a stronger effect upon orthodoxy/traditionalism than upon religious attitudes

Intelligence promotes atheism: Argyle (1958) - simply put

Intelligence places more obstacles to accepting conservatism than it does to accepting religious faith.

Why might intelligence undermine religious beliefs? - Zuckerman (2013) - 3 ideas

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 is thus less necessary.

Intelligence promotes atheism - Ok, but what do the data show overall - BELL (2002)

39/43 studies found a negative correlation between intelligence & religious belief.

Intelligence promotes atheism - Ok, but what do the data show overall - Zuckerman et al (2013)

Even more comprehensive: meta-analysis of 63 studies

Average correlation between Intelligence and strength of religious beliefs

is around  -0.20 to -0.25

Intelligence promotes atheism - Ok, but what do the data show overall - The intelligence religion association is stronger in….

1) in college students & general population than pre-college students.

i.e. stronger as you age.

2) for religious beliefs than behaviours

Don’t believe in god, still go to church/mosque, still follow religious festivals

• but cross-sectional studies, correlation is not cause, longitudinal evidence

Intelligence promotes atheism - KaNAZAWA (2010) - same as the intelligence study, but instead asked to what extent are you a religious person

• adolescent intelligence predicts subsequently religiosity

• School-aged intelligence is positively correlated with atheism, liberalism and view that men should be monogamous

• Higher intelligence = higher atheism,

• found intelligence and atheism, to a lesser extent to liberalism and intelligence

Analytic thinking promotes religious disbelief - Gervais - Well established dual-process idea of human thinking:

System 1: relies on frugal heuristics (approximations, shortcuts) yielding intuitive answers

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

Analytic thinking promotes religious disbelief - Gervais - Well established dual-process idea of human thinking: method

• Subjects complete analytic thinking task and then complete three measures of religious belief (intrinsic religion, intuitive religious belief, belief in supernatural agents)

Analytic thinking promotes religious disbelief - Gervais - Well established dual-process idea of human thinking: results

• Weak but persuasive correlations?

• Correlations between analytical thinking task and religious belief

• Intrinsic religiosity (r = -0.22, p = 0.003)

• Intuitive religious belief (r = -0.15, p = 0.04)

• Supernatural agents (r = -0.18, p = 0.02)

Religious beliefs: intelligence and analytical thinking - summary

Beliefs and attitudes: Causal influences 3 - genes vs environment - political beliefs and attitudes: causation - Ford, Funk and Hibbing

• 1/3 of variance in political belief is accounted for by genes

• Shared environment not that strong

• Influence of unique experience is stronger

• most heritable thing is whether you think prayer should be done in schools, astrology is high

Beliefs and attitudes: Causal influences 3 - genes vs environment - traditional beliefs and attitudes: Causation - Ludeke et al 2013

A recent suggestion by Ludeke et al 2013 that a single heritable factor called ‘obedience to traditional authority’… might explain a sizeable proportion of the variance in beliefs and attitudes relating to authoritarianism, conservatism, and religiousness.

h² = 0.52 for the MPQ traditionalism factor, using standard equation.

Genes vs environmental influences change over time…a more nuanced behavioural genetics examined interactions between genes and enviorbmnent

But even with the simple additive model of separate 3 factors,

a)heritability,

b)shared environment

c)unique environmental influences

we can ask…

Are these influences exerted equally over a lifetime?

Genes vs environmental influences change over time…Hatemi et al., (2009)

• genetic influence are absent/ minimal early on, at the same time that shared environment influence is very strong

• Genetic influence gets stronger as you get older

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

• influence of unique environment is about the same over the lifetime

Genes vs environmental influences change over time…Hatemi et al., (2009) - BASIC SUMMARY

basic summary - Shared environmental influence decreases and Genetic influence increases

Genes vs environment influence: summary

Both lecture summary 1

Both lecture summary 2