Bright minds and dark attitudes

Interesting paper by Hodson and Buseri:

http://pss.sagepub.com/content/23/2/187.full.pdf+html

Our synthesis demonstrates that cognitive ability plays a substantial role not only in predicting prejudice, but also in predicting its potential precursors: right-wing ideologies and authoritarian value systems, which can perpetuate social inequality by emphasizing the maintenance of the status quo, and a lack of contact and experience with out-groups. Our analysis of two large-scale U.K. data sets established a predictive relation between childhood g (a latent factor of generalized intelligence) and adult prejudice, as well as an indirect effect of g on prejudice via conservative ideology; this indirect effect explained more than 90% of the relation between g and racism in three of the four analyses (see Table 2). Thus, conservative ideology represents a critical pathway through which childhood intelligence predicts racism in adulthood. In psychological terms, the relation between g and prejudice may stem from the propensity of individuals with lower cognitive ability to endorse more rightwing conservative ideologies because such ideologies offer a psychological sense of stability and order. By emphasizing resistance to change and inequality among groups, these ideologies legitimize and promote negative evaluations of out-groups.

It's good that the study limited "conservatism" solely to instances of social conservatism, as its thesis surely couldn't support being extended to include economic conservatism. (Both low and high IQ populations, when surveyed, overwhelmingly favor social democratic policies.)

Nevertheless, I'm highly critical of reductionist theories in general and IQ theory in particular. Peter Schönemann, for example, spent his entire academic career deconstructing the edifice of the psychometric notion of g, leading to results which render little reason to believe it possesses any explanatory power whatsoever. And even if we grant the validity of there being a general factor of intelligence, the debate on what percentage of our IQ is innate is still far from settled in the scientific community.

Low IQ groups tend to be economically disenfranchised. The correlation between socioeconomic status and religiosity is fairly high, thus leaving reason to suspect that, through a process of religious socialization, conservative values may be instilled in such groups. As for the higher prevalence of racism among low IQ individuals, that may be due to the fact these people literally have to live amongst immigrant groups, who they (correctly) associate with their economic insecurity. In short, it simply makes no sense to detach these questions from their wider social contexts. The study claims to have controlled for socioeconomic status, but the only way for researchers to do so effectively is to employ the use of twin studies—Hodson and Busseri chose Bouchard et al.'s 1999 study. Unfortunately for them, however, twin study methodology is itself fraught with problems (see Jay Joseph's research for more on this) and therefore unreliable at best.