Mark Pine

Actually, this may be a question that liberals prefer not to discuss, since it entails the possibility of attributing a less admirable trait to a class of people—which may seem like prejudice. But to be truthful, I’ve always thought that the answer to this question is probably yes. Now, Satoshi Kanazawa, an intrepid social psychologist at the London School of Economics and Political Science, has produced a study (pdf) in the current issue of Social Psychology Quarterly that supports the idea.

Before describing the results of his careful research, which uses precise definitions, I want to explain what I mean by “liberal” and why I suppose liberals are probably smarter. I think mostly in political terms, and to me a liberal is someone who generally votes Democratic, or perhaps Green. Liberals value political equality, equal rights, and equal economic opportunity, and we back government initiatives to level the playing field among people of different economic strata, ethnic and religious groups, genders, and sexual orientations. We are concerned about the unfortunate and underprivileged among us, and we support a strong social safety net, including government assistance to poor people.

Central to the liberal worldview and value set is the recognition that we live in a complex society, and that while we can certainly affect our own position in the social system with respect to power and fortune, there are also potent influences beyond our control—especially the social position and genetic endowment that we were born with.

Being liberal, I believe, involves recognizing and understanding the many complex factors contributing to each person’s unique situation. That requires intelligence, education, and a lot of thought. Hence, liberals tend to be smarter.

Kanazawa, however, has gone much further than armchair speculation. He examined intelligence, along with political attitudes and values (as well as other attitudes and values) in the findings of the National Longitudinal Study of Adolescent Health and the General Social Surveys. The former is a survey headquartered at the University of North Carolina and begun in 1994 of 132 high schools and middle schools and 20,000 students. The latter are annual and biennial surveys of 1500-3000 adults carried out by the National Opinion Research Center at the University of Chicago.

The author drew the definition of liberal from survey questions that included self-identifications on scales of liberal/centrist/conservative values on the survey of adolescents and young adults and liberal vs. conservative values on the survey of adults. Intelligence was assessed using the Peabody Picture Vocabulary Test on the adolescent-young adult survey and a verbal synonym test on the adult survey.

The results were striking in the younger group. Intelligence increased monotonically with liberal self-identification, and the most liberal respondents scored 0.8 standard deviation higher on intelligence than the most conservative. So it’s pretty clear that at least among the young, IQ correlates with liberalism.

On the adult survey, the results were less dramatic but still highly significant. Positive correlation of liberal views with intelligence was assessed using a standardized coefficient to be 0.07, with p < .001.

Kanazawa explains his result with reference to a hypothesis called the Savanna-IQ Interaction, which supposes

more intelligent individuals may be more likely to acquire and espouse evolutionarily novel values, such as liberalism, atheism, and, for men, sexual exclusivity, than less intelligent individuals, while general intelli- gence may have no effect on the acquisition and espousal of evolutionarily familiar values.

In the course of his research, he shows that the novel cultural values likely to have appeared recently in human history—liberalism, atheism, and marital fidelity among men—correlate with intelligence. In contrast, several values long extant in human culture, because of their central role in enhancing survival—values related to the importance of children, marriage, family and friends—do not correlate with intelligence, i.e., they are present to about the same degree in more and less intelligent people.

Naturally, being liberal, I find the outcome of Kanazawa’s research satisfying and validating. Yet I’m not entirely happy simply accepting his results. For one thing, I think it would be mistaken to assume that people with conservative and traditional values are not intelligent. Kanazawa examined averages of groups of people. Clearly, there are/were many exceptional people who give counterexample to his findings—extremely intelligent conservatives (like William Buckley), and dumb liberals and atheists (whom I will refrain from naming).

Finally, we need to keep in mind that there are many kinds of intelligence, not just the verbal and IQ kinds. Howard Gardner, the Harvard education professor, has described nine kinds. I’m particularly impressed by his notion of interpersonal intelligence, the ability to understand other people. As I’ve grown older, I’ve realized how very important for life that kind of intelligence is. Even though I’m quite intelligent in the IQ sense, I’m average in the interpersonal sense, perhaps below average.

And I wouldn’t be surprised if conservatives and traditionalists, as a group, scored higher on interpersonal intelligence than liberals do.