Does your IQ match your values?: Image via AFreeIQTestThe March issue of the peer-reviewed Social Psychology Quarterly, a journal of the American Sociological Association, will contain an article entitled "Why Liberals and Atheists are More Intelligent." Though certain to cause some outrage, the investigator has collected some statistically significant IQ evidence that supports his theory.
Satoshi Kanazawa, an evolutionary psychologist at the London School of Economics and Political Science, poses the theory that the more intelligent people are, the more likely it is for them to adopt evolutionarily novel preferences and values in response to the challenges of the times.
Kanazawa says that humans are evolutionarily programmed to be conservative – to care mostly about family and friends, to believe in a supernatural power or God because of their paranoia about what they perceive as "unnatural" phenomenon, and, for men, to be polygamous.
"General intelligence, the ability to think and reason, endowed our
ancestors with advantages in solving evolutionarily novel problems for
which they did not have innate solutions," says Kanazawa. "As a result, more intelligent people are more likely to recognize and
understand such novel entities and situations than less intelligent
people, and some of these entities and situations are preferences,
values, and lifestyles."
Data from the National Longitudinal Study of Adolescent Health (Add Study) support all three of Kanazawa’s theories.
Students (grades 7 through 12) who identified themselves as "very liberal" show an average IQ of 106 during adolescence, while those who identified themselves as being "very conservative" had an average IQ of 95 during adolescence.
Those who identified themselves as "not at all religious" had an average IQ of 103 at adolescence; those that reported being "very religious" had average IQs of 97.
As to monogamy, though the preliminary press information does not provide the exact IQ levels, the information does indicate that there was corroborative IQ data among males, with those valuing male exclusivity scoring higher on the IQ tests than the males favoring male polygamy. Kanazawa’s argument is that exclusivity is a novel evolutionary value for men. Females do not show an IQ difference based on exclusivity values, but Kanazawa did not expect that they would.
Stay tuned for the full report in the March Issue of the Social Psychology Quarterly!
Sources: American Sociological Association via Physorg.com; AddHealth
