There are also a lot of poor traditionalists. Always have been.
Well, they may be doing badly, but they’re frightened of doing worse if things change.
Albert Einstein and Carl Sagan were almost certainly agnostics…and Isaac Newton was a theist.
Just sayin’!
And what happens to them? They die without ever once trying to change their lot.
Indeed. For those living close to the edge, change is often feared, because change for the worse is dangerous.
…
Though on the other hand - if being better off correlates to being conservative, and being smart correlates to being liberal … does that mean that the stupider one is, the better off one is likely to be? 
I find it interesting that board that regularly slams IQ studies when used to discuss racial or gender issues is now embracing an IQ study that shows that conservatives are not as smart as liberal atheists.
You do realise that conservative and liberal atheist are not genetic conditions, don’t you?
Color me :dubious: that anything published in the “Social Psychology Quarterly” can be taken as rigorously and objectively produced evidence of anything.
It is, however, true that my dog is smarter than your dog because my dog doesn’t believe in Sky Fairies (and eats Ken-L-Ration).
Indeed. The really contentious point in “IQ studies when used to discuss racial or gender issues” is to what degree IQ is genetically determined (a question that once was considered settled but today is anything but). That is not an essential issue, however, when considering any relationship between IQ and political/social/religious views.
Absolutely - but are we suddenly embracing IQ studies as being legitimate measure of intelligence?
Does the article linked in the OP use IQ as a measure of intelligence? I would assume so; but all I can access is the abstract, wherein the term “IQ” appears nowhere.
What’s intersting about it? Do you imagine that political views are genetic?
The abstract mentions the “Savanna-IQ Interaction Hypothesis” - so I am assuming they have some IQ data in there.
Was the definition supplied to the subjects before they identified themselves? I would answer “conservative”, but had I known that the only definition was how much I care about giving money to the poor, then I might answer differently.
If religion is correlated with giving to charities while atheism is correlated to desiring higher income redistribution, then if I define the latter avenue of welfare as “liberalism”, then of course atheists end up liberal.
Now that liberal and atheist are joined at the hip, as are conservative and theist, it makes sense for the “break the tradition” type of people to be smarter. So automatic win for L/A. You can’t be sure, though, if it’s due to the liberalism or the atheism.
If I had to guess, I’d say it’s the atheism. You don’t end up an atheist unless you’re either raised by an atheist (rare) or you’re smart enough to analyse things for yourself and come to your own conclusion. Add that to the fact that smart people beget smart kids, you’ll end up with smart atheists.
It’s not the only contentious point of the worthiness of IQ studies.
I doubt Mr. Gould would have approved of using IQ studies in the “analysis” of political/social/religious views. Seems to suffer from the same two falacies Gould described for specifically biological determinism - reification and ranking - and in spades, because of the inherent difficulty in even defining the group under analysis (I am not convinced that anyone who cares relatively about others and is willing to give to others is a “liberal” - the term “liberal” embraces a complex set of attitudes and is not easily or at all reducable to any single obvious definition).
Why exactly don’t you think Social Psychology Quarterly is a rigorous journal?
Hold off a second here, in the same way that some people are born with higher inclination (genotype?) towards certain athletic activities, isn’t it possible that some may be inclined with the ability of absorbing (learning) more information. This is HUGELY controversial, its something that I recently heard in “Before the dawn” by Nicholas Wade.
To expand on that, to embrace the ideas that would consider “liberal” by our current American society* requires a reasonable inquiry into the facts, which requires a somewhat decent education/discipline to actually research these things and go against our “gut tribal instincts”.
*such as welcoming a more involved role of government in health care (which comes from the goal of helping total strangers with our own, hard earned, tax payer money), favor of gun control (because you’re more likely to hurt yourself then the fictional “criminal attacking my house/family” and because of the nonsense of the argument that universal gun ownership somehow decreases crime), global warming, keep religion out of the public schools and emphasize science, consider the benefits to yourself and the planet of being vegetarian, etc etc etc …
Plus- do you really think this guy is actually willing, even just for a second, to take a different viewpoint from the absolute crap he’s fed by the far right?
Interesting definition. The “willingness to contribute private resources” part is odd–I would say that fiscal liberals are those who desire for the government to force the conribution of private resources, whereas fiscal conservatives want the private resources to be deployed by the private sector.
I wish I could read this myself because the quote just opens up more questions. The first is: how did this guy decide whether to count someone as a liberal or not?
The “race and IQ” threads usually proceed with the liberals saying (i) race doesn’t exist and (ii) IQ doesn’t exist.
In this thread, IQ apparently exists (so far).
In affirmative action threads (and other threads dealing with race but not IQ), race almost invariably exists.
You haven’t been paying attention. No one denies IQ exists, as a measure of some stable personal psychological characteristic – i.e., if you take two well-designed IQ tests five years apart, you probably will get roughly the same score each time. But it is far less well-established what IQ is, whether the characteristic measures is innate or learned, whether it is culture-bound or transcultural, how valuable it is, whether it is merely a set of “secretarial skills,” or whether there even is such thing as g, a general intelligence factor. (See, e.g., Howard Gardner’s theory of multiple intelligences)
Again, you haven’t been paying attention. The contention which you are confusedly attributing to liberals is actually that “race” is a social construct rather than a biological category. For purposes of discussing affirmative action, race is relevant, because it is a social construct, not because it is a biological category, and the purpose of affirmative action is to correct for the social effects of social discrimination and prejudice based on race as socially perceived. I hope you would not seriously dispute the existence, at least in the past and throwing a shadow on the present, of social discrimination and prejudice based on race as socially perceived.