Intelligent people's politics determined by their wallet — not their brain: scientists

For years, scientists have researched whether there is any connection between genetic intelligence and political preference, yet the results were contradictory. By incorporating class into the research, however, one researcher has found a startling and consistent pattern: Intelligent people are inclined to be left-wing economically if they were born poor and right-wing economically if they were born wealthy.

“In this study, I argue that this puzzle can only be understood from a gene–environment interaction (GxE) perspective,” wrote Uppsala University's Department of Government researcher Rafael Ahlskog in the journal Political Psychology. “Drawing on traditional theories of political preference formation, I argue that genetics associated with cognitive performance should cause more left-wing economic preferences if you grow up in relative poverty, but more right-wing economic preferences if you grow up affluent. Utilizing variation in a polygenic index (PGI) of cognitive performance within dizygotic twin pairs, coupled with unique register data on economic conditions for the twins, their parents, and their childhood neighborhood, I show that the causal effect of the PGI on economic conservatism is zero on average, but indeed sizable and sign-discordant by class background.”

Ahlskog added, “The GxE perspective thus has wide-ranging implications for future research attempting to integrate genetic methods into political psychology.”

In short, while intelligence does impact a person’s political preferences, smart people will lean toward conclusions that are perceived as providing the most benefit to their specific class, regardless of its specific ideological content.

To learn this, Ahlskog decided to study a large sample of fraternal twins born between 1943 and 1958 and studied by the Swedish Twin Registry (Zagai et al., 2019).

“The twins have also been connected to rich registry sources for things like education and income, as well as to the intergenerational registry, allowing the addition of the same register variables for the parents of the twins,” Ahlskog added. “A separate full population register dataset has been used to obtain information about context/neighborhood [socioeconomic index].”

Despite its robust source base, the study is not without its limitations.

“he genetic predictor is a noisy measurement that only captures a fraction of the actual heritable traits for cognitive performance,” reported PsyPost's Karina Petrova on Wednesday. “Comparing genetic differences within local twin pairs amplifies this measurement noise even further. As a result, the reported effects are likely much smaller than the actual biological impact.”

Petrova added, “The geographical and historical realities of the respondent group also matter. The individuals in this sample grew up in Sweden during the middle of the twentieth century, a period defined by the rapid expansion of the modern welfare state. Class-based politics and labor movements were highly salient in their daily lives.”

This is not the first study to demonstrate a link between intelligence and political ideology. A February study in the journal Intelligence studied 7,000 third-grade students by determining their IQs, following up with the high IQ and non-high IQ students six years later to confirm their IQs and then do so again 35 years later to assess their political views. It found that non-gifted men were more likely to be conservative than gifted men, while for women there was no difference between IQ groups and their political views.

On a related note, an April study published in the journal Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin revealed that among 1,600 people dating online, liberals overwhelmingly and disproportionately were likely to rank men who supported right-wing conspiracy theories about vaccines and election denial to be less intelligent than those who did not. Liberals were also found to reject conservatives at much higher rates than conservatives rejected liberals.

“Disclosing conspiracy beliefs in online dating profiles undermines impressions of warmth, intelligence, and trustworthiness, which are important for online dating success,” the authors wrote in their conclusion. “Right-wing conspiracy beliefs were particularly stigmatized, with liberals being harsher in their judgments and conservatives showing greater leniency.”

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