Agreeing isn’t a sign of intelligence.

Liberals have higher IQ-scores than conservatives, but that doesn’t mean that they are smarter.

Photo by Richard Lee on Unsplash

“Conservatives are not necessarily stupid, but most stupid people are conservatives” — John Stuart Mill (1806–1873)

Ouchie. It isn’t quite fun to be a conservative with quotes as seen above, and this hasn’t improved since the intelligence of conservatives and liberals have been tested empirically. Studies show quite clearly that conservatives have lower intelligence.

These are the facts. But what seems more debatable is the interpretation of why there is this difference.

The reasoning for some is that with higher intelligence, comes a greater level of abstraction, which in turn leads to liberal views. A common issue here is toleration to immigrants; conservatives are claimed to be locked down by prejudice, whilst liberals are able to realize the gains of open borders etc.

This may be true to some extent. But an alternative view seems to be much overlooked.

This is the view that highly educated people (the ones with high intelligence) are much more sensible to what others think about them. In psychology, this is know as social desirability bias, which is a response bias when answering surveys…