Is IQ positively related to political tolerance?

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Yes. But for some groups more than for the others. We tested this by asking a subset of our participants how tolerant they are towards two polarizing groups, neo-nazis (which was an especially aversive group), and Christian fundamentalists. To get a more accurate measure of tolerance, we excluded from the analyses those participants that said that they actually liked neo-nazis/Christian fundamentalist (because tolerance doesn't apply for a group you already like). This left us with subsamples of n = 291 participants that did not like neo-nazis and n = 197 of participants that did not like Christian fundamentalists.

After this we asked them whether they agreed or disagreed with four tolerance-related statements:

• Representatives for Neo-Nazis/Christian fundamentalists should have the right to speak at high schools or the like.

• Neo-Nazis/Christian fundamentalists should be allowed to hold demonstrations.

• Representatives for Neo-Nazis/Christian fundamentalists should be allowed to express themselves in public debate.

• The police should have better opportunities for tapping telephones owned by Neo-Nazis/Christian fundamentalists. (reverse coded)

We then summed these responses to form a total tolerance score for neo-nazis and Christian fundamentalists (separately) and correlated IQ to those scores. The correlations turned out to be r = 0.11 between IQ and tolerance for neo-nazis (which is quite low and, in this case not statistically significant), and r = 0.27 between IQ and tolerance for Christian fundamentalists. Thus it seems that IQ may be slightly positively correlated with political tolerance. Here are the two plots showing the relationships between IQ and tolerance for our two groups.

What do the other studies say?

Our results are generally in line with research that consistently shows a significant relationship between cognitive ability and political tolerance, with higher cognitive ability generally predicting greater tolerance (Rasmussen & Ludeke, 2021; De keersmaecker et al., 2020). In addition, lower cognitive ability predicts greater prejudice (r=-0.19) (Hodson & Michael, 2012; Onraet et al., 2015). 

Takeaways

• Higher IQ people are probably a little bit more likely to have tolerance for groups that they politically oppose

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