What is the relationship between IQ and political views?

Note: This is a section of a longer article. To go to the start, click here.

In general, those with higher IQs tend to have more liberal/progressive views. Specifically, we have asked our participants (n = 3688) the following four questions, each of which looks at progressivism vs. conservatism in a slightly different way:

• In political matters, where do your views generally fall on the scale from "left" (progressive) to "right" (conservative)? (“Left to right conservatism scale”)

• Are you registered to vote with any U.S. political parties?

• Currently, where do your views fall on a scale from completely fiscally progressive, to completely fiscally conservative? (“Fiscal progressiveness”)

• Currently, where do your views fall on a scale from completely socially progressive, to completely socially conservative? (“Social progressiveness”)

  
  

Note that we gave our participants explanations for the last two questions. For example, we explained that fiscal progressives usually prefer that the government provides more services, and passes more regulation in order to try to make society better, while fiscal conservatives usually advocate low taxes, reduced government spending and minimal government debt, and typically are in favor of deregulation, free trade, free markets, privatization, and tax cuts. We provided similar explanations for the social progressiveness question. 

Here are the correlations between IQ and our ideological/political variables, followed by the heatmap for easier visualization of these relationships. The strongest correlation is between IQ and social progressiveness, followed by the correlation between IQ and left-right self-placement with those with higher IQ placing themselves more left on the scale.

Interestingly enough, we found much larger correlations between progressivism and IQ when measured as social progressivism or an overall left-to-right scale than we did when measured as fiscal progressiveness or as U.S. political party affiliation.

Variable	Correlation with IQ
Social Progressiveness	0.225
Fiscal Progressiveness	0.108
Is Democrat	0.065
Is Republican	-0.059
progressive to conservative slider scale (higher numbers mean more conservative)	-0.180

What do the other studies say?

Several meta analyses have explored this question before and generally found negative low-to-moderate correlations (ranging from r = -0.25 to r = -0.20)  between IQ and right-wing ideological attitudes (Onraet et al., 2015; Van Hiel et al., 2010). However, when focusing exclusively on economic attitudes, the relationship has been found to be  very low, albeit positive this time with higher IQ predicting more conservative economic attitudes (meta-analytical r = 0.07 in Jedinger & Burger, 2022). Our results are thus consistent with these findings in prediction of social ideological attitudes, though slightly contradictory with regard to fiscal conservatism.

Takeaways

• Those with higher IQs tend to have more socially progressive (i.e., less socially conservative) views.  

If you'd like to read the full report, of which this is a section, as one long PDF, you can download it here.

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