The inverse relationship between intelligence and conservatism

One of John Stuart Mill's most often quoted remarks is:

I never meant to say that the Conservatives are generally stupid. I meant to say that stupid people are generally Conservative. I believe that is so obviously and universally admitted a principle that I hardly think any gentleman will deny it.

This has often been misquoted as "Conservatives are not necessarily stupid, but most stupid people are conservatives." A recent study has shown that there is some truth to Mill's statement.

“We found that lower general intelligence in childhood predicts greater racism in adulthood, and this effect was largely mediated via conservative ideology,” said Professor Gordon Hodson, a psychologist at Brock University in Ontario. “A secondary analysis of a US data set confirmed a predictive effect of poor abstract-reasoning skills on antihomosexual prejudice, a relation partially mediated by both authoritarianism and low levels of intergroup contact.”

Satoshi Kanazawa addressed the issue from an evolutionary psychology point of view in Why Liberals Are More Intelligent Than Conservatives (subtitled Liberals think they’re more intelligent than conservatives because they are). First he gave a definition of liberalism:

It is difficult to define a whole school of political ideology precisely, but one may reasonably define liberalism (as opposed to conservatism) in the contemporary United States as the genuine concern for the welfare of genetically unrelated others and the willingness to contribute larger proportions of private resources for the welfare of such others. In the modern political and economic context, this willingness usually translates into paying higher proportions of individual incomes in taxes toward the government and its social welfare programs. Liberals usually support such social welfare programs and higher taxes to finance them, and conservatives usually oppose them.

Kanazawa then goes on to note that liberalism, as per the definition above, could be considered to be "evolutionarily novel". He then cites statistics that show that the correlation between liberalism and intelligence (the graph is from his blog):

For example, among the American sample, those who identify themselves as “very liberal” in early adulthood have a mean childhood IQ of 106.4, whereas those who identify themselves as “very conservative” in early adulthood have a mean childhood IQ of 94.8.

However, he also notes that liberalism is absent from all the surveys of traditional cultures.

Now Kanazawa has an hypothesis that:

applied to the domain of preferences and values, ... more intelligent individuals are more likely than less intelligent individuals to acquire and espouse evolutionarily novel preferences and values that did not exist in the ancestral environment and thus our ancestors did not have, but general intelligence has no effect on the acquisition and espousal of evolutionarily familiar preferences and values that existed in the ancestral environment.

This is based on the following principles and theories:

The Savanna Principle states that the human brain has difficulty comprehending and dealing with entities and situations that did not exist in the ancestral environment. The theory of the evolution of general intelligence suggests that general intelligence evolved as a domain-specific psychological adaptation to solve evolutionarily novel problems. Their logical conjunction suggests a qualification of the Savanna Principle and leads to a new hypothesis about individual preferences and values.

So, back to the issue at hand.

Because all members of a hunter-gatherer tribe are genetic kin or at the very least friends and allies for life, sharing resources among them does not qualify as an expression of liberalism as defined above. Given its absence in the contemporary hunter-gatherer tribes, which are often used as modern-day analogs of our ancestral life, it may be reasonable to infer that sharing of resources with total strangers that one has never met or is not likely ever to meet – that is, liberalism – was not part of our ancestral life. Liberalism may therefore be evolutionarily novel, and the Hypothesis would predict that more intelligent individuals are more likely than less intelligent individuals to espouse liberalism as a value.

He finishes by noting that:

Incidentally, this finding substantiates one of the persistent complaints among conservatives. Conservatives often complain that liberals control the media or the show business or the academia or some other social institutions. The Hypothesis explains why conservatives are correct in their complaints. Liberals do control the media, or the show business, or the academia, among other institutions, because, apart from a few areas in life (such as business) where countervailing circumstances may prevail, liberals control all institutions. They control the institutions because liberals are on average more intelligent than conservatives and thus they are more likely to attain the highest status in any area of (evolutionarily novel) modern life.

However, all is not lost for conservatives because Kanazawa, in a later column, asks the question If Liberals Are More Intelligent than Conservatives, Why Are Liberals So Stupid?

Bruce G. Charlton, Professor of Theoretical Medicine at the University of Buckingham and Editor in Chief of Medical Hypotheses, may have an explanation. In his editorial in the December 2009 issue of Medical Hypotheses, Charlton suggests that liberals and other intelligent people may be “clever sillies,” who incorrectly apply abstract logical reasoning to social and interpersonal domains. As I explain in an earlier post, general intelligence – the ability to think and reason – likely evolved as a domain-specific evolved psychological mechanism to solve evolutionarily novel problems, whereas, for all evolutionarily familiar problems, there are other dedicated evolved psychological mechanisms. Everyone – intelligent or not – is evolutionarily equipped with the ability to solve such evolutionarily familiar problems in the social and interpersonal domains as mating, parenting, social exchange, and personal relationships, with the other evolved psychological mechanisms. Charlton suggests that the totality of all the other evolved psychological mechanisms (except for general intelligence) represents what we normally call “common sense.” Everyone has common sense. Intelligent people, however, have a tendency to overapply their analytical and logical reasoning abilities derived from their general intelligence incorrectly to such evolutionarily familiar domains and as a result get things wrong. In other words, liberals and other intelligent people lack common sense, because their general intelligence overrides it. They think in situations where they are supposed to feel. In evolutionarily familiar domains such as interpersonal relationships, feeling usually leads to correct solutions whereas thinking does not.

Basically, more intelligent people are also more likely to lack common sense.

Edit 7/02/2012: George Monbiot writing in The right's stupidity spreads, enabled by a too-polite left argues that:

Conservativism may be the refuge of the dim. But the room for rightwing ideas is made by those too timid to properly object