Is a person’s IQ related to his or her political ideology?

Left, right and center: Who is more intelligent and why?

The study of intelligence is one of the areas that has generated the most clashes of viewpoints both in psychology and in the social sciences in general.

Defining what intelligence is is in itself a battlefield.And if we also try to relate the concept of IQ with the political ideology of each person, the controversy is served. The reason is clear: a high IQ is a trait that all advocates of political positions want to associate with their cause, because intelligence is not simply a personal characteristic, but also carries a strong moral value: being intelligent is good.

But, beyond all the biased opinions and value judgments, there are some investigations that, although they have limitations and could be victims of certain biases in their design, attempt to address the issue of the relationship between IQ and political ideology in the least subjective way in the least subjective way possible. So. Are people on the left more intelligent, perhaps those on the cento? Let's see what has been found through these studies.

Leftists, rightists and their relationship with IQ

In general, if we had to say whether left-wing or right-wing people are more intelligent and we only had to give an answer without going into details, we would have to admit that there are more studies that relate a higher IQ with left-wing ideologies than studies that do the same with right-wing ideologies. than studies that do the same with right-wing positions. However, within this simplistic view of the results obtained through research, there are several things to keep in mind.

The first is that there are many studies that have reached contradictory results. There are two possible reasons for this. The first is that classifying political ideologies into "left and right" is a way of oversimplifying reality.The second is that the culture of each country and region seems to play a very important role in the way intelligence and ideology are related. We will see what this means below.

What does it mean to be conservative?

One of the best-known theories explaining how IQ and political positioning interact is the one that distinguishes between progressives y conservatives.

According to Lazar Stankov, for example, Conservative people are characterized by a certain cognitive rigidity.They value very highly the constant following of rules and respect for authority, traditions and orthodoxy when interpreting texts. In short, they make their own a framework of rules already given to them by certain authorities or pressure groups.

This rule-following can be seen as the antithesis of the concept of intelligence, which is related to the ability to find creative ways of behaving in novel situations through a good dose of mental agility, which is why Stankov and other researchers have proposed that people with lower intelligence are more seduced by conservative political positions. In addition, Stankov himself found that people with lower intelligence are more seduced by conservative political positions, Stankov himself even found correlations between a low IQ and a high score in conservatism.This theory was thus reinforced.

Now then... Doesn't this relationship between ideology and intelligence depend on the cultural context of each country? Information is now available from studies that indicate how the history of a country or region affects the way in which the dominant ideology "by default" is more to the right or to the left. Thus, while in Brazil there is a strong attachment to ideological centralism because of the country's historical instability, in Russia conservatism is more related to Stalin's orthodox communism, while in the US conservatism is related to anti-communism and advocacy of military interventions outside the country.

Nuances within ideologies

Another aspect to take into account when looking at how IQ and ideology are related is the following question: can it be said that there is only one left and one right? There are several studies that show that within the groups of people identified as conservative or progressive there are details that show the extent to which these two categories have very different subgroups. For example, one can be economically liberal and socially conservative.. This is what happens, for example, in people who adhere to right-wing positions related to the rejection of non-Western ways of life and left-wing values that in turn defend the existence of the free circulation of money.

At the same time, people who see themselves as advocates of centrist policies may be seen as belonging to a third group with their own characteristics that distinguish them from people with ideologies of the extremes. In this sense, there are both studies that relate a high IQ with a moderate center position and others that find the opposite phenomenon: high intelligence associated with people with more radical right-wing and left-wing positions. Rindermann and his team of researchers found the former type of result, while Kemmelmeier found the latter.

Why does this happen? There are many possible factors that could explain this difference, but one of them possibly has to do with the characteristics of the groups of people studied in each of these studies.

Sophisticated political tastes

While Rindermann, who saw a relationship between high IQ and moderate ideology, studied people with an average level of intelligence, Kemmelmeier studied people with a higher-than-normal IQ.. 

This would suggest that gifted people with an intellectual level within the normal range would be more seduced by the moderate, while the more intelligent would be more likely to explore more sophisticated isions and away from the socially established, finding ways in which these can seduce them. This is a likely explanation, as a relationship has also been found a relationship has also been found between a high IQ and a greater tendency to claim to have well-defined political positions, whereas people without an ideology are more likely to be more likely to have a strong political position.whereas people without a defined political ideology tend to have lower intelligence scores.

In conclusion

Although very interesting results have been obtained throughout several investigations, no conclusive results have yet been obtained that allow us to state with a good degree of certainty that people of a certain political ideology are more intelligent.

Los factores culturales y los matices dentro de los espectros políticos tienen una importancia que hace que sea difícil hallar tendencias universales.

Referencias bibliográficas:

• Kemmelmeier, M. (2008). Is there a relationship between political orientation and cognitive ability? A test of three hypotheses in two studies. Personality and Individual Differences, 45(8), pp. 767 - 772.

• Rindermann, H., Flores-Mendoza, C., & Woodley, M. A. (2012). Political orientations, intelligence and education. Intelligence, 40(2), pp. 217 - 225.

• Stankov, L. (2009). Conservatism and cognitive ability. Intelligence, 37(3), pp. 294 - 304.