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bcspace wrote:Low IQ & Liberal Beliefs Linked To Poor Research

BC, do you post any of your own words? Any of your own ideas?

http://mormondiscussions.com/phpBB3/viewtopic.php?p=550169#p550169

bcspace wrote:Low IQ & Liberal Beliefs Linked To Poor Research

I'm quite curious why bcspace linked to this.

This blog entry responds to the paper "Bright Minds and Dark Attitudes: Lower Cognitive Ability Predicts Greater Prejudice Through Right-Wing Ideology and Low Intergroup Contact", published in the journal Psychological Science last February.

Was bcspace troubled by that paper and was glad to find blog entry that responded to it? Did he like the title? I suspect he thought the blog actually offered some "proof" that liberals are stupid. The irony.

Here is the abstract from the research that was published in the journal:

Despite their important implications for interpersonal behaviors and relations, cognitive abilities have been largely ignored as explanations of prejudice. We proposed and tested mediation models in which lower cognitive ability predicts greater prejudice, an effect mediated through the endorsement of right-wing ideologies (social conservatism, right-wing authoritarianism) and low levels of contact with out-groups. In an analysis of two large-scale, nationally representative United Kingdom data sets (N = 15,874), we found that lower general intelligence (g) in childhood predicts greater racism in adulthood, and this effect was largely mediated via conservative ideology. A secondary analysis of a U.S. 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. All analyses controlled for education and socioeconomic status. Our results suggest that cognitive abilities play a critical, albeit underappreciated, role in prejudice. Consequently, we recommend a heightened focus on cognitive ability in research on prejudice and a better integration of cognitive ability into prejudice models.

http://pss.sagepub.com/content/23/2/187.abstract

eta: just read Buffalo's other thread, and realized bcspace was responding to that with this link.

I can honestly say, based on many decades of my own experience and the many people I have known and interacted with, that people (both children and adults) with poor education and language skills and demonstratedly poor reasoning ability (such as math and science skills, etc.) are far more likely to be racial and religious bigots and hold tightly to extremely conservative views (especially of a religious nature) than those who are highly educated and possess demonstratedly high reasoning and problem solving abilities. Thus the study in question strongly corroborates what I have personally observed all my long life.

In my own personal journey through life, I have found that the more I learn about history, science, math and the world around me, the less "conservative" and the more "liberal" my own views and attitudes have become. It only becomes increasingly clear to me that it is indeed true that "reality has a very strong liberal bias."

Yet, I think we need both "conservatives" and "liberals." I think that intelligent and honest conservatives and liberals who are both willing to seriously listen to each other and honestly consider the merits and deficiencies of their own and each other's views can together form a useful, negative feedback loop that prevents society from both stagnating and running wildly out of control and "jumping off the track." It is a serious mistake to think that either conservatives or liberals have a monopoly on either truth or error.

There are undeniably old ideas that are still worth holding on to, as well as old ideas that should have been abandoned long ago, and there are always new and better ways of doing things being discovered that deserve serious consideration. Conservatives are more likely than liberals to tenaciously cling to the old simply because it is old and familiar, and liberals are more likely to eagerly (sometimes too eagerly) seek out and embrace the new. Thus both conservatives and liberals have a legitimate role to play in society, as long as they both have the intelligence and humility to consider the possibility that they might not always be right.

If anything, liberals are more likely than conservatives to seriously consider the possibility that they could be mistaken. Indeed, anyone who is unable to consider the possibility that others' ideas might have real merit, perhaps even more merit than one's own, is not truly a "liberal", as far as I am concerned. An important part of being truly "liberal" is willingness to reexamine and reconsider even one's own cherished convictions when warranted by the available evidence.

Gunnar wrote:I can honestly say, based on many decades of my own experience and the many people I have known and interacted with, that people (both children and adults) with poor education and language skills and demonstratedly poor reasoning ability (such as math and science skills, etc.) are far more likely to be racial and religious bigots and hold tightly to extremely conservative views (especially of a religious nature) than those who are highly educated and possess demonstratedly high reasoning and problem solving abilities. Thus the study in question strongly corroborates what I have personally observed all my long life.

But it doesn't corroborate with the numerous distinguished intellectuals, scholars, academics, journalists, and average human beings who are hold strongly conservative/libertarian views and many of whom are widely recognized as among the best minds and critical theorists of the 20th century.

I've also met and worked with numerous uneducated, ignorant bigots and know-nothings throughout my life, and while some of them held some "conservative" beliefs, none of them were conservatives in any salient sense, and a number of them were decidedly liberal in their politics and attitudes.

So long as this kind of massaged, ideologically driven and manufactured "social science" continues to be done, accepted, and tolerated within academia (does anybody really believe that disciplines such as sociology, social psychology, and cultural anthropology are anything more than derivative extensions of critical theory?), so long will contemporary academia be consigned to hermetic alienation from serious critical thought, any actual search for knowledge and truth, and from reality itself.

In my own personal journey through life, I have found that the more I learn about history, science, math and the world around me, the less "conservative" and the more "liberal" my own views and attitudes have become.

Which may be nothing more than the imposition of your own internal psychological dynamics, biases, assumptions, and wish fantasies regarding how the world "should" be upon that actual world. This might well be the case given that I and many other people who have spent their lives learning, reading, thinking, and journeying through life, have come to precisely the opposite conclusion: that leftism is an adolescent fantasy driven by arrested intellectual, moral, and intellectual development mediated by relentless dogmatism, intolerance, and bigotry toward any dissent or disagreement with the wide-eyed, adolescent utopian dream.

Conservatives are more likely than liberals to tenaciously cling to the old simply because it is old and familiar, and liberals are more likely to eagerly (sometimes too eagerly) seek out and embrace the new. Thus both conservatives and liberals have a legitimate role to play in society, as long as they both have the intelligence and humility to consider the possibility that they might not always be right.

If anything, liberals are more likely than conservatives to seriously consider the possibility that they could be mistaken. Indeed.

This is pure fantasy. The Left is and always has been, collectively speaking, defined by its rabid and, when liberals attain, as is always their goal, massively concentrated and unaccountable political power, murderous bigotry toward even the slightest deviation from ideological purity. This idealized fantasy of the morally pure, intellectually open and tolerant "liberal" was never anything but a self indulgent self delusion, made even more insufferable and petulant by its concentration in a particularly self indulgent and delusional generation.

The Left abandoned the entire classical western intellectual tradition long ago, leaving conservatives and serious libertarians as the only torch-bearers of authentic liberal arts education and the ideals of philosophical rigor, critical reasoning, and a dispassionate, open search for the truth, wherever that may lie.

A "liberal" was always, and still remains, a socialist without a gun, and a revolutionary socialist is a "liberal in a hurry."

Which may be nothing more than the imposition of your own internal psychological dynamics, biases, assumptions, and wish fantasies regarding how the world "should" be upon that actual world.

So, you take the fact that I have been able to free myself from my former racial and religious prejudices via my reading and studying as evidence that I have only become more bigoted and biased than ever before? You remind me of a white supremacist I once saw interviewed on television who castigated his interviewer for being prejudiced against racial bigots.

Gunnar wrote:

Which may be nothing more than the imposition of your own internal psychological dynamics, biases, assumptions, and wish fantasies regarding how the world "should" be upon that actual world.

So, you take the fact that I have been able to free myself from my former racial and religious prejudices via my reading and studying as evidence that I have only become more bigoted and biased than ever before? You remind me of a white supremacist I once saw interviewed on television who castigated his interviewer for being prejudiced against racial bigots.

I'm going to have to leave you to your own devices, Gunnar. Its just not worth the effort, brain cell damage, or hostile feelings, which I've vowed not to get back into in this forum.

You're far, far too enveloped within your own self-referential, ideological/psychological cocoon to have any productive or intellectually reasoned debate with, and so, rather than get into a big row, I'll just bow out and let you have your say.

But please, don't allow me to interfere with your enjoyment of the doctrine of intellectual national socialism, also known as "multiculturalism" and "diversity." Yes, its moral superiority on the cheap, but better than nothing from postmodern perspective, I suppose.

I'm shocked. The left and the right calling each other stupid.