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April 13, 2012

Verbal intelligence by demographic

Filed under: Data Analysis,Demographics,GSS,Intelligence,WORDSUM — Razib Khan @ 7:43 pm




January 28, 2012

Social conservatives have a lower I.Q.? (probably)

Filed under: conservative,Culture,I.Q.,Intelligence,Liberalism,Politics — Razib Khan @ 1:29 pm

In light of my previous posts on GRE scores and educational interests (by the way, Education Realist points out that the low GRE verbal scores are only marginally affected by international students) I was amused to see this write-up at LiveScience, Low IQ & Conservative Beliefs Linked to Prejudice. Naturally over at Jezebel there is a respectful treatment of this research. This is rather like the fact that people who would otherwise be skeptical of the predictive power of I.Q. tests become convinced of their precision of measurement when it comes to assessing whether a criminal facing the death penalty is mentally retarded or not! (also see this thread over at DailyKos). You can see some of the conservative response too.

The paper itself is Bright Minds and Dark Attitudes: Lower Cognitive Ability Predicts Greater Prejudice Through Right-Wing Ideology and Low Intergroup Contact:


I emphasized sections that I assume will answer some immediate questions, as not everyone has access to Psychological Science. Yes, they used different types of intelligence tests; verbal and spatial. Yes, they corrected for socioeconomic background. Their replication was in the UK and USA. Importantly, they focused on a few characteristics, attitudes toward homosexuals and race. It doesn’t seem like they explored an enormous range of opinions. And as noted in the paper they were looking at the social dimension of political ideology.

There is plenty of work on cognitive styles and political orientation. Recently it is moral foundations from Jon Haidt. Earlier you had George Lakoff’s models. Neither of these focused on general intelligence, the raw CPU power of the mind. Rather they surveyed moral intuition and personality profiles (for example, there is some evidence that those with a greater bias toward “openness” are more socially liberal).

Looking at the General Social Survey I too have found at a correlation between higher intelligence and social liberalism. On the other hand a good objection to this is that my estimator of intelligence, WORDSUM, was verbal, and liberals and conservatives may exhibit different cognitive profiles. This study takes that into account, adding spatial I.Q. tests to the mix.

It is important to emphasize that the authors do not posit an independent direct causal connection between low I.Q. and more reactionary attitudes towards race and homosexuality. Rather, they start out with a model where low cognitive ability people are drawn (or remain in) to conservative orientation, and this is further correlated with these specific racial and sexual attitudes. Like almost all psychology you can’t get the causation airtight (if you are a hardcore Humean you could probably say this for everything), but the correlation is suggestive in light of political and psychological models. The problem is the second. As Jonathan Haidth has articulated most recently most academic political scientists and psychologists have strongly social liberal views, and so they consciously or unconsciously tend to caricature and misrepresent the views of half their study population (notice that the authors assume that these socially conservative positions are ‘Dark Attitudes’; most people today would agree, but shouldn’t intellectuals avoid this sort of thing?). So though I have some confidence in the correlations, I’m a lot more skeptical of the explanatory models (though I don’t reject them out of had). There are so many models sitting around that how you chose models can be shaped by bias rather easily.

First, let’s hit the results.

The table above represents the results for the British cohorts and race, and the diagram to the left illustrates the outcome for the American sample and homosexuality. The primary point is that as per their hypothesis the effect of lower cognitive ability on prejudice toward other races and homosexuality is mediated more or less through ideology. Coarsely, stupid people aren’t racist, stupid people are more likely to be socially conservative, and more socially conservative people are more likely to be racist. How these join together though is something one can subject to more critical examination. The authors allude to this when they note that there is a finding that those who know people of other races tend to be less prejudiced, with the inference being that contact makes one less racist. But this is not an established causality. Rather, it could be that people with less prejudiced tendencies put themselves into situations where they are likely to meet other races. This tendency could be correlated with higher I.Q. through a mediation of a “cosmopolitanism index.” Who knows? There are many stories one could tell.

I do want to emphasize though that this is a coarse measure of ‘conservatism.’ In the early to mid aughts Paul Wolfowitz was a hated figure on the American political Left because of his critical role in buttressing the intellectual armamentarium favoring the invasion of Iraq. But it is well known that Wolfowitz was and is a social liberal, like a subset of neoconservatives who focus on foreign policy. On the above measure Wolfowitz, who has undergraduate degrees in mathematics and chemistry from Cornell and a graduate degree in political science from University of Chicago, would come out as a high I.Q. social liberal. Is that right? As far as it goes it is right, but on some level the results would be misleading in the more complex terrain of coalitional politics. A substantial number of Americans shake out as social conservatives and fiscal moderates/liberals. And yet this faction is totally unrepresented in modern politics. In contrast, their inverse, libertarians, do have some representation, albeit a marginalized one. Why? Because the latter position has modest high I.Q./elite support, while the former position has far less. If you changed the question to attitudes toward global free trade there would be a correlation between lower I.Q. and the ‘more liberal’ (at last in American politics) position.

This qualification also dovetails with the broader point about styles of cognitive thinking, and reliance on traditional norms as opposed to think a priori. Ironically it makes intuitive sense that higher I.Q. people would be less reliant on intuition, impulse, and collective wisdom. But there are limits to this. For example, see the reaction to the proposition of sex between consenting adults who happen to be siblings on an atheism forum (assume they use birth control). But some moral philosophers posit that this is not harmful or immoral, and should be socially accepted. It’s an interesting illustration of the boundary condition of the power of disgust and emotion, as only the hyper-rational feel comfortable even entertaining the moral legitimacy of this proposition. More relevantly, educated liberals also make use of ‘stereotypes’ constantly. It’s just that those stereotypes are of conservatives. I know this because almost all my friends are educated liberals, and they often forget that I’m a conservative. So I hear a lot about conservatives are this and that without qualification, to great merriment and laughter (also, conservatives are genuinely evil and malevolent apparently!). The tendency toward generalization doesn’t bother me in an of itself, rather, I’m focused on whether the proposition is true. But the hypocrisy gets tiresome sometimes, as people will fluidly switch from a cognitive style which accepts generalization to one which rejects it. A stereotype is often a generalization whose robustness you don’t want to accept. Negative generalities need context when they’re unpalatable, but no qualification is necessary when their truth is congenial. Sometimes this veers into moderately politically incorrect territory. I was once an observer on a conversation between liberal white academics who were mulling over the unfortunate reality that their Asian American students were far more likely to cheat to obtain better grades. I suspect that this is actually true for various reasons. But I also suspect that these academics forgot that I was privy to the conversation, and wouldn’t have aired this truth in a more racially diverse social context.

More broadly what is the takeaway from this sort of research? Should we conclude that because the more intelligent tend to be socially liberal that socially liberal propositions are true? I think one should be skeptical of this position. There are two immediate rejoinders. First, politics is a matter of values. The reliance of reason vs. emotion, individual ratiocination vs. historical or social wisdom, may vary. But that does not speak to the truth of any given value judgement, as those judgments are embedded in a system of norms, as well as individual self-interest (e.g., the higher I.Q. tendency to favorable attitudes toward free trade may have less to do with an understanding of comparative advantage, than an implicit understanding that globalization favors them as opposed to less intelligent lower classes). Second, the moral arc of history is not always unidirectional. The ‘progressive’ position is sometimes reversed. In Better for All the World there is a broad history of the rise of a consensus among economic and intellectual elites about the wisdom of coercive eugenics as an instrument of progressive social engineering in the late 19th century. Religious conservatives, whether evangelical Protestant or Roman Catholic, were two of the greatest bulwarks against this force for progress. Arguably these two elements were more efficacious in resisting the spread of eugenics legislation than the Left critics, judging by the outcomes Southern Europe and the American South, as opposed to the more ‘forward thinking’ nation-states of Northern Europe and the American North. This fact is unknown to most of my friends and acquaintances, judging by repeated assumptions that any utilization of personal genomics for eugenic purposes will occur first in politically conservative jurisdictions.

With all these qualifications, I believe this sort of research is essential and insightful. We need to understand the patterns of cognitive variation, whether it be intelligence or personality, which may result in differences of opinion. At the end of the day no opinions may change, but one may be able to construct a crisper argument when taking into account the genuine roots of one’s political opponents viewpoints, rather than your own ill-informed caricature.

Addendum: I did not address the issue of revealed vs. avowed preferences and attitudes. But I think that this difference will not change the sign of correlation. For example, for various reasons I assume that the gap between white liberals and white conservatives when it comes to race is smaller in terms of the preference revealed in their choices, rather than the survey responses they give, but I don’t think it reverses the rank order of the correlation.

Citation: Bright Minds and Dark Attitudes: Lower Cognitive Ability Predicts Greater Prejudice Through Right-Wing Ideology and Low Intergroup Contact, Psychol Sci. 2012 Jan 5.

January 25, 2012

Classicists are smart!

Filed under: Data Analysis,GRE,Intelligence,Social Science — Razib Khan @ 4:15 am

The post below on teachers elicited some strange responses. Its ultimate aim was to show that teachers are not as dull as the average education major may imply to you. Instead many people were highly offended at the idea that physical education teachers may not be the sharpest tools in the shed due to their weak standardized test scores. On average. It turns out that the idea of average, and the reality of variation, is so novel that unless you elaborate in exquisite detail all the common sense qualifications, people feel the need to emphasize exceptions to the rule. For example, over at Fark:

Apparently what had happened was this: He played college football. He majored in math, minored in education. When he went to go get a job, he took it as a math teacher. When the football coach retired/quit, he took over. When funding for an advance computer class was offered, he said he could teach it after he got the certs – he easily got them within a month.

So the anecdote here is a math teacher who also coached. Obviously the primary issue happens to be physical education teachers who become math teachers! (it happened to me, and it happened to other readers apparently) In the course of double checking the previous post I found some more interesting GRE numbers. You remember the post where I analyzed and reported on GRE scores by intended graduate school concentration? It was a very popular post (for example, philosophy departments like it because it highlights that people who want to study philosophy have very strong GRE scores).

As it happens the table which I reported on is relatively coarse. ETS has a much more fine-grained set of results. Want to know how aspiring geneticists stack up against aspiring ecologists? Look no further! There are a lot of disciplines. I wanted to focus on the ones of interest to me, and I limited them to cases where the N was 100 or greater (though many of these have N’s in the thousands).

You’re going to have to click the image to make out where the different disciplines are. But wait! First I need to tell you what I did. I looked at the average verbal and mathematical score for each discipline. Then I converted them to standard deviation units away from the mean. This is useful because there’s an unfortunate compression and inflation on the mathematical scores. Disciplines which are stronger in math are going to have a greater average because the math averages are higher all around. You can see that I divided the chart into quadrants. There are no great surprises. People who want to pursue a doctorate in physical education are in the bottom left quadrant. Sorry. As in my previous post physicists, economists, and philosophers do rather well. But there were some surprises at the more detailed scale. Historians of science, and those graduate students who wish to pursue classics or classical languages are very bright. Budding historians of science have a relatively balanced intellectual profile, and the strongest writing scores of any group except for philosophers. I think I know why: many of these individuals have a science background, but later became interested in history. They are by nature relatively broad generalists. I have no idea why people drawn to traditionally classical fields are bright, but I wonder if it is because these are not “sexy” domains, to the point where you have to have a proactive interest in the intellectual enterprise.

I also wanted to compare aggregate smarts to intellectual balance. In the plot to the right on the x-axis you have the combined value of math and verbal scores in standard deviation units. A negative value indicates lower values combined, and a positive value higher. Obviously though you can have a case where two disciplines have the same average, but the individual scores differ a lot. So I wanted to compare that with the difference between the two scores. You can see then in the plot that disciplines like classics are much more verbal, while engineering is more mathematical. Physical scientists tend to be more balanced and brighter than engineers. Interestingly linguists have a different profile than other social scientists, and cognitive psych people don’t cluster with others in their broader field. Economists are rather like duller physicists. Which makes sense since many economists are washed out or bored physicists. And political science and international relations people don’t stack up very well against the economists. Perhaps this is the source of the problem whereby economists think they’re smarter than they are? Some humility might be instilled if economics was always put in the same building as physics.

In regards to my own field of interest, the biological sciences, not too many surprises. As you should expect biologists are not as smart as physicists or chemists, but there seems to be two clusters, with a quant and verbal bias. This somewhat surprised me. I didn’t expect ecology to be more verbal than genetics! And much respect to the neuroscience people, they’re definitely the smartest biologists in this data set (unless you count biophysicists!). I think that points to the fact that neuroscience is sucking up a lot of talent right now.

The main caution I would offer is that converting to standard deviation units probably means that I underweighted the mathematical fields in their aptitudes, because such a large fraction max out at a perfect 800. That means you can’t get the full range of the distribution and impose an artificial ceiling. In any case, the raw data in the table below. SDU = standard deviation units.


Field V-mean M-mean V-SDU M-SDU Average-SDU Difference-SDU
Anatomy 443 568 -0.16 -0.11 -0.13 -0.05
Biochemistry 486 669 0.20 0.56 0.38 -0.36
Biology 477 606 0.13 0.15 0.14 -0.02
Biophysics 523 727 0.51 0.95 0.73 -0.43
Botany 513 626 0.43 0.28 0.35 0.15
Cell & Mol Bio 497 658 0.29 0.49 0.39 -0.20
Ecology 535 638 0.61 0.36 0.49 0.26
Develop Bio 490 623 0.24 0.26 0.25 -0.02
Entomology 505 606 0.36 0.15 0.25 0.22
Genetics 496 651 0.29 0.44 0.36 -0.16
Marine Biology 499 611 0.31 0.18 0.24 0.13
Microbiology 482 615 0.17 0.21 0.19 -0.04
Neuroscience 533 665 0.60 0.54 0.57 0.06
Nutrition 432 542 -0.25 -0.28 -0.27 0.03
Pathology 468 594 0.05 0.07 0.06 -0.02
Pharmacology 429 634 -0.28 0.33 0.03 -0.61
Physiology 464 606 0.02 0.15 0.08 -0.13
Toxicology 465 610 0.03 0.17 0.10 -0.15
Zoology 505 609 0.36 0.17 0.26 0.20
Other Biology 473 626 0.09 0.28 0.19 -0.19
Chemistry, Gen 483 681 0.18 0.64 0.41 -0.47
Chemistry, Analytical 464 652 0.02 0.45 0.23 -0.43
Chemistry, Inorganic 502 690 0.34 0.70 0.52 -0.37
Chemistry, Organic 490 683 0.24 0.66 0.45 -0.42
Chemistry, Pharm 429 647 -0.28 0.42 0.07 -0.69
Chemistry, Physical 513 708 0.43 0.82 0.62 -0.39
Chemistry, Other 477 659 0.13 0.50 0.31 -0.37
Computer Programming 407 681 -0.46 0.64 0.09 -1.10
Computer Science 453 702 -0.08 0.78 0.35 -0.86
Information Science 446 621 -0.13 0.25 0.06 -0.38
Atmospheric Science 490 673 0.24 0.59 0.41 -0.35
Environ Science 493 615 0.26 0.21 0.23 0.06
Geochemistry 514 657 0.44 0.48 0.46 -0.05
Geology 495 625 0.28 0.27 0.27 0.01
Geophysics 487 676 0.21 0.61 0.41 -0.40
Paleontology 531 621 0.58 0.25 0.41 0.33
Meteology 470 663 0.07 0.52 0.30 -0.46
Epidemiology 485 610 0.19 0.17 0.18 0.02
Immunology 492 662 0.25 0.52 0.38 -0.26
Nursing 452 531 -0.08 -0.35 -0.22 0.27
Actuarial Science 460 726 -0.02 0.94 0.46 -0.96
Applied Math 487 730 0.21 0.97 0.59 -0.76
Mathematics 523 740 0.51 1.03 0.77 -0.52
Probability & Stats 486 728 0.20 0.95 0.58 -0.75
Math, Other 474 715 0.10 0.87 0.48 -0.77
Astronomy 525 706 0.53 0.81 0.67 -0.28
Astrophysics 540 727 0.66 0.95 0.80 -0.29
Atomic Physics 522 739 0.50 1.03 0.77 -0.52
Nuclear Physicsl 506 715 0.37 0.87 0.62 -0.50
Optics 495 729 0.28 0.96 0.62 -0.68
Physics 540 743 0.66 1.05 0.85 -0.40
Planetary Science 545 694 0.70 0.73 0.71 -0.03
Solid State Physics 514 743 0.44 1.05 0.74 -0.62
Physics, Other 519 723 0.48 0.92 0.70 -0.44
Chemical Engineering 490 729 0.24 0.96 0.60 -0.72
Civil Engineering 456 705 -0.05 0.80 0.38 -0.85
Computer Engineering 465 716 0.03 0.87 0.45 -0.85
Electrical Engineering 465 722 0.03 0.91 0.47 -0.89
Industrial Engineering 426 699 -0.30 0.76 0.23 -1.06
Operations Research 483 743 0.18 1.05 0.61 -0.88
Materials Science 509 728 0.39 0.95 0.67 -0.56
Mechanical Engineering 471 721 0.08 0.91 0.49 -0.83
Aerospace Engineering 498 725 0.30 0.93 0.62 -0.63
Biomedical Engineering 504 717 0.35 0.88 0.62 -0.53
Nuclear Engineering 500 720 0.32 0.90 0.61 -0.58
Petroleum Engineering 414 676 -0.40 0.61 0.10 -1.01
Anthropology 532 562 0.59 -0.15 0.22 0.73
Economics 508 707 0.39 0.81 0.60 -0.43
International Relations 531 588 0.58 0.03 0.30 0.55
Political Science 523 574 0.51 -0.07 0.22 0.58
Clinical Psychology 484 554 0.18 -0.20 -0.01 0.38
Cognitive Psychology 532 627 0.59 0.28 0.44 0.30
Community Psychology 441 493 -0.18 -0.60 -0.39 0.43
Counseling Psychology 444 500 -0.15 -0.56 -0.35 0.41
Developmental Psychology 476 563 0.12 -0.14 -0.01 0.26
Psychology 476 546 0.12 -0.25 -0.07 0.37
Quantitative Psychology 515 629 0.45 0.30 0.37 0.15
Social Psychology 518 594 0.47 0.07 0.27 0.40
Sociology 490 541 0.24 -0.28 -0.02 0.52
Criminal Justice/Criminology 418 477 -0.37 -0.71 -0.54 0.34
Art history 536 549 0.62 -0.23 0.20 0.85
Music History 536 596 0.62 0.08 0.35 0.54
Drama 514 541 0.44 -0.28 0.08 0.72
Music History 490 559 0.24 -0.17 0.03 0.40
Creative Writing 553 540 0.76 -0.29 0.24 1.06
Classical Language 619 633 1.32 0.32 0.82 0.99
Russian 584 611 1.03 0.18 0.60 0.85
American History 533 541 0.60 -0.28 0.16 0.88
European History 554 555 0.77 -0.19 0.29 0.97
History of Science 596 661 1.13 0.51 0.82 0.62
Philosophy 591 630 1.08 0.30 0.69 0.78
Classics 609 616 1.24 0.21 0.72 1.02
Comp Lit 591 588 1.08 0.03 0.56 1.06
Linguistics 566 630 0.87 0.30 0.59 0.57
Elementary Education 438 520 -0.20 -0.42 -0.31 0.22
Early Childhood Education 420 497 -0.35 -0.58 -0.46 0.22
Secondary Education 484 576 0.18 -0.05 0.07 0.24
Special Education 424 497 -0.32 -0.58 -0.45 0.26
Physical Education 389 487 -0.61 -0.64 -0.63 0.03
Finance 466 721 0.03 0.91 0.47 -0.87
Business Adminstraiton 434 570 -0.24 -0.09 -0.16 -0.14
Communication 458 517 -0.03 -0.44 -0.24 0.41
Theology 537 583 0.63 -0.01 0.31 0.64
Social Work 428 463 -0.29 -0.80 -0.54 0.52

August 6, 2011

Rick Perry is not too smart

Filed under: Barack Obama,Intelligence,Mitt Romney,Politics,Rick Perry — Razib Khan @ 8:29 pm

Likely presidential candidate Rick Perry’s college transcript at Texas A & AM has been published. Here are the highlights:






February 10, 2011

November 19, 2010

Why H. L. Mencken is popular with nerds

Filed under: Democracy,Intelligence,News,Politics — Razib Khan @ 4:49 pm

The 800-Pound Mama Grizzly Problem:





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