Are Liberals Smarter Than Conservatives?

Jason Richwine points out a peer-reviewed study that indicates they are.

Lazar Stankov, a visiting professor at Singapore’s National Institute of Education, published “Conservatism and Cognitive Ability” earlier this year in the peer-reviewed journal Intelligence. Here is a quote from the article’s abstract:

Conservatism and cognitive ability are negatively correlated … At the individual level of analysis, conservatism scores correlate negatively with SAT, vocabulary, and analogy test scores. At the national level of analysis, conservatism scores correlate negatively with measures of education … and performance on mathematics and reading assessments.

But there are a couple of caveats worth noting: First, by “conservatism” Stankov does not necessarily mean people who favor free market economics. He has in mind a kind of traditionalism probably best described as social conservatism. The second caveat is that social conservatives do not always vote for conservative candidates. Most black Americans, for example, clearly exhibit “the Conservative syndrome” as Stankov defined it—70 percent voted to abolish gay marriage in California—but they routinely give about 90 percent of their votes to the Democratic Party.