When you write about social conservative wingnuts day in, day out, the question always comes up: are these people stupid, evil, or both? With some of the leaders, you get the sense that they’re evil, and that they’re simply preying on people who fit the “stupid” category. But all too often, it feels like they’re just stupid. Science says this hunch has something to back it up:
You’ve always had an inkling that this might be true, and now here comes Science to validate your gut: children with low IQs tend to grow up to be prejudiced adults who often adopt socially conservative ideologies. The “liberal elite” is not in your imagination, friends. Fox News viewers really are that dumb!
[...]
The first study examined two groups of British adults, one born in 1958 and the other born in 1970. Both groups were assessed for intelligence at age 10 or 11, and then a followup was conducted when they were between the ages of 30 and 33. During the initial test, children were asked to complete tasks that tested their abilities to reason and remember. During the followup two decades later, researchers assessed the subjects’ level of prejudice and degree of socially conservative views. “Social conservatism” was determined by asking subjects to respond to a series of questions like “Family life suffers if mom is working full time” or “I wouldn’t mind working with other races.” In this study, children with low scores on the first set of tests tended to grow up to exhibit prejudiced and socially conservative viewpoints on the second set of tests.
And here’s the gay part:
The second study analyzed by the Canadian researchers examined Americans’ attitude toward homosexuality. The study found that people with poorer abstract reasoning skills tended to be more homophobic, even when researchers controlled for education level.
The Canadian researchers hypothesize that people who “have trouble grasping the complexity of the world” may tend toward prejudice and conservatism because they crave structure and can’t process chaos and nuance. Religion, authoritarianism, and isolationism appeal to a desire for order in a world that offers few absolutes.
Yep, sounds familiar! It’s the low-road anti-gay activists who fit this bill, in my estimation. The ones who lead small hate groups and whatnot. Also, Rick Santorum.
Bwahahaha, the “related posts” at the bottom are about Linda Harvey.
WordPress, you amuse me.
So, hatred and fear now scientifically linked to ignorance. If only this message wouldn’t also just go directly over their heads. Sigh…
NotSoDeep – this study is based on the scientific method; therefore it won’t even have a chance to go over their heads. Once they hear the word “study” or “science” they will tune it out. All eggheads ever talk about is facts, and facts don’t fit in with a life devoid of reality.
I think it’s interesting. I think when doing these studies, it’s very hard to entirely isolate certain factors (like economic differences in childhood, differences in childrearing etc…)
The differences in political opinion may be more physiological than anything. The wikipedia article briefly outlined an interesting view:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Biology_and_political_orientation
If anything, I think it’s just a complementary view of the world, I don’t think it’s a more inferior view than the next person’s view. Speaking as a conservative engineer, the study is by no means a rule of thumb!
Whether this is true or not, I tend to believe it is, we should show that beside being a little more able to think we are also civilized and avoid using words like dumb.
Bigots, homophobs, right-wingers can learn to think. Let’s also teach them how to act in a civilized adult manner.
Yeah, but Richard, you may have book learning, but you have exhibited all of the characteristics of fear-based ignorance in the comments section of this blog.
Steve: Oh, come ON. Extreme homophobes are not going to start using their noodles en masse, and it’s idealism to think otherwise.
I’ve been convinced of the truth of this hardwiring of super conservative personalities for a long time. Fundagelical christians and their counterparts in other faith systems tend to be very concrete thinkers who deal poorly with ambiguity, nuance and the abstract. They also tend to be more suspicious and fear-based than other folks. This doesn’t make them inherently bad people, just frustrating as hell if you want to have a rational conversation about something. Just as we are discovering that our gayness & gender identity are largely hardwired, I am convinced that many, many other personality traits are going to be found over time to have remarkable genetic influences and predispostions.
[...] RSS feed for comments on this post. TrackBack URL [...]
Richard’s probably a civil engineer.
i wonder would this account at least partially for the apalling spelling punctuation grammer and sintacks that is so often a feature of coments what homaphobics and creationists write.
Please tell me the spelling and punctuation in your own comment was ironic William.
I thought I had posted something here on this subject yesterday but I apparently never hit Submit Comment before shutting down my system. Anyway, to recap, I see this tendency as general across the political spectrum, though it’s more present in some political milieus than others.
I do see a liberal effort to create an angry “know nothing” contingent, which has been somewhat successful, and which I think is intended to serve as a counter to the “army of angry morons” created by conservative media.
Among LGBT people I’ve seen some of this kind of hostile, broadbrush thinking as well. The great commonness of LGBT negativity toward ALL Christians is one example. The feeling I got most often from people who toss off angry missives against “Christians” is they don’t want to think. Another is the anti-bisexual attitude among many monosexual lesbians and gay men. It’s as though the part of their brain that is capable of tolerance was worn out or stretched to its limits by accepting exclusively homosexual men and women, and just wasn’t intelligent or flexible enough to conceive that there aren’t just two discrete sexualities. (I imagine anti-transgenderism among LGB people works much the same way.)
I see the same thing from gay racists. It’s as though their ability to be tolerant was used up by their acceptance of homosexual people, the acceptance of themselves, and they just don’t have any left for anyone else. The way people like this react angrily toward some types of stimuli related to people of color seems like the reaction of someone who has been pushed beyond their limits or abilities, a sort of reacting out of fatigue.
And then there’s the blanket anti-conservative sentiment — and its sheer nastiness — that I’ve been seeing in our community for the past two decades. It seems to me the best way to deal with gay conservatives is to actually understand them first. Which is cognitively difficult since we have a new type of gay conservative now, the GOProud variety, that seem to be really foreign in many ways to the thinking of most LGBT people, including those right of center gay people who support anti-discrimination laws,
http://www.logcabin.org/site/c.nsKSL7PMLpF/b.6417373/k.5D4F/Workplace_Discrimination.htm
however true it is that their support of conservative candidates compromises efforts to enact it.
(For what it’s worth, I’m by no means right of center, in fact I’m to the left of the Democratic party — though I’m not sure how much that says anymore. :)
Still though, the status quo and the past are favored most by resort to broadbrush, kneejerk prejudice, so I’d expect the people with the poor reasoning skills would be more concentrated in conservative and reactionary movements, ESPECIALLY conformist conservatives who operate not out of thoughtful application of principle but who feel happiest when they accept what others tell them and who like to feel they’re part of a greater whole (in this case the conservative media-enforced Republican conservative movement).
I have to say, a LOT of fundamentalists seem thoughtless and dumb. One thing I’ve noticed is how few of them you see in high tech milieus. You see Mormons and Catholics (the other two big contingents of the U.S. Religious Right triad), but very rarely fundamentalists. It’s as though fundamentalism and analytical skills are antithetical to one another. Here’s a little something from Iowa, a proud part of the Bible Belt: a man in IT I’d worked with who had worked out of Iowa for years was told by others at his Iowa-based company, “The Devil’s in this computer!” when their computer was acting up. I asked him, were those people serious when they said that, and he said “Yes!”
It’s seemed to me that gay men on the whole are more articulate than straight men, and that is particularly true of more “effeminate” men, speaking generally. When I was younger, I at times got the impression that gay men and lesbians tended to be smarter on average than straight people. I took this to be due to our need to be able to handle ourselves in hostile, outnumbered situations more often than straight people do.
And straight women seem more articulate, in general, than straight men. Which I attribute to their need to be able to out-think or out-talk one or more men who might otherwise do them some kind of harm.
From what I understand, there’s a point when a person is very young when that person’s brain has the most brain cells, and that many of those brain cells are pared away as time goes on, maybe losing stuff that isn’t used much or at all. I have to wonder that having to put more effort into making sense of our lives, and having to put more thought into getting by in life might tend to cause our brains to develop with more of certain types of abilities, perhaps superior introspection or strategizing, or social abilities that are in some ways superior.
Which isn’t to deny whatever damage is done to the emotional substructures of our brains by growing up in what is still very much a straight man’s world.
Fundagelical wingnuts are stoopid?
No s**t.