Are liberals and atheists smarter?
An upcoming study has some interesting IQ-related results (h/t: panzerfaust at DU) that are going to really push some buttons:
Liberalism, atheism, male sexual exclusivity linked to IQPolitical, religious and sexual behaviors may be reflections of intelligence, a new study finds.
Evolutionary psychologist Satoshi Kanazawa at the the London School of Economics and Political Science correlated data on these behaviors with IQ from a large national U.S. sample and found that, on average, people who identified as liberal and atheist had higher IQs. This applied also to sexual exclusivity in men, but not in women. The findings will be published in the March 2010 issue of Social Psychology Quarterly.
It's only a summary, but it's still worth reading--bearing in mind the standard caveats about correlation and causation.
update (2/27 @ 2:22pm):
The paper is online at Dr Kanazawa's personal website here. Kanazawa uses the Savanna-IQ Interaction Hypothesis ("more intelligent individuals may be more likely to acquire and espouse evolutionarily novel preferences and values than less intelligent individuals, while general intelligence may make no difference for the acquisition and espousal of evolutionarily familiar values.") and writes that:
...consistent with the Hypothesis, more intelligent individuals are more likely to espouse liberal political ideology and to be atheists, and more intelligent men (but not women) are more likely to value sexual exclusivity.
Here is Figure 1, showing higher intelligence along with liberalism and atheism:
Kanazawa writes, though, that the data "cannot explain the origin of covariance between general intelligence and certain values:"
Why do intelligent parents tend simultaneously to be liberal and atheist, to pass on their genetic tendencies toward liberalism and atheism to their intelligent children? Why are there not an equal (or greater) number of intelligent parents who are conservative and/or religious, to pass on their conservative and religious tendencies to their intelligent children? Why are there not many less intelligent parents who are liberal and atheist?