Lecture 9 - Beliefs and attitudes 2 Flashcards
How could intelligence drive attitude formation?
When considering social, moral and political situations, those with greater cognitive skill are able to form more individualistic and open-minded (i.e. antiauthoritarian) attitudes than those of lesser cognitive ability
Old claim
What correlation did McCourt et al. (1999) find between IQ and RWA?
Negative - r = -0.37
I.e. the less intelligent participants were in the sample, the more likely they were to espouse right-wing authoritarian views.
However, cross-sectional study - cannot establish cause
Stankov (2009) employed western measures of conservatism and cognitive tests to his sample - what was an issue with this?
His sample included many foreign students applying to US university - western measures may not be valid
Did Stankov (2009) find negative correlations between conservatism and cognitive ability?
Yes - from negative 0.23 to 0.4
Cross sectional
Deary, Batty & Gale (2008) tested childhood intelligence at 10 years to see if this predicted political attitudes and political party preference at age 30. What did they find?
Those who endorse liberal/non-traditional attitudes as adults did better as kids in intelligence tests
Those having voted or likely to vote for Greens and Liberal Democrats as adults did better as kids in intelligence tests
(while BNP-voters were below average intelligence)
What is structural equation modelling?
Statistical technique for inferring causal relationships between latent & observed variables
(But still true that ‘correlation is not causation’)
Strength of association/magnitude of relationship between one variable and another, but tells us nothing about causality - all correlational
Are g and liberalism directly measurable constructs?
No - constructs derived from many smaller tests of underlying attitudes/abilities
In 2016 in the US, did voting patterns reflect the relationship between higher intelligence and liberal attitudes?
Yes
e.g. Democrat advantage for post-grads is +40% in Wisconsin
In 2012 in the US, did voting patterns reflect the relationship between higher intelligence and liberal attitudes?
More complex - least & most-educated vote Democrat
Can most variability in political attitudes later in life be explained by g score at 10?
Yes
Is social class a good predictor of liberal attitudes?
No
Is the relationship between childhood intelligence and adult liberal attitudes mediated by education and class?
No
Why are the temporal constraints on measuring childhood intelligence with adult political attitudes helpful for inferring causation?
adult Liberal attitudes can’t cause childhood general intelligence
g earlier on plausibly might shape later liberal attitudes
What does Kanazawa suggest is the adaptation of intelligence?
To deal with evolutionarily novel thinking - liberalism is an example of a novel idea
Kanazawa (2010) measured intelligence using Peabody Picture vocabulary test (verbal intelligence measure), and measured adult political orientation. What did they find?
Adolescent intelligence predicts subsequent political orientation
What did Argyle (1958) find out about the relationship between intelligence and atheism?
“Intelligent students are much less likely to accept orthodox beliefs, and rather less likely to have pro-religious attitudes”
Orthodox = traditional conservative way of thinking
1) As per political orthodoxy, intelligence dampens religious attitudes
2) However, intelligence has a stronger effect upon orthodoxy/traditionalism (in a general sense) than upon religious attitudes
Simply put:
Intelligence places more obstacles to accepting conservatism than it does to accepting religious faith.
What were three reasons why intelligence might undermine religious beliefs as put by Zuckerman et al. (2013)?
1) Intelligent people less likely to conform, so can resist religious dogma.
2) Intelligent people higher in analytical thinking than intuitive thinking.
3) Intelligence confers some of the benefits of religion (better social bonds), so religion is thus less necessary.
What was the average correlation between intelligence and strength of religious beliefs found by Zuckerman et al. (2013)?
-0.20 to -0.25
In Bell’s (2002) multi-study review, how many studies found a negative correlation between intelligence and religious belief?
39/43 studies found a negative correlation between intelligence & religious belief. Pretty robust finding!
However correlations are fairly weak, but still consistently found
When is the intelligence-religion association stronger?
1) in college students & general population than pre-college students.
i.e. stronger as you age.
2) for religious beliefs than behaviours
Don’t believe in god, still go to church/mosque, still follow religious festivals
What is school-age intelligence also positively correlated with other than liberalism and atheism?
View that men should be monogamous
What is a strength of Kanazawa’s study?
Large samples - study 1 had over 15,000 respondents
What was the difference in IQ points between lowest and highest religiosity groups, and difference in IQ points between lowest and highest conservatism groups?
Religious - 6
Political attitudes - 12
Double the effect for political attitudes, but generally the same pattern
Intelligence may allow for abstract analytical thinking which underlies both these findings
Why might the association between religion and low intelligence be weaker in countries with high levels of religion?
Society is strongly biased to be religious so there is a lot of variance under ‘religious’ people - may be a higher effect among less religious countries but no studies on this yet
