Liberalism and Atheism Linked To IQ 33
Pharmboy writes "CNN is reporting that 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 US 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."
Re:Yep, and really smart people choose for themsel (Score:3, Insightful)
Sorry, but stereotyping and other forms of generalization don't work very well when you are dealing with the long tail, on either side of the peak.
The article is about a whopping single digit difference. Not exactly the long tail in the 160s range or the 40s range.
"Participants who said they were atheists had an average IQ of 103 in adolescence, while adults who said they were religious averaged 97, the study found."
Now if they tested for gullibility instead of intelligence, I'm sure the correlation would be far stronger.
Re:I think Georges Lemaitre would disagree (Score:3, Insightful)
Yes, a literal interpretation of any religious book usually can't coexist with reason and rationality. But taking religion as a moral tradition, it really doesn't have to have any issue with science.
And please remember, no matter how many single instances of intelligent conservative religious sluts you want to break out, it doesn't change the data of a large pool or respondents like this. That isn't how statistics work. You average them in. And the fact that they achieved statistically significant results means that when you average in ALL the numbers (including the people who don't fit the pattern) the pattern will remain. That's what significant means: that it isn't just random chance, dependent on how you chose your samples.
And a friendly science reminder: to say that smart people are more likely to be liberal is inaccurate, as it assumes that the high IQ causes the liberal thoughts. Maybe being liberal MAKES you smarter. So maybe if that guy wasn't a priest he would have been even smarter. But realistically, you just don't have to read that much into it. Every group has outliers.