The study can reach the conclusion "liberals are smarter than conservatives" only by making the sort of unscientific, intuitive, and ultimately indefensible leap of faith which science should never make. There is a lot more to adaptive intelligence than can be measured by a few minutes of button-pushing.

Yet it is axiomatic that the body of conservatives has less education on average than their liberal counterparts. Liberal perspective: higher education loosens up and improves adaptive intelligence. Conservative perspective: higher education brainwashes people into becoming liberals. Scientific perspective: the study of the brain is so embryonic and incomplete that we can't explain satisfactorily why people think as they do about much of anything.

(A wink to William Saleton for having borrowed his pithy format.)

In the absence of a firm biochemical understanding of how the brain operates, pursuing such conclusions is like building castles out of sand. I'll side with William on this one.

As an aside, I'm not as interested in correlating adaptive intelligence to political inclinations as I am in correlating selfishness and empathy. I wonder: can arguments over capital punishment, torture, conservation, universal health care, free trade, belligerent foreign policy, and civil rights be boiled down to how selfish or empathetic the various proponents are? Now there's a good question for pseudo-scientists to tackle! :P

Actually, the correlation between education and political persuasion is very weak, and almost non-existent with respect to high school and 2-4 year college degrees. A gap does open for "advanced degrees", but it is my speculation at least is that this is largely an artifact of teachers (particularly K12) needed advanced degrees. They make up a disproprotionate share of people with advanced degrees and lean decidedly left. Yet I would bet that you and I would both judge 90% of the engineers (usually BS degree holders) at your local company as smart or smarter than the average teacher in your local district.

In my fifteen years working at tech firms in Silicon Valley, it's been my experience that programmers tend to be liberals, while management and marketing people are more often conservatives.

I'm interested in Urgelt's empathy/selfishness question, too. I have known some pretty smart conservatives.

The study did not say liberals are smarter than conservatives. Salaton said the study said liberals are smarter than conservatives and that the study was rigged. Neither of these assertions was true. Salaton, in this case, is wrong.

One thing missed by you and by Saleton is that the particular task used in this study is a widely-used, well-understood task. That's why the authors used it.

A major part of an IQ test involves repeating a list of numbers backwards. The experimenter tells you a set of letters, and you list them backwards. It's that simple. Does it sound important ot intelligence? No, not really. But it correlates so well with other aspects of intelligence and it's so simple to administer, we've become very dependent on this particular test. Also, the neurobiology of verbal working memory is relatively well-understood.

The go/no-go test is similar. Saleton -- who claims to write about science for Slate -- purposefully presented this study out of context in order to make it look ridiculous. He either knows better or he should be fired by Slate for incompetence.

You just undermined your point. The repeating numbers backwards test has a reasonable level of validity because it correlates quite well with IQ, and IQ (this is very important) actually correlates with the real world, though not perfectly.

I have no idea what the go/no-go test correlates to in real life, and neither does anyone else from what I can tell. Nor is it clear that doing "well" on go/no-go is a good thing, as Saleten pointed out. It could be good or bad, depending on the situation. This stands in contrast to IQ, which is pretty much a good thing to have in any situation.

If you actually read the technical article (which I did), the "liberals are better than conservatives bias" is not obvious. Peer-review is good at weeding out that crap. However, if you read some of the comments by the authors outside of the journals, the bias creeps in. The media has magnified it a thousand-fold, as they alway do.

Hey Sakura,

A B.S. is NOT an advanced degree. An advanced degree is a Masters or a P.H.D. Also, teachers are not required to hold advanced degrees, just a Bachelors with a teaching certification. Your idea that engineers are smarter than teachers is absurd. Of course they are generally better at math, their speciality, but they lack skillsets in NUMEROUS other areas. The facts are that a large majority of P.H.D. holders are liberal in their thinking. Does this mean that the more educated someone is, the more likely they are to be liberal? Not necessarily, it could also mean that liberals are more inclined to pursue Doctorate degrees.

as a doctoral student who falls on the conservative side of the spectrum, I definitely agree that graduate students tend to be more liberal, with the notable exception of business students. part of the reason may simply boil down to money- if that's your main priority, a PhD definitely isn't the best career move. and conservatives certainly are fond of money.

K12 teachers are not required to get Master's degrees, but many do. Partly because teacher certification gets them halfway there, partly because they are required to take additional classes occasionally, and partly because it bumps their pay in a formulaic way. Of course, virtually all college/university teachers have advanced degrees.

The idea that engineers on average are smarter than K12 teachers is not absurd. It is the data. Shall I dig up the average ACT/SAT scores of people admitted to engineering programs vs education programs for you? You will be comparing the most difficult programs with some of the best students against what is often the program with the lowest bar to get in to. It is a sad fact that many people that enter (and get through) our teacher ed programs are there because they couldn't cut it anywhere else.

PhD holders do lean left, but not so much as you think. And again, it comes around to the idea that liberals are drawn to teaching, and a PhD is the gateway to teaching at many levels. Many of the jobs conservatives are drawn to (business, for example) do not require "advanced degrees" but rather experience on the job.