Anti-Gay Views Linked to Lower Intelligence in New Study
S E E D E D C O N T E N T
A new study of almost 12,000 people links greater prejudice against gay people with lower intelligence, and makes total sense, adding to “a growing body of literature that indicates less intelligent people tend to express more prejudicial attitudes.”
PsyPost reports : “The study analyzed data from 11,654 individuals who participated in the Household, Income and Labour Dynamics in Australia Survey. Cognitive ability was assessed using three tests: the National Adult Reading Test, the Symbol Digits Modalities Test and the Backwards Digit Span test. Perales found that those who scored lower on the tests were more likely to disagree with the statement “Homosexual couples should have the same rights as heterosexual couples do.” The link was strongest for verbal ability. This association held even after controlling for a number of socio-demographic and economic variables — including education. ‘Altogether, the findings provide clear evidence that cognitive ability is an important precursor of prejudice against same-sex couples,’ Perales wrote in his study
Says the abstract : “There are well-known correlations between low cognitive ability and support of prejudicial or non-egalitarian attitudes. This paper adds to existing knowledge by providing the first analyses of the associations between cognitive ability and attitudes towards LGBT issues in a non-US sample (Australia), comparing these across three measures of cognitive ability, and examining the separate, joint and interactive effects of education and cognitive ability. Findings from a high-quality, national Australian dataset (n = 11,564) indicate that individuals with low cognitive ability are less likely to support equal rights for same-sex couples. This pattern holds in the presence of confounds, is consistent across measures of ability, and is more pronounced for verbal ability. Education and cognitive ability affect attitudes through similar channels, but retain independent effects.”
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It would be surprising if these findings didn't hold true for other kids of irrational prejudices like racism, Islamophobia, xenophobia and misogyny. As Trump said: "I love the poorly educated."
The idea that less educated and less intelligent people are more biased against people who are different than they are is not surprising. The reason why they do what they do is not what I was expecting.
I know that Bob Altemeyer (the research psychologist who wrote "The Authoritarians") also found a strong correlation between right-wing views, prejudiced views and low intellect. Other researchers have found a correlation between those traits and the size of the amygdala.
I've read that people who support conservative viewpoints tend to have a larger amygdala and are often driven by fear.
They are? I'm not sure which "right wing" ideologies you are referring to, but in the US, the right wing tends to be anti-authoritarian. They look to deregulate industry and promote individual liberty. They favor political power in the hands of state and local authority versus a strong central government. They promote entrepreneurship instead of government created jobs. They favor private property. In national elections, they favor a system that protects small states and rural communities, i.e. political minorities. Such a policy creates a diversity of ideologies.
By contrast, the left wing, both in the US and around the world, tends to promote a strong central government that regulates all aspects of life. In some left wing countries, this extends even to telling citizens what kind of career path they should pursue and imposing heavy taxes to fund whatever projects that central government wants to pursue. Today's left wing is particularly authoritarian when it comes to policing political speech. In national elections, they favor the mob rule of pure democracy over a system that protects minorities. Such a policy crushes diversity of thought in favor of authoritarian groupthink.
Of course, your mileage may vary and individuals are certainly not always pure in the ideology, but I would not say that the right wing is more authoritarian.
How exactly is the denial of equal rights to LGBT people, and those of other religions supporting individual liberty? Are racism, xenophobia, and slavery also supporting individual liberty?
Donald Trump has expressed more than a few dictatorial ideas and I don't see many liberals defending him.
LOL. Altemeyer's study was about the "Tea Party" loons and he's recently updated it to help explain the right wing support for Trump. My own observation is that right wingers in general tend to be pro-authoritarian, you included, and it certainly explains why someone like Trump endorses brutal dictators like Duterte. And there isn't anything that's left-wing about opposition to abortion rights, women's rights, LGBT rights, voting rights for minorities, marijuana use, porn, sex, etc.......in general the right wing is an opponent of personal liberty except for the freedom to impose their twisted values on everyone else, and the freedom to pollute the environment which everyone has to live in.
Here's the Trump update on authoritarians:
That's a rather ironic and uninformed comment since what you're referring to (the electoral college) was part of the framework put in place to protect the "property rights" of rich white folks in the slave states. It was definitely not designed to protect minorities.
a very interesting comment - can you tell me was it the "left wing" or the "right wing" that was asking the federal government to regulate the genders legally allowed to obtain a secular legal Marriage license and excluding any combination that were not 2 people of the opposite gender ? in fact, to this day, that particular "wing" has it embedded in their political party's platform to reverse the SCOTUS decision - there's your only hint. (i suppose if you are honest and answer "right wing" then it may destroy your argument, huh ?)
I'm not aware of rights denied to LGBT people. Perhaps you could elaborate and connect them to specific ideology?
Indeed not. However, none of those things are connected to right wing concepts of government.
For example? And anyway, I did say your mileage would vary on an individual basis. It's only 5 or 6 years ago that Trump was a Democrat.
I'm not sure what you're attempting to prove by offering this. And anyway, with politics as tribal as they are these days, Trump actually came out in favor of ending a war and the Left refuses to support him. I won't dignify modern leftism by calling it "liberal." It's anything but.
those terrible educated "elites" ! how dare we have anyone get a PhD and do research work to better understand the world and people around them !! i mean, the nerve of those people, right ?
Is this a hint that you do not support free speech for others? Conservatives can dish it out but they can't take it.
The concept of free speech means that nobody has the right to be immune from criticism by anyone else.
DOMA laws/Prop-8 and the idea that Phillps and others like him can refuse to serve LGBT people equally with WASPs in a public business. The fact that some adoption agencies can deny to allow gay couples to adopt. Transgendered bathroom laws are based on the conservtive religious belief that transgendered people are criminals who secretly plot to molest children in the bathroom.
The conservative support of racism and xenophobia is obvious to everyone but themselves.
The idea that the state can endorse Christian belief by erecting religious monuments on public property or teach Christian beliefs in public schools.
The uncomfortable truth is that the framers didn't trust regular people to make a good decision - a prejudice that may not be wholly unjustified. People cast votes for all sorts of ridiculous reasons. I'd like to see people consider skills and experience working with legislators, diplomacy, economics, leadership and so on. Instead they vote for the person who looks good on TV or makes pretty speeches. They vote for the guy who kisses babies, eats cheeseburgers, or who is simply from the same state. Hamilton talks about the importance of electing competent presidents in Federalist Paper No. 68.
In Federalist No. 10, Madison talks about his concern for factions and why he saw there a reason to avoid direct democracy. He feared that the majority could trample on the rights of the minority.
Feel free to start your own article on that topic. Please stick to the seed.
Anyone who is honest admits that opposition to abortion has nothing whatsoever to do with a desire to control women, and everything to do with protecting the life of an innocent unborn baby. Don't waste your energy trying to tell me what I believe. I couldn't care less what women do with their body as long as they aren't killing some other body.
Women have the same rights men do. The women's suffrage movement took root first and strongest in the western states, which - especially in those days - tend to be more rural, celebratory of entrepreneurship, rugged individualism, and resistant to mandates from Washington D.C.
LGBT have the same rights as anyone else. They may be denied certain privileges or entitlements, but wanting something is not the same as having a right to it.
Minorities have the same voting rights as anyone else and they can thank the anti-authoritarian Republican Party for it. These are the people who passed the 13th, 14th, and 15th Amendments. They also voted for the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965 in greater percentages than Democrats did. Today, leftists like to pretend that Voter ID laws disparately impact people of color. But go ask an actual person of color if they have more trouble getting an ID than a white person and they're liable to give you the finger for your racist assumption that they're stupid.
Just last week, Trump indicated he would support legalizing marijuana and said particularly that maybe the states should be allowed to decide for themselves. Classic non-authoritarian, states right liberal viewpoint and opposite of the modern leftist.
Porn is legal and obscenity laws are based on local standards. Are you trying to make my point?
Sex is legal, too, and tends to be locally regulated. For example, each state has its own age of consent.
The national GOP platform seeks to deny full civil rights to gays......I suggest you read it some time. And not only do all the red states fail to protect sexual orientation and gender identity, at the national level it's become much worse under Trump and adversely impacts everything from healthcare to immigration to public schools.
DOMA was passed by huge bipartisan votes and signed into law by Bill Clinton (famous Democrat. Look him up.) The country and all states have long seen value in encouraging strong families by encouraging marriage. That means you have to define what it is. The very nature of defining what a thing is means you also have to define what it isn't. That means not every person will get to take part.
But encouraging behavior is not forcing it. You can't look at a law like that and call it authoritarian. It doesn't make people do anything.
I'm not aware of a religious tenant that says they're criminals. I am aware of people who have taken advantage of compassion for trans people to commit crime. Fear of crime isn't really a political ideology, though. Perhaps we have strayed from the topic, eh?
I'm really not trying to derail the thread. All I'm doing is disputing the unsupported assertion that the political right wing is uniquely authoritarian as compared to the left wing.
We do not vote on the rights of other people, especially minorites because that would be the tyranny of the majority. Marriage has long been a right of all people regardless of race, color, gender, disability and sex. The dominant religion in the country does not control what rights other people and other religions may exercise.
The very existence of the Bill of Rights that guarantees equal rights to all people, and not just the majority, is proof of this very basic concept of freedom. The 14th Amendment's equal protection clause drives this point home.
Authoritarian laws deny some people rights that others enjoy. Why are you defending this idea if you claim to support personal freedom? What does LGBT marriage equality force you or anyone else to do?
What sort of nonsense is this?
LOL.
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That's still not really the case but I'm really referring to the historical trends where red states were dead last in banning marital rape and removing coverture laws. Patriarchy and misogyny are twin pillars of right-wing ideology, and pretty much all the opposition to equal rights for women has come from the far right wing like the LDS and Phyliss Schlafly who led the fight against the ERA.
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You mean back when those states were heavily influenced by the Progressive Movement?
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That's quite obviously a rather clueless denial of reality. Whether it's the very recent history of anti-LGBT sharia laws which are STILL on the books in most red states or the current efforts in red states to enable anti-LGBT discrimination in adoptions and public accommodations, all of that bigoted nonsense is coming solely from the right wing.
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Again you're in denial about the history of conservative efforts to deny women and racial minorities the right to vote, and you seem oblivious to the intent and the effect of the "voter ID" laws which the GOP has recently passed (where courts have even found an explicitly racist intent).
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We'll see. So far all the opposition comes from the right wing, particularly bible-babblers.
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Wasn't it Rudy Ghouliani who was recently ridiculing a woman because she's a porn star? And aren't those "community standards" far more restrictive in conservative communities than in liberal ones? I remember how the bible-babblers and other right-wing kooks freaked out about Andres Serrano's "Immersion" when it was exhibited at the Virginia Museum of Art, and freaked out about a Robert Mapplethorpe exhibit in DC and have ever since tried to shut down the National Endowment for the Arts....... despite those things not even being porn.
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Sorry but it's only the loony red states which still have things like sodomy laws on the books and which refuse to remove them despite their unconstitutionality. And it's only those loony red states which in recent decades have prosecuted gays under those Christian sharia laws. Similarly it's only red states like Texas which have recently tried to uphold their bans on sex toys.
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Only one Republican voted against it and he was the gay one. In contrast there were quite a few Dems who voted against it and spoke quite eloquently against it. Note that it was authored by the GOP in the GOP-controlled Congress as an election wedge issue, and since it passed with a veto proof majority Clinton signed it despite personally opposing it. While there were no legal same-sex marriages anywhere at the time, it's worth noting that it was struck down as blatantly unconstitutional the very first time a court reviewed it on its merits. The court also noted that the legislative record of the GOP-controlled House was filled with bible-babble.
Well you certainly haven't proved that at all. At best your diversion to the electoral college rather laughably undermined whatever point you thought you were making given its vile history.
Perhaps you're confusing those who falsely claim to be "libertarian" with being anti-authoritarian? In my experience they're anything but and are most often social conservatives like Ron Paul who think that liberty is only served by repealing the Civil Rights Act, Voting Rights Act, and 14th Amendment. In the view of that kind of right wing libertarian, "liberty" is only served by the freedom to unjustly discriminate and the freedom to pollute "your own" land, air and groundwater. Those loons think that it's "tyranny" when their business has to sell things to black or gay folks, despite the fact that they have legal alternatives to avoid those laws, and of course zoning regulations are tyranny.
LOL. That's no different than the losing arguments which conservatives used against mixed-race marriage. They were just as moronic and just as authoritarian 50 years ago as they are today. In fact the exact same argument form was used: "everyone has an equal right to marry someone of the same race as themselves."
Note that when the courts struck down these bans one key aspect was that they were an irrational infringement of personal liberty, a right protected under due process.
It's also an inherently authoritarian impulse not to recognize that gays and straights have the exact same interests in marriage, and to think that marriage should be "defined" in such a way as to irrationally exclude certain minorities in order to privilege the majority. Whether it's white supremacy or hetero supremacy, both are authoritarian at their core.
What a woman does with her body, including the decision to have an abortion or not, is none of your or anyone else's business!
The only thing I find shocking about this, is that anyone was shocked by this.