IQ & Bush support
Dr Maxtor has posted an amusing report which indicates that there is a correlation between low IQ and support for Bush. Among people of IQs above 140, there is 80% support for Kerry, among those of average or below average IQ, Bush is narrowly in the lead (54-46). Nader supporters are among the brightest, but “too smart for their own good”.
There are two problems with this report, amusing as it is. First is that IQ is not universally accepted as a measure of intelligence; there is an essay by Ashley Montagu, The IQ Mythology (in Montagu, Race & IQ, Oxford, 1999), which explains that, among other things, IQ results are affected by one’s upbringing and environment, and not just one’s physical makeup. They ask questions which are obviously easy to fix, such as general knowledge questions. What’s general knowledge to an American isn’t general to a Sri Lankan, so you might expect an American to know who Martin Luther King or JF Kennedy were (and that they were shot), but obviously the Sri Lankan couldn’t be expected to know this. When I was at school, a teacher told another pupil, an obnoxious bully, that he was more intelligent than myself or a friend of mine, and that he could beat us at any subject he chose, if he wanted to (he didn’t, and was subsequently expelled for drug possession). The only source of this could have been an IQ test, and I have heard of pupils being expelled from schools for coming up short at these tests.
The other issue with this report is that it’s not actual lack of intelligence which helps Bush, but the encouragement by the media of visceral, lowest-common-denominator, “common sense” attitudes which do not require thinking. It makes common people – not necessarily thick, but mostly uneducated – value their opinions and rubbish those of people who have studied the issue. Which is why you get “middle Americans” in places like Kansas rubbishing the effete, latte-drinking intellectuals of New York and Massachusetts, and wealthy businessmen boasting about how “humble” they are (see T Frank, What’s the Matter With Kansas/America?.
The most obvious source of these attitudes are the talk radio programmes, in which presenters give the “common people” a chance to bash the powerful and talk back to the arrogant councillors and mayors – not a bad thing in itself, but then they get onto the subject of school “discipline” and the prevailing opinions are that the kids just need a whack round the head. The hosts may shame some of the most virulent and explicit hatred, but bleats about immigrants and “political correctness” are quite common, along with populist appeals to “support our boys” and that sort of thing. So the problem is the under-valuing of intelligence and coherent thought, not people having low IQs. People can think – they just don’t.
