3 Comments
User's avatar
Norman G. Angleson's avatar

>this is a phenomenon that’s entirely relegated to the Anglosphere.

You sure it's not just high IQ countries in general? There's evidence that parenthood almost entirely accounts for the relationship between age and conservatism; experimentally inducing a parental mindset also boosts conservative thinking:

https://royalsocietypublishing.org/doi/10.1098/rspb.2022.0978

I interpret this as more support for notions of conservatism as 'instinctual thinking' explaining things like political gaps in traits like racism and IQ.

Here's another study exploiting timing differences in the rollout of broadband, this time with the british housing panel study, and this time more of a focus on various 'social capital' measures:

http://repec.econ.muni.cz/mub/wpaper/working%20papers/WP201801MUNIeconPAPER.pdf

There's also some evidence of network effects, where banning individual teenagers from social media use doesn't produce expected positive effects since everyone else is still online:

https://twitter.com/Chris_Said/status/1498279379083870211

May soon also be possible to see if China's new policies have any success given that they're gonna be a nation-wide thing. Tho prob not worth limiting the productivity of the talented male minority.

Expand full comment
Cremieux's avatar

I'm sure. The other Western non-Anglosphere countries are also high-IQ but unaffected.

Expand full comment
Galatia's avatar

What explains gap in IQ?

* "Recent evidence indicates that cognitive ability has a monotonically positive relation to socially liberal beliefs"

https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0191886915002925

* "Non-White voters drag down the Democrats, so when looking at only Whites the left has a consistent lead in intelligence, but it's pretty small. However, it is true that extreme liberal Whites are the smartest group with a mean of 107 IQ versus their counterparts extreme conservative Whites with a mean of 98.5, close to a 10 IQ gap"

https://kirkegaard.substack.com/p/conservatives-arent-stupid

* "We sought to assess whether previous findings regarding the relationship between cognitive ability and religiosity could be replicated in a large dataset of online daters (maximum n = 67k). We found that self-declared religious people had lower IQs than nonreligious people (atheists and agnostics). Furthermore, within most religious groups, a negative relationship between the strength of religious conviction and IQ was observed. This relationship was absent or reversed in nonreligious groups. A factor of religiousness based on five questions correlated at −0.38 with IQ after adjusting for reliability (−0.30 before). The relationship between IQ and religiousness was not strongly confounded by plausible demographic covariates (β = −0.24 in final model versus −0.30 without covariates"

https://www.mdpi.com/2624-8611/2/1/3/htm

Expand full comment