Liberal Scientist Concludes Liberals Are Smart, Conservatives Dumb.

An endless supply of Professor Frinks seek name recognition, and what better way is there to do that then to conclusively prove conservatives are dumb. Mmmhideum-hey.

Every few months a story pops up that claims to empirically demonstrate that liberals (coincidentally) have the pole position when it comes to the world’s intelligence-race.  Usually these studies cover their tracks with a multitude of qualifiers tucked away where only their peers will notice. Regardless, when eager media (like Pavlov’s dogs) write headlines like “Low IQ & Conservative Beliefs Linked to Prejudice,” they’ve done their job.

The world can breathe a sigh of relief, because lead researcher Gordon Hodson, a psychologist at Brock University in Ontario, is cracking the “predjudice nut”!

“[In the study,] social conservatives were defined as people who agreed with a laundry list of statements such as “Family life suffers if mum is working full-time,” and “Schools should teach children to obey authority.” Attitudes toward other races were captured by measuring agreement with statements such as “I wouldn’t mind working with people from other races.”

..As suspected, low intelligence in childhood corresponded with racism in adulthood. But the factor that explained the relationship between these two variables was political: When researchers included social conservatism in the analysis, those ideologies accounted for much of the link between brains and bias.”

Yes. Yes. There were a lot of things that probably turned out “as suspected,” particularly the notion that conservatives are idiots. However, if you read all the way to the end of the story…you’ll find that a professor unconnected with the study actually provides some sanity:

“My speculation is that it’s not as simple as their model presents it,” [University of Virginia psychologist Brian Nosek] said. “I think that lower cognitive capacity can lead to multiple simple ways to represent the world, and one of those can be embodied in a right-wing ideology where ‘People I don’t know are threats’ and ‘The world is a dangerous place’. … Another simple way would be to just assume everybody is wonderful,”
(Emphasis added).

Sadly for liberal scientists everywhere, Brian Nosek decided to play wet blanket. He rather astutely points out that, with the right phrases, the world might realize that liberal moral relativism also attracts a sizable population of idiots.

Years ago, when I was saving money for graduate school, I worked as substitute teacher. On quite a few occasions I worked with mentally disabled kids from middle school to high school. If I followed the logic of the headlines provided by Stephanie Pappas of LiveScience.com, I would have thought I was in a golden incubator for bigoted conservative voters. The truth? It seemed to me that the bigger the disability the kids had, the bigger their hearts were. The tougher their lives were, the brighter their outlook on the world. Often times I had to turn my back to the class to discretely compose myself, because witnessing young children dealing with pain and adversity with uncommon grace and poise is incredibly humbling.

There is a difference between causation and correlation, and media always blurs the lines when it makes them (i.e., liberals) look good. Instead of analyzing the principles that undergird conservatism, those Hayek deemed “second hand dealers in ideas” would rather find creative ways to slime its advocates. With the internet, they can no longer do so without being challenged (which might account for why so many liberals support internet censorship).

Think about it. Or, better put, run it up the flagpole and see.