Or you might be thinking of reasonable in the sense of “moderate”, so that opinions you label as “unreasonable” would be less represented than they are today. Fewer politicians who are religious, or anti-science, or whatever.
I don’t see strong evidence that higher IQs would lead to any of these results.
It’s true that intelligence is strongly correlated with political opinion—both the opinions listed in that article, and other ones (and political opinions tend to form clusters with strong internal correlations).
So if you select the top 10% most intelligent people today, the spectrum of opinion would be different from that of all society. And perhaps it would also be narrower, meaning no new extremist opinions would emerge that are at merely 1% today but happen to be held by 10% of the 10% most intelligent people.
But it’s not clear to me how much of that correlation would go away if you control for all the other factors that intelligence is also correlated with, and that would still be varying in a higher-intelligence society. For instance intelligence is correlated with wealth, status, certain social circles. It’s correlated with certain political affiliations beyond those examined by the article you link to, and political affiliations tend to clump into highly correlated clusters.
Being conscious of one’s own high intelligence is probably correlated with respecting intelligence as such, and hence respecting the opinions of other people known to be intelligent; whereas being conscious of having low intelligence is probably correlated with anti-intelligence (anti-rational, anti-science) beliefs. (Which partly explains why more intelligent people agree more with economists, who are high-status on the intelligence scale. After all, the study doesn’t say that intelligent people independenly came up with the same conclusions as economists. At least I assume it doesn’t, since it’s behind a paywall.)
Some of my uncertainty is merely a matter of how we construct our counterfactual intelligent society, so let’s take a concrete example. Suppose all new people born starting tomorrow will have the mean IQ of their parents + 40%. Would the current correlations between intelligence and political opinion win over the current correlations between the political opinions of parents and their children, or of children growing together in communities with uniform political opinions? I don’t feel I have enough evidence for a high degree of confidence here.
The data from twin studies and intrafamily correlations suggest that their political beliefs would change substantially, but their partisan affiliation not so much. This would change policy by changing what wins primaries in parties, and what parties fight over vs agree on.
That isn’t especially related to my original point, because it seems specific to the current structure of U.S. politics; it’s not very applicable to countries that don’t have a few large long-lived political parties. For instance, in Israel, many people were born before the establishment of the state, and no party has survived since then.
We need to look at aspects of U.S. political belief to make good U.S.-specific predictions. And in that, you are surely better informed than I am. So I accept your conclusion that in that context, intelligence is causative of rational and of moderate beliefs. But the specific reasons and dynamics that lead to that seem highly contigent.
Yes, the first-past-the-post geographical constituency system has quite different effects on partisan structure than many other electoral systems, and other countries have more fluid partisan identity.
“So I accept your conclusion that in that context, intelligence is causative of rational and of moderate beliefs.”
I think the belief point holds much more broadly. Similar studies have been done with data about other political beliefs from European countries, e.g. by people in Deary’s lab in the U.K.
http://econlog.econlib.org/archives/2010/10/intelligence_ma.html
It’s true that intelligence is strongly correlated with political opinion—both the opinions listed in that article, and other ones (and political opinions tend to form clusters with strong internal correlations).
So if you select the top 10% most intelligent people today, the spectrum of opinion would be different from that of all society. And perhaps it would also be narrower, meaning no new extremist opinions would emerge that are at merely 1% today but happen to be held by 10% of the 10% most intelligent people.
But it’s not clear to me how much of that correlation would go away if you control for all the other factors that intelligence is also correlated with, and that would still be varying in a higher-intelligence society. For instance intelligence is correlated with wealth, status, certain social circles. It’s correlated with certain political affiliations beyond those examined by the article you link to, and political affiliations tend to clump into highly correlated clusters.
Being conscious of one’s own high intelligence is probably correlated with respecting intelligence as such, and hence respecting the opinions of other people known to be intelligent; whereas being conscious of having low intelligence is probably correlated with anti-intelligence (anti-rational, anti-science) beliefs. (Which partly explains why more intelligent people agree more with economists, who are high-status on the intelligence scale. After all, the study doesn’t say that intelligent people independenly came up with the same conclusions as economists. At least I assume it doesn’t, since it’s behind a paywall.)
Some of my uncertainty is merely a matter of how we construct our counterfactual intelligent society, so let’s take a concrete example. Suppose all new people born starting tomorrow will have the mean IQ of their parents + 40%. Would the current correlations between intelligence and political opinion win over the current correlations between the political opinions of parents and their children, or of children growing together in communities with uniform political opinions? I don’t feel I have enough evidence for a high degree of confidence here.
The data from twin studies and intrafamily correlations suggest that their political beliefs would change substantially, but their partisan affiliation not so much. This would change policy by changing what wins primaries in parties, and what parties fight over vs agree on.
That isn’t especially related to my original point, because it seems specific to the current structure of U.S. politics; it’s not very applicable to countries that don’t have a few large long-lived political parties. For instance, in Israel, many people were born before the establishment of the state, and no party has survived since then.
We need to look at aspects of U.S. political belief to make good U.S.-specific predictions. And in that, you are surely better informed than I am. So I accept your conclusion that in that context, intelligence is causative of rational and of moderate beliefs. But the specific reasons and dynamics that lead to that seem highly contigent.
Yes, the first-past-the-post geographical constituency system has quite different effects on partisan structure than many other electoral systems, and other countries have more fluid partisan identity.
“So I accept your conclusion that in that context, intelligence is causative of rational and of moderate beliefs.”
I think the belief point holds much more broadly. Similar studies have been done with data about other political beliefs from European countries, e.g. by people in Deary’s lab in the U.K.