Satoshi Kanazawa is an evolutionary psychologist and intelligence researcher at the London School of Economics and Political Science. He is Reader in Management at LSE as well as Honorary Research[…]
Sign up for the Smarter Faster newsletter
A weekly newsletter featuring the biggest ideas from the smartest people
Humans are, in a sense, hardwired to be conservative, and it requires a unique intelligence to acquire something as evolutionarily novel as liberalism.
Question: Are liberals more intelligent than conservatives?
Satoshi Kanazawa: That is the conclusion of my latest study because being liberal is evolutionarily novel. In a sense, humans are designed to be conservative and it’s unnatural for humans to be liberal, being concerned about the welfare of millions of genetically unrelated other people. So more intelligent people are more likely to acquire unnatural preferences and values and being a liberal is one of them and as a result more intelligent people tend to be more liberal than less intelligent people.
Satoshi Kanazawa: That is the conclusion of my latest study because being liberal is evolutionarily novel. In a sense, humans are designed to be conservative and it’s unnatural for humans to be liberal, being concerned about the welfare of millions of genetically unrelated other people. So more intelligent people are more likely to acquire unnatural preferences and values and being a liberal is one of them and as a result more intelligent people tend to be more liberal than less intelligent people.
▸
1 min
—
with