Do Racism, Homophobia, Conservatism, and Low I.Q. Go Hand in Hand?

Lower Cognitive Abilities Predict Greater Prejudice Through Ring-Wing Ideology.

by Goal Auzeen Saedi, Ph.D. - Psychology Today:


This morning as I logged onto Facebook, I came upon this image. Having followed the Boston marathon and MIT shooting coverage initially, I lost some interest when it came down to the “hunt.” As much as justice matters to me, so does tact and class, and the sensationalism of manhunts always leaves me uncomfortable. I also knew it would be a matter of time before the political rhetoric would change from the victims and wounded to the demographic factors of the suspects—namely race and religion. And alas, it has.

However, what struck me most about this image posted above was the Facebook page it came from, “Too Informed to Vote Republican.” I wondered about this, recalling an old journal article I’d come across when studying anti-Islamic attitudes post 9/11. The paper referenced a correlation between conservatism and low intelligence. Uncertain of its origin, I located a thought-provoking article published in one of psychology’s top journals, Psychological Science, which in essence confirms this.

Hodson and Busseri (2012) found in a correlational study that lower intelligence in childhood is predictive of greater racism in adulthood, with this effect being mediated (partially explained) through conservative ideology. They also found poor abstract reasoning skills were related to homophobic attitudes which was mediated through authoritarianism and low levels of intergroup contact.

What this study and those before it suggest is not necessarily that all liberals are geniuses and all conservatives are ignorant. Rather, it makes conclusions based off of averages of groups. The idea is that for those who lack a cognitive ability to grasp complexities of our world, strict-right wing ideologies may be more appealing. Dr. Brian Nosek explained it for the Huffington Post as follows, “ideologies get rid of the messiness and impose a simple solution. So, it may not be surprising that people with less cognitive capacity will be attracted to simplifying ideologies.” For an excellent continuation of this discussion and past studies, please see this article from LiveScience.

Further, studies have indicated an automatic association between aggression, America, and the news. A study conducted by researchers at Cornell and The Hebrew University (Ferguson & Hassin, 2007) indicated, “American news watchers who were subtly or nonconsciously primed with American cues exhibited greater accessibility of aggression and war constructs in memory, judged an ambiguously aggressive person in a more aggressive and negative manner, and acted in a relatively more aggressive manner toward an experimenter following a mild provocation, compared with news watchers who were not primed” (p. 1642). American “cues” refers to factors such as images of the American flag or words such as “patriot.” Interestingly, this study showed this effect to be independent of political affiliation, but suggested a disturbing notion that America is implicitly associated with aggression for news watchers.

Taken together, what do these studies suggest? Excessive exposure to news coverage could be toxic as is avoidance of open-minded attitudes and ideals. Perhaps turn off the television and pick up a book? Ideally one that exposes you to differing worldviews.

A Message on Racism for the American Family Association of Pennsylvania

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Low IQ & Conservative Beliefs Linked to Prejudice

This article presents some very important ideas for the leadership in Venango County, home-base for the Hate Group, the American Family Association of Pennsylvania, to mull over as they struggle to move the region forward in challenging times.

by Stephanie Pappas, Senior Writer for LiveScience.com:

There's no gentle way to put it: People who give in to racism and prejudice may simply be dumb, according to a new study that is bound to stir public controversy.

The research finds that children with low intelligence are more likely to hold prejudiced attitudes as adults. These findings point to a vicious cycle, according to lead researcher Gordon Hodson, a psychologist at Brock University in Ontario. Low-intelligence adults tend to gravitate toward socially conservative ideologies, the study found. (Pictured: Diane Gramely, President of the American Family Association of Pennsylvania.) Those ideologies, in turn, stress hierarchy and resistance to change, attitudes that can contribute to prejudice, Hodson wrote in an email to LiveScience.

"Prejudice is extremely complex and multifaceted, making it critical that any factors contributing to bias are uncovered and understood," he said.

Controversy Ahead

The findings combine three hot-button topics.

"They've pulled off the trifecta of controversial topics," said Brian Nosek, a social and cognitive psychologist at the University of Virginia who was not involved in the study. "When one selects intelligence, political ideology and racism and looks at any of the relationships between those three variables, it's bound to upset somebody."

Polling data and social and political science research do show that prejudice is more common in those who hold right-wing ideals that those of other political persuasions, Nosek told LiveScience.

"The unique contribution here is trying to make some progress on the most challenging aspect of this," Nosek said, referring to the new study. "It's not that a relationship like that exists, but why it exists."

Brains and Bias

Earlier studies have found links between low levels of education and higher levels of prejudice, Hodson said, so studying intelligence seemed a logical next step. The researchers turned to two studies of citizens in the United Kingdom, one that has followed babies since their births in March 1958, and another that did the same for babies born in April 1970. The children in the studies had their intelligence assessed at age 10 or 11; as adults ages 30 or 33, their levels of social conservatism and racism were measured.

In the first study, verbal and nonverbal intelligence was measured using tests that asked people to find similarities and differences between words, shapes and symbols. The second study measured cognitive abilities in four ways, including number recall, shape-drawing tasks, defining words and identifying patterns and similarities among words. Average IQ is set at 100.


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." (These questions measured overt prejudiced attitudes, but most people, no matter how egalitarian, do hold unconscious racial biases; Hodson's work can't speak to this "underground" racism.)

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.

People with lower cognitive abilities also had less contact with people of other races.

"This finding is consistent with recent research demonstrating that intergroup contact is mentally challenging and cognitively draining, and consistent with findings that contact reduces prejudice," said Hodson, who along with his colleagues published these results online Jan. 5 in the journal Psychological Science.

A Study of Averages

Hodson was quick to note that the despite the link found between low intelligence and social conservatism, the researchers aren't implying that all liberals are brilliant and all conservatives stupid. The research is a study of averages over large groups, he said.

"There are multiple examples of very bright conservatives and not-so-bright liberals, and many examples of very principled conservatives and very intolerant liberals," Hodson said.

Nosek gave another example to illustrate the dangers of taking the findings too literally.

"We can say definitively men are taller than women on average," he said. "But you can't say if you take a random man and you take a random woman that the man is going to be taller. There's plenty of overlap."

Nonetheless, there is reason to believe that strict right-wing ideology might appeal to those who have trouble grasping the complexity of the world.

"Socially conservative ideologies tend to offer structure and order," Hodson said, explaining why these beliefs might draw those with low intelligence. "Unfortunately, many of these features can also contribute to prejudice."

In another study, this one in the United States, Hodson and Busseri compared 254 people with the same amount of education but different levels of ability in abstract reasoning. They found that what applies to racism may also apply to homophobia. People who were poorer at abstract reasoning were more likely to exhibit prejudice against gays. As in the U.K. citizens, a lack of contact with gays and more acceptance of right-wing authoritarianism explained the link.

Simple Viewpoints

Hodson and Busseri's explanation of their findings is reasonable, Nosek said, but it is correlational. That means the researchers didn't conclusively prove that the low intelligence caused the later prejudice. To do that, you'd have to somehow randomly assign otherwise identical people to be smart or dumb, liberal or conservative. Those sorts of studies obviously aren't possible.

The researchers controlled for factors such as education and socioeconomic status, making their case stronger, Nosek said. But there are other possible explanations that fit the data. For example, Nosek said, a study of left-wing liberals with stereotypically naïve views like "every kid is a genius in his or her own way," might find that people who hold these attitudes are also less bright. In other words, it might not be a particular ideology that is linked to stupidity, but extremist views in general.

"My speculation is that it's not as simple as their model presents it," 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."


Prejudice is of particular interest because understanding the roots of racism and bias could help eliminate them, Hodson said. For example, he said, many anti-prejudice programs encourage participants to see things from another group's point of view.

That mental exercise may be too taxing for people of low IQ.

"There may be cognitive limits in the ability to take the perspective of others, particularly foreigners," Hodson said. "Much of the present research literature suggests that our prejudices are primarily emotional in origin rather than cognitive. These two pieces of information suggest that it might be particularly fruitful for researchers to consider strategies to change feelings toward outgroups," rather than thoughts.

July 4 "Tea Parties" Co-Organized by the American Family Association Will Include White Nationalists

by Leonard Zeskind, author of "Blood and Politics: The History of the White Nationalist Movement from the Margins to the Mainstream."

On July 4, tens of thousands of mostly middle-class white people in hundreds of different cities will register their opposition to the Barack Obama presidency at Tea Party events from coast to coast. Mainline Republicans will be among the protestors. They might carry poster signs about the rapidly expanding national debt, or against universal healthcare and more taxes. Expect also that peculiar brand of libertarian conservative from Congressman Ron Paul's Campaign for Liberty, which is actually one of two organizational pillars of the Tea Parties. The other mainstay has been Donald Wildmon's American Family Association. Its website has posted the names of more than 1,500 people who have signed up to organize protests in their communities. A total of 1,271 cities will have AFA "registered" events.


The Tea Parties will also attract a number of white nationalist activists this time around, drawn primarily by the prospect of a replay of Tea Party protests last April 15. At that time more than 260,000 people showed up at over 300 Tea Party events, according to a respectable count by Nate Silver, who used mainstream media reports as his guide. At that time, Minuteman and other anti-immigrant activists added to the count, as did members of the Council of Conservative Citizens, a white nationalist organization headquartered in St. Louis with member concentrations throughout the South and Mid-South.

A recent opinion piece by Bill Rolen in the Council's tabloid newspaper, The Citizen Informer, underscores his organization's ambivalence over the Tea Party events. On the positive side he writes, "the fact that hundreds of thousands of white people got up the nerve to oppose the government [was] astonishing." On the other hand, Rolen notes the "negative tendency that plagues Tea Party activism...to deny the racial dynamic empowering the movement." He concludes that, "The future of this revolution, if that is what it is, depends on white zealots." Little talk of taxes and budget deficits intrudes into this analysis of past events.

The Council of Conservative Citizens has not yet made a visible and significant organizational commitment to mobilize its thousands of members for the Tea Parties on July 4, but from another corner of the white nationalist movement plans to participate have been brewing since the first week in May. On the Stormfront website, national socialists and others have created a discussion thread under the rubric of a possible Tea Party for Americans Coalition.

At times these posts have an almost cartoonish aspect, with elaborately construed pseudonyms and accompanying graphics--a number of which include pictures of the now deceased National Alliance founder William Pierce. But the conclusions are real enough. They will not wear any gear with swastikas or other symbols of their actual core ideologies. They might carry Confederate battle flags or other more generic symbols of white protest. And they will be handing out a leaflet with a relatively muted political message. "We need a relevant transitional envelop-pushing flyer for the masses. Take these Tea Party Americans by the hand and help them go from crawling to standing independently and then walking towards racialism," one poster argued.

Others had slightly different ideas. Several people said they would bring a variety of pieces of propaganda, with the intensity of racism apparent on a sliding scale. They would gauge the individual Tea Partyer that they were talking to, and hand them material accordingly.

In contradistinction, another message read, "I distributed WN [white nationalist] literature at the last Tea Party in Phoenix. I will be doing it again in July. This is the time and place. For those on a budget, I would suggest printing business cards with the web address of your group or organization. Keep it simple."


This band of white nationalists on Stormfront obviously believe that the Tea Parties represent an opportunity for them to strengthen their numbers, and perhaps gain a larger foothold among the grass roots opponents of President Barack Obama. This opposition may just now be starting to grow some legs. Not in Congress, where Republicans are out-numbered and remain out-gunned. Not in opinion polls, where support for President Obama remains high. Not in the deep blue states of the D.C. to Boston corridor. But in the civic arena, where a constellation of anti-tax, anti-immigrant, and Christian right activists and Republican conservatives are gathering their forces. Expect white nationalists to put their own star in this sky.

Liberals, progressives and Obama-ites of every description would make a mistake if they chose to ignore this opposition, or worse yet decided to deny it exists. And yes, Donald Wildmon and Ron Paul should wake up, before somebody comes along and eats their lunch the way Pat Buchanan and his followers took away Ross Perot's Reform Party in the 2000 elections.

Pennsylvania's Rick Santorum Offers Up Some Racist Dating Advice

The Republican gave some dating advice, then took the opportunity to say that African-American men aren't interested in marriage.

By Tana Ganeva, AlterNet

This past Monday, former Sen. Rick Santorum, R-Pa., was tapped by Fox news to discuss the crucial, timely matter of Obama's Saturday night date. Santorum covered the relative advantages of various date destinations (Broadway or the corner bar?). He philosophically mused about what makes a marriage special (it's, in fact, the mundane!). And, he also took the opportunity to casually propagate some terrible racial myths and stereotypes (via Salon):


Number one, I think it's great that the president has a date night with his wife. He's a role model. He's a role model in particular, whether he likes it or not, in the African-American community.

And you have an African-American community, particularly in the poor inner city areas, we're looking at out of wedlock birthrates in three quarters to 75 percent (sic) of children being born out of wedlock. Marriage is an institution that's a bridge too far for too many African-American women and is not desirable among African-American males.

I know this doesn't need explaining, but just for fun: Here Santorum taps into centuries-old stereotypes that paint black men as sexually deviant and irresponsible, and hence to blame for the existence of the black underclass (as opposed to blatant as well as structural racism, the lack of support for all poor people and families, a legacy of violence and discrimination, etc. etc.)

Marriage is an institution that is "not desirable" for African-American men? Really?

Santorum also slips up by saying "African-American women and men", without qualifying the statement with some sort of reference to class status -- thereby implying that African-Amercans are naturally averse to marriage, regardless of class, social status, or education. This also nicely dovetails with classic racist myths about African-American sexuality.

Anyway, nice to know that social conservatives can deeply embarrass themselves and the GOP even when talking about something as trivial as the President's date night.

Here's the rest of Santorum's wise take on modern relationships in case you need some dating advice:

I think he has to realize that flying to New York is self-indulgent. Go down to the corner bar and have a drink, a shot and a beer. It does not matter where you go with your wife, is that it's with your wife. That's really the point... I would make the argument, the simpler the date, the more normal it is.

It connects to people. Here is what you do. Here is how you do it. And it is not going to Broadway. All right, once in awhile, you do something special. But it is mundane that really makes the marriage special, but because you are with your wife the mundane isn't mundane. It's special.