Intelligent people are more likely to be left-wing, says science

Great news for socialists: a new study has found that intelligent people are more likely to hold left-wing views.

Psychology researchers at the University of Minnesota, Twin Cities studied more than 300 families as part of the study and concluded in a new paper published in the journal Intelligence, that being more clever “correlated with a range of left-wing and liberal political beliefs.”

The researchers measured participants’ intelligence using both IQ and genetic indicators of intelligence known as polygenic scores. They ascertained participants’ politics by testing for five variables: “political orientation, authoritarianism, egalitarianism, social liberalism, and fiscal conservatism.”

“Polygenic scores predicted social liberalism and lower authoritarianism, within families. Intelligence was able to significantly predict social liberalism and lower authoritarianism, within families, even after controlling for socioeconomic variables,” the researchers wrote in the journal. “Our findings may provide the strongest causal inference to date of intelligence directly affecting political beliefs.”