Well, we could have told you this without a research project!
According to the findings of a study conducted by Gordon Hodson, a psychologist at Brock University in Ontario, adults with lower intelligence are more prone to gravitate toward socially conservative ideologies, which, because they stress a resistance to change, also leads to prejudice!
According to social and cognitive psychologist Brian Nosek:
“They’ve pulled off the trifecta of controversial topics. 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. The unique contribution here is trying to make some progress on the most challenging aspect of this. It’s not that a relationship like that exists, but why it exists.”
However, he continues:
“We can say definitively men are taller than women on average. 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. My speculation is that it’s not as simple as their model presents it. 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.”
Well, truth!
There are so many variables and factors of the human condition that can lead to prejudice, but then again, we’ve always associated that word with IGNORANCE!
Because intelligent people know that there is ALWAYS room to learn and understand more – even if they think they have it all figured out!
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