Liberals Vs. Conservatives

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   Have fun:
http://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/the-scientific-fundamentalist/201003/why-liberals-are-more-intelligent-conservatives

It is difficult to define a whole 
school of political ideology precisely, but one may reasonably define 
liberalism (as opposed to conservatism) in the contemporary United 
States as the genuine concern for the welfare of genetically 
unrelated others and the willingness to contribute larger proportions of
 private resources for the welfare of such others.  In the modern 
political and economic context, this willingness usually translates into
 paying higher proportions of individual incomes in taxes toward the government
 and its social welfare programs.  Liberals usually support such social 
welfare programs and higher taxes to finance them, and conservatives 
usually oppose them.      

         Defined as such, liberalism is evolutionarily novel.  Humans (like other species) are evolutionarily designed to be altruistic
 toward their genetic kin, their friends and allies, and members of 
their deme (a group of intermarrying individuals) or ethnic group.  They
 are not designed to be altruistic toward an indefinite number of 
complete strangers whom they are not likely ever to meet or interact 
with.  This is largely because our ancestors lived in a small band of 
50-150 genetically related individuals, and large cities and nations 
with thousands and millions of people are themselves evolutionarily 
novel.
 The examination of the 10-volume compendium The Encyclopedia of World Cultures, which describes all
 human cultures known to anthropology (more than 1,500) in great detail,
 as well as extensive primary ethnographies of traditional societies, 
reveals that liberalism as defined above is absent in these traditional 
cultures.  While sharing of resources, especially food, is quite common 
and often mandatory among hunter-gatherer tribes, and while trade with 
neighboring tribes often takes place, there is no evidence that people 
in contemporary hunter-gatherer bands freely share resources with members of other tribes.
 Because
 all members of a hunter-gatherer tribe are genetic kin or at the very 
least friends and allies for life, sharing resources among them does not
 qualify as an expression of liberalism as defined above.  Given its 
absence in the contemporary hunter-gatherer tribes, which are often used
 as modern-day analogs of our ancestral life, it may be reasonable to 
infer that sharing of resources with total strangers that one has never 
met or is not likely ever to meet – that is, liberalism – was not part 
of our ancestral life.  Liberalism may therefore be evolutionarily 
novel, and the Hypothesis
 would predict that more intelligent individuals are more likely than 
less intelligent individuals to espouse liberalism as a value.
 Analyses
 of large representative samples, from both the United States and the 
United Kingdom, confirm this prediction.  In both countries, more 
intelligent children are more likely to grow up to be liberals than less
 intelligent children.  For example, among the American sample, those 
who identify themselves as “very liberal” in early adulthood have a mean
 childhood IQ of 106.4, whereas those who identify themselves as “very conservative” in early adulthood have a mean childhood IQ of 94.8.

 Even
 though past studies show that women are more liberal than men, and 
blacks are more liberal than whites, the effect of childhood intelligence on adult political ideology is twice as large as the effect of either sex or race.  So it appears that, as the Hypothesis
 predicts, more intelligent individuals are more likely to espouse the 
value of liberalism than less intelligent individuals, possibly because 
liberalism is evolutionarily novel and conservatism is evolutionarily 
familiar.
 The primary means that citizens of capitalist 
democracies contribute their private resources for the welfare of the 
genetically unrelated others is paying taxes to the government for its 
social welfare programs.  The fact that conservatives have been shown to
 give more money to charities than liberals is not inconsistent with the prediction from the Hypothesis;
 in fact, it supports the prediction.  Individuals can normally choose 
and select the beneficiaries of their charity donations.  For example, 
they can choose to give money to the victims of the earthquake in Haiti,
 because they want to help them, but not to give money to the victims of
 the earthquake in Chile, because they don’t want to help them.  In 
contrast, citizens do not have any control over whom the money they pay 
in taxes benefit.  They cannot individually choose to pay taxes to fund 
Medicare, because they want to help elderly white people, but not AFDC, 
because they don’t want to help poor black single mothers.  This may 
precisely be why conservatives choose to give more money to individual 
charities of their choice while opposing higher taxes.
 Incidentally,
 this finding substantiates one of the persistent complaints among 
conservatives.  Conservatives often complain that liberals control the 
media or the show business or the academia or some other social 
institutions.  The Hypothesis explains why conservatives are correct in their complaints.  Liberals do
 control the media, or the show business, or the academia, among other 
institutions, because, apart from a few areas in life (such as business)
 where countervailing circumstances may prevail, liberals control all institutions. 
 They control the institutions because liberals are on average more 
intelligent than conservatives and thus they are more likely to attain 
the highest status in any area of (evolutionarily novel) modern life.

Poll Question: Are liberals more intelligent than conservatives?
Poll Choice	Votes	Poll Statistics
Yes	17	[53.13%]
No	12	[37.50%]
To Hell With You	2	[6.25%]
Whaaaa???	1	[3.13%]
This topic is closed, no new votes accepted

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