More intelligence means less prone to indoctrination.
A new study from the United States that found a marked difference in cognitive ability left and right has already caused controversy with the left wing mechina attempting to discredit both the findings and the authors.
The study fundamentally challenges the notion that those obsessed with WOKE ideology are more intelligent than those who are not concerned with political correctness. As many suspected, the idea that those who are left-wing are more intelligent than other groups is not born out by the facts.
Britain's institutions – the BBC, educational system and universities, the NHS and Local Authorities, are now dominated by the WOKE. Since smart people tend to get ahead in life, you might assume the woke would have higher intelligence. But this is not the case, according to the study.
Louise Drieghe and colleagues surveyed 300 North American adults using the platform Mechanical Turk. To measure participants’ cognitive ability, they administered the Ammons Quick Test, which involves correctly assigning words to pictures. Previous studies have shown that people’s scores on the test correlate strongly with their scores on more comprehensive IQ tests, such as the Wechsler Adult Intelligence Scale.
The researchers also assessed participants’ support for free speech and concern for political correctness. To measure the former, they constructed a 9-item scale, comprising items such as “Every individual has the unalienable right to express their thoughts freely,” and “Censorship of speech leaves little room for debate and diverse points of view”.
To measure the latter, they used a 7-item scale developed by two other researchers. It includes items such as “I get mad when I hear someone use politically incorrect language,” and “I try to educate people around me about the political meaning of their words”.
Drieghe and colleagues’ key finding is shown in the first column of the table below. The values are correlation coefficients – a way of quantifying how strongly related two variables are.
As can be seen my the data, there was a positive correlation between cognitive ability and support for freedom of speech, and a negative correlation between cognitive ability and concern for political correctness. (The asterisks tell us these results are statistically significant.)
North Americans with higher cognitive ability are more supportive of free speech and less concerned about political correctness.
One possibility is that this is only true among highly educated people. Indeed, the sample was skewed towards those with a university degree: 66% of participants had one, compared to less than 40% in the general population. Critics of the study suggest the correlations would have been weaker if the sample had been more representative.
However, the study’s findings are merely consistent with previous research that found cognitive ability is associated with broadly classically liberal beliefs, such as support for free speech, that old thing called 'democracy' and rights for women, and opposition to state control of the economy.
The study also confirms what many have warned for long time now, that higher education is not teaching children how to think, but what to think. Far-left ideology is promoted in schools at an early age, when children are most malleable. Boys showing any type of male traits are now considered 'defective', often labelled disruptive and having a clinical condition such as ADHD with the establishment using a medical cosh to deal with the 'defect'. Transgenderism, toxic-masculinity, climate hysteria, and Critical Race Theory are now all taught in schools from kindergarten onwards. This indoctrination stamps out intelligence in favour or compliance and a false notion that compliance equals intelligence.
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