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发帖数: 38403 | 1 Kanazawa et al. Why Liberals and Atheists Are More Intelligent. Social
Psychology Quarterly March 2010 vol. 73 no. 1 33-57
ScienceDaily (Feb. 24, 2010)
More intelligent people are statistically significantly more likely to
exhibit social values and religious and political preferences that are novel
to the human species in evolutionary history. Specifically, liberalism and
atheism, and for men (but not women), preference for sexual exclusivity
correlate with higher intelligence, a new study finds.
The study, published in the March 2010 issue of the peer-reviewed scientific
journal Social Psychology Quarterly, advances a new theory to explain why
people form particular preferences and values. The theory suggests that
more intelligent people are more likely than less intelligent people to
adopt evolutionarily novel preferences and values, but intelligence does not
correlate with preferences and values that are old enough to have been
shaped by evolution over millions of years."
"Evolutionarily novel" preferences and values are those that humans are not
biologically designed to have and our ancestors probably did not possess.
In contrast, those that our ancestors had for millions of years are "
evolutionarily familiar."
"General intelligence, the ability to think and reason, endowed our
ancestors with advantages in solving evolutionarily novel problems for which
they did not have innate solutions," says Satoshi Kanazawa, an evolutionary
psychologist at the London School of Economics and Political Science. "As
a result, more intelligent people are more likely to recognize and
understand such novel entities and situations than less intelligent people,
and some of these entities and situations are preferences, values, and
lifestyles."
An earlier study by Kanazawa found that more intelligent individuals were
more nocturnal, waking up and staying up later than less intelligent
individuals. Because our ancestors lacked artificial light, they tended to
wake up shortly before dawn and go to sleep shortly after dusk. Being
nocturnal is evolutionarily novel.
In the current study, Kanazawa argues that humans are evolutionarily
designed to be conservative, caring mostly about their family and friends,
and being liberal, caring about an indefinite number of genetically
unrelated strangers they never meet or interact with, is evolutionarily
novel. So more intelligent children may be more likely to grow up to be
liberals.
Data from the National Longitudinal Study of Adolescent Health (Add Health)
support Kanazawa's hypothesis. Young adults who subjectively identify
themselves as "very liberal" have an average IQ of 106 during adolescence
while those who identify themselves as "very conservative" have an average
IQ of 95 during adolescence.
Similarly, religion is a byproduct of humans' tendency to perceive agency
and intention as causes of events, to see "the hands of God" at work behind
otherwise natural phenomena. "Humans are evolutionarily designed to be
paranoid, and they believe in God because they are paranoid," says Kanazawa.
This innate bias toward paranoia served humans well when self-preservation
and protection of their families and clans depended on extreme vigilance to
all potential dangers. "So, more intelligent children are more likely to
grow up to go against their natural evolutionary tendency to believe in God,
and they become atheists."
Young adults who identify themselves as "not at all religious" have an
average IQ of 103 during adolescence, while those who identify themselves as
"very religious" have an average IQ of 97 during adolescence.
In addition, humans have always been mildly polygynous in evolutionary
history. Men in polygynous marriages were not expected to be sexually
exclusive to one mate, whereas men in monogamous marriages were. In sharp
contrast, whether they are in a monogamous or polygynous marriage, women
were always expected to be sexually exclusive to one mate. So being
sexually exclusive is evolutionarily novel for men, but not for women. And
the theory predicts that more intelligent men are more likely to value
sexual exclusivity than less intelligent men, but general intelligence makes
no difference for women's value on sexual exclusivity. Kanazawa's analysis
of Add Health data supports these sex-specific predictions as well.
One intriguing but theoretically predicted finding of the study is that more
intelligent people are no more or no less likely to value such
evolutionarily familiar entities as marriage, family, children, and friends. |
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