Scientific proof that liberals are smarter than conservatives

Here I am laughing at the silly conservatives. They're so unintelligent! Ha-ha!

A recent study shows that conservatives aren't as smart as liberals:

Conservatism and cognitive ability are negatively correlated. The evidence is based on 1254 community college students and 1600 foreign students seeking entry to United States' universities. At the individual level of analysis, conservatism scores correlate negatively with SAT, Vocabulary, and Analogy test scores.

I knew it! Conservatives score lower than liberals on the SAT! So liberals are smarter! Ha ha! Woo! Ha!

And blacks tend to score lower than whites on the SAT, which means that the conservatives who wrote The Bell Curve were right about blacks being cognitively inferior, and the liberals who debunked their claims in The Bell Curve Wars were wrong, so conservatives are smarter, but the same test scores show that liberals are smarter and...



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Yes, I understand that some of the authors of The Bell Curve Wars weren't liberals, which is an important point in terms of their collective objectivity, but the joke doesn't work well if you mention that fact.

The guy whose head SHOULD explode is John Derbyshire of the National Review. The Derbster is convinced that we're on the brink of scientifically proving that blacks are cognitively inferior. My guess is that he'll probably just ignore this study, and any others which show that Derb and his fellow conservatives are no smarter than your average black guy.

Just to be clear, the point is that it's impossible to say that one group of people is smarter than another using SAT scores. Like all tests, the SATs have built in biases, and members of different groups have a different set of circumstances and experiences than members of other groups. If tests like the SAT could be used to determine which groups were inherently smartest, we'd have to conclude that American Jews were less intelligent than other Americans during the late 1800s and early 1900s, but are more intelligent today. We'd also have to conclude that Catholics in Northern Ireland are less intelligent than Protestants, while Catholics in the United States are roughly equal in intelligence.

In short, this latest study doesn't really tell us much about the relative intelligence of conservatives and liberals.

(cross posted at appletree)