UPDATE: Is Ideology About Status? was an unacknowledged inspiration for this post.
There have been many theories of conflict within a society that we may see reflected in politics. Most famous perhaps is that of economic classes, associated with Marxism. Some libertarians (and Calhoun) present their own of tax-payers and tax-eaters, though Bryan Caplan rejects that in favor of a jock vs nerd theory. As I’ve mentioned before, I agree with Ilya Somin that all of them are wrong. Many on both sides seem to think the divide is based on thinking with your head vs your heart (or “gut” as a tv personality popular with those kids these days puts it), but Caplan has found that is also wrong. A related divide many might imagine is the smart vs the stupid, but the ideologues on both sides tend to be similarly smart while moderates are generally quite dim (there may of course be temporary fluctuations, but they are not an enduring fundamental of politics). These may be on the right track though, because our political leanings are significantly heritable and the brain seems a good place to focus. This idea inspired Lee Sigelman to muse that rising rates of obesity among pregnant women may result in conservative dominance (hiss, the biological-yet-nurturist heresy). It’s also behind the Genetic Warfare site/post I pointed out a little while back. What I’m going to postulate is a divide between the intelligent based on the two immediate sub-components of g: verbal and visuo-spatial intelligence.
This occurred to me as I was reading the Bell Curve. I’ll excerpt the portion which set me thinking and should also explain the basic concepts: “A full-scale IQ score is the aggregate of many subtests. There are thirteen of them in the Wechsler Intelligence Scale for Children (WISC-R), for example. The most basic division of the subtests is into a verbal IQ and a performance IQ. In the white samples, the verbal and performance IQ subscores tend to have abot the same mean, because IQ tests have been standardized on predominantly white populations. But individuals can have imbalances between these two IQs. People with high verbal abilities are likely to do well with words and logic. In school they excel in history and literature; in choosing a career to draw on those talents, they tend to choose law or journalism or advertising or politics. In contrast, people with high performance IQs – or, using a more descriptive phrase, ‘visuospatial abilities’ are likely to do well in the physical and biological sciences, mathematics, engineering, or other subjects that demand mental manipulation in the three physical dimensions or the more numerous dimensions of mathematics.” The prototypical high-verbal IQ types sound a hell of lot like Mencius Moldbug’s bete-noire, the Brahmins. As an introverted nerd, I am drawn to other similar types who are quite prideful in their abilities and often resentful or contemptuous of the clever-talking flim-flammers and “people persons”. And it seems like everybody hates lawyers. I am reminded of the Charles Murray quote “Who wants to be an elephant?“, though without the geniality. They like to say “The numbers/physics don’t lie” and “You can’t argue with a computer/reality”. We can see the bitter narcissism of the engineer in comments like this one, directed at those Wall Street masters-of-the-universe that just screwed up the financial markets. I have to admit I indulge in this myself. In the back of my mind lurks a variety of “producerism” in which inventors are the prototypical producers and bullshitters are prototypical parasites. This is tempered with the knowledge that engineers and applied scientists are especially vulnerable to pseudo-science that Ivory Tower egghead theorists have to shoot down. The “practical man” is often enough led by “theory” as much as a theorist, only illogically, incoherently and unknowingly.
With that out of the way let’s move aside from any discussion of the relative merits of these intellectual abilities and who deserves to be on the holding or receiving end of the stick. Does my idea hold water any more than the theories I dismissed at the beginning? I don’t have data on hand that can analyze this directly, so I’m going to throw out some things that might raise your Bayesian assignments of probability (although if they are underwhelming they should lower it from where you had adjusted it before reading). Not all groups have the same profile when it comes to these sub-components. Men and women differ, for example. They are generally believed to have the same average IQ, but men are more visuo-spatial and women more verbal. As Larry Summers pointed out to his detriment, men also have a higher variance when it comes to IQ than women. In politics there is some gender-gap, though it shows up primarily among the unmarried. Unmarried women lean left. Might this be because of the variance aspect? I don’t think so. The GOP seems to be a more homogenous party, which draws its support from the middle class (not the working class, as some stupidly think nowadays) with some college education but not grad school. I dispelled myths about that here. The Dems draw their support both from the poor/working-class and from some quite wealthy coastal elites in the richer Blue States, such as the finance guys attacked above. I don’t actually know if finance (or programming, for that matter) attracts verbal rather than visuo-spatial sorts, but I figured I’d throw that out there. So if this was simply about variance we might expect men (who as Roy Baumeister explains are high-variance in general) to go with the high-variance party, but they don’t.
It’s not only genders that differ along these sub-components. Ethnic groups do as well. However, the difference in their average IQ scores makes this tricky. The highest intelligence is found among Ashkenazi Jews. They are especially gifted verbally (Barry Sonnenfeld in his commentary for Miller’s Crossing points out the odd unusualness of Jewish cinematographers in Hollywood). Jews in the past had a similar profile to other “white ethnics”: they arrived as immigrants without much to their name, were enlisted by the Democratic urban machine and worked their way up in the face of nativist hostility (likely exaggerated in the retelling). What’s odd about Jews is that they are the most succesful ethnic group in America in economic terms, but vote for the party of the poor. The saying goes that they “Earn like Episcopalians and vote like Puerto Ricans”. Except Hispanics with higher income would be significantly to their right. According to Ann Coulter in Slander (yes, I’ve read her, is that a crime) Jews bloc-vote at the highest rate of any comparable demographic group. Second highest in her list are blacks, the economically least succesful ethnic group. Far different than Jews when it comes to IQ, yes? Except their advantage is also in verbal abilities. There is an ethnic group that seems to have a higher IQ than gentile whites, but with the opposite advantage in sub-components. These are East Asians. At present they lean left, but this may the temporary result of Christian-inflected culture war. They went right in 1992. Even today they aren’t as left-wing as other minorities like Jews or blacks. This would be better for my case if they went right, but the general party of outsiders/alienated effect could be swamping it. I’ll add here that American Indians (related to Asians way back) have a similar visuo-spatial orientation (and although their average IQ is lower than whites, northern tribes get the closest among peoples outside Europe or Asia) and lean right. Despite having very high poverty rates and being mistreated to an arguably greater extent than any other ethnic group in the country, they are very patriotic and are the most overrepresented in combat casualties relative to their population share. Perhaps due to their extreme learning experience they are also the most anti-immigrant.
All this talking about groups may seem like too much of a reach when I should be focusing on cognitive specialties. So let’s look at academia. Razib has some charts here on political leanings by subject. Subjects like English, History, Philosophy and even Theology are among the leftiest, and all draw on verbal smarts. Engineering and the hard sciences which draw more on visuo-spatial abilities are to their right, although this only means a little more conservatives and mostly just fewer liberals leading closer to parity. I would have expected Music to be leftier (don’t famous musicians have Hollywood/”creative class” type politics), but maybe Agnostic’s argument about the visuo-spatial component is shining through.
I don’t place a terribly high confidence in this theory and it could easily be blown out of the water by some data directly analyzing the correlation between the sub-components and political leaning. Anyone that can do so is encouraged to fire at will.
Addendum: Razib used the GSS to analyze the same question but came up with more ambiguous results than Half Sigma.
October 31, 2008 at 2:27 am
Interesting theory. Would you expect one’s leaning has more do do with one’s verbal strength relative to one’s verbal strength or vice versa, or one’s absolute strength in each field?
Also, I’m interested in how you said moderates tend to be more dim. Where can I read more about that?
October 31, 2008 at 10:37 am
It would seem a reference to Jonathan Haidt would be in order here. Would the difference between left and right be the differing packaging of the various moral senses? I suspect his model needs serious qualificaitons though, as I’m confident that someone like Christopher Hitchens is as cold as I am about the political world, even though he’s far from a philosophical individualist anarchist with a penchant for Austrian/Neoclassical economics.
As for the question of moderates. Are these political moderates or ideological moderates? I’m fairly damned ideological, but am also moderate when it comes to the Dems vs. Repubs. I can read someone like Andrew Gelman and Arthur C. Brooks without pimping for Democrats or Republicans respectively.
October 31, 2008 at 11:49 am
I was going to mention Jonathan Haidt too. You can see a short talk by hime here and take his surveys yourself here.
I don’t think intelligence has a great deal to do with political affiliation, although since the conservative ideology explicitly embraces stupidity as a positive virtue you can see how that side may have trouble holding on to the brainy. This can be observed in the current presidential campaign, which has the smarter conservatives abandoning the lost cause in droves, with Palin being the trigger/excuse.
October 31, 2008 at 2:27 pm
mtraven,
Exactly. The McCain campaign has taken this “anti-elitist” thing so far they’ve gone into positively embracing outright stupidity as a kind of virtue. ‘Folk and Faith’ nonsense.
In Rick Shenkman’s new book Just How Stupid Are We?, he, a lefty, fondly recalls how conservatives like Nock and Mencken (whom some would disagree are conservative at all) used to think the masses were full of shit. He then contrasts that perspective with Ben Stein, McCain, and the talk show crowd in the modern age.
October 31, 2008 at 4:47 pm
Ideology and a focus on politics are the reserve of the elite. “Undecideds” and “Independents” are moderates usually because they don’t have enough understanding of political differences to pick a side to irrationally root for. The fact that as people become more informed they do not converge on agreement but rather become more extreme when it comes to politics (and religion) is a major indicator that irrationality is pervasive there. Half Sigma has WORDSUM (heavily verbal, as you might guess) scores by political ideology here and here. He showed a shifting trend here. Those posts leave out libertarians, which he shows here to be the smartest, although some of that actually conflicts with Bryan Caplan’s findings.
October 31, 2008 at 4:49 pm
explicitly embraces stupidity
That sounds like it would show up in the thinking vs intuition analysis, which Caplan found to be a non-factor. Perhaps he was using earlier data before the right’s recent decline.
October 31, 2008 at 4:53 pm
Would you expect one’s leaning has more do do with one’s verbal strength relative to one’s verbal strength or vice versa, or one’s absolute strength in each field?
Those with less IQ in general will tend to be like Converse’s mass public, incapable of ideology and uninterested in policy. My imagined theory here is that to the extent that a person is ideological at all, the predominance of verbal vs visuospatial pushes them left or right. I have to admit though that there is less evidence for visuospatial pushing people right than simply not pushing left like verbal.
October 31, 2008 at 7:48 pm
Steve Sailer is sure this theory is correct and offers some anecdotal evidence in favor. He also suggests some ways of testing it. The data I have pointed to regarding colleges is for faculty and the scores he is referencing are for incoming freshman. I don’t know if there is as good data on the political leanings of students (a much greater proportion of whom I think will be apolitical).
November 1, 2008 at 9:20 pm
“Exactly. The McCain campaign has taken this “anti-elitist” thing so far they’ve gone into positively embracing outright stupidity as a kind of virtue. ‘Folk and Faith’ nonsense.”
I haven’t been following the general election as closely as I followed the primaries, but I suspect that Dain’s ideas on the McCain campaign’s “anti-elitism,” coem from looking over mtraven’s shoulder at his copy of Time Magazine.
This “anti-elitism” is, in fact, a construction of the Corporate Media.
John McCain and Sarah Palin are both elitists and Joe the Plumber is bourgeois.
The stupidity of the electoral process was equally mind-numbing in 2004, 2000, 1996 and 1992 and…—but a lot of us bought into the falsities of these most important elections ever.
Consequently, we wish to forget or, at least to justify our participation in past election cycles, by labeling this one the dumbest ever. Which it is not, necessarily.
November 1, 2008 at 9:24 pm
As to the question at hand,
One tends to favor the theory that most people, as defined by class, gender or race, are not political and are subjected to immense coercion to become political.
November 2, 2008 at 7:37 pm
I don’t like Bryan Caplan’s study of thinking vs feeling because I don’t understand Myers-Briggs and I’m generally skeptical of identifications of its traits with common words. It is valuable to identify which traits (if any) have political correlates, but identifying that with popular slogans seems much more difficult.
November 2, 2008 at 8:25 pm
“I’m generally skeptical of identifications of its traits with common words.”
It’s worth noting that Myers-Briggs specifies where its identification terms differ in meaning from the common understanding.
The dimension in question (Thinking vs. Feeling) is also relatively congruent with the common meanings. As long as you keep in mind that it’s about preferences, this is probably the least controversial dimension on the M-B.
November 5, 2008 at 7:13 pm
Not a terrible study. The thing is that businessmen have good verbal skills too (they have to be champion BSers to do their job), and they lean right.
I think impractical people with good verbal skills tend to lean left because they can’t make any money, whereas impractical people with good visuospatial skills can make passable incomes in the trades. I really think a lot of it comes down to money.
Myself I’ve got pretty good verbal skills which don’t translate into people skills, but that’s an n of 1.
November 6, 2008 at 7:13 pm
Income is correlated with GOP-voting, but not terribly strongly. Andrew Gelman reports there has been a shift in the most recent presidential election compared to the last one at the highest levels.
November 14, 2008 at 10:56 pm
tggp:
That’s a pretty fascinating break-down. It would certainly seem to explain the occupational-but-not-income differences in voting patterns.
Let us know when you have more for this.
November 14, 2008 at 11:36 pm
The authors of the Bell Curve had access to scores for the different components of the SAT among students at different elite colleges. I hadn’t had much look looking for that kind of thing just googling.
November 16, 2008 at 2:40 pm
TGGP, there’s a bit of evidence that depression and nonverbal learning disorders are linked through hemisphere dominance/activation. http://psychiatry.jwatch.org/cgi/content/citation/1998/1201/13
Coupled with the empirical observations that Republicans are happier, engineers are spatial, emotionally balanced, and conservative, it is plausible that cognitive strengths and mood covary by hemisphere function. In this rough model, hemisphere function leads to mood and IQ differences, and the mood differences lead to political leaning.
Like Sailer, I think you are onto something.
November 16, 2008 at 8:39 pm
Speaking of that, I should note that despite what I’ve claimed here before, it turns out that the depressed are not more accurate in general.
November 25, 2008 at 9:13 pm
I’ll add here that American Indians […] lean right.
I’m Quinault, and use the term “First Nations” in self defense because of the large number of programmers from India that surround me at work. Urban FN people vote Democrat for the social programs, but the folk on the Rez vote Republican because the GOP has a very strong record of honoring treaty rights, which the Dems do not. (Republican senator Slade Gorton was a huge exception to this rule of thumb.) “Progressive” changes to an Indian Reservation end up being of benefit to the side with the most lawyers, and there have been times in the twentieth century when it has been illegal for North American natives to engage legal representation.
Anecdotal, but most of my male relatives served in the armed forces, mostly Marines although there was room for the less masculine in the Army and Air Force. (I can’t think of a single relative who served in the Navy.)
November 27, 2008 at 11:13 am
I’ve encountered a lot more South Asians than indigenous American Indians and I agree that it would be better to have distinct terms for them.
Urbanites in general seem to lean left. I didn’t know that the GOP had that kind of reputation for honoring treaties. I thought the Dems put more weight on the obligations of international law (which could conceivably include treaties with First Nations in the U.S) but that could just be a pose.
What is the attitude of First Nations people toward the reservations? Do they view it as something undesirable imposed on them by Uncle Sam or as the last redoubt of their culture?
December 2, 2008 at 8:57 pm
[…] I gave my spiel about the verbal/visuospatial or right-brain/left-brain divide here. Via Mind Hacks I found an Edge article by Chris Badcock titled The Imprinted Brain Theory. He […]
January 12, 2009 at 7:15 pm
[…] references Agnostic’s post here in discussing the possible influence of these g-components on political leanings. Groups that […]