Liberals and Atheists are smarter than Religious Conservatives. Who knew!
The study was published in the March 2010 issue of the peer-reviewed scientific journal Social Psychology Quarterly. Here are a few snippets:
“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.”
It goes on to say this:
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.
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.“
ScienceDaily
Moving on. Now what about IQ and racism, prejudice and bigotry? They are all linked as well. According to
Psychological Science, those who score lower on IQ charts in adolescence tend to grow up to have Conservative views and may develop prejudiced beliefs as well.
Dr. Gordon Hodson, a professor of psychology at the university and the study’s lead author, said:
“People of low intelligence gravitate toward socially conservative ideologies, which stress resistance to change and, in turn, prejudice.”
But why, you may ask? What is so endearing about conservative ideologies?
Because such ideologies feature “structure and order” that make it easier to comprehend a complicated world.
So, my fellow Liberals, Atheists and Liberal Atheists, since the world and reality is too complicated and messy, people turn to a fairy tale book for a “simpler” solution to their problems, A.K.A. “pray the problems away”.
Now, I’d like to post a screenshot for all of you, just to show you how scary religious people are. Read on and weep.
So this individual is a book away from raping, stealing and murdering people. How pleasant! It’s sad that religious folk need a book to tell them that something is wrong. Why is it a hard concept to do good without something telling you to do good?
Now let’s look at morality. Yes, morality is subjective, and varies from person to person, but let’s take a look at religious folk versus non-religious. We, as Atheists, are shamed in the Untied States of America for being godless heathens who do nothing for this country but strip it away from religion. While I would enjoy living in a non-religious country, I’m not fighting tooth and nail to make religion illegal.
Religious concept: “god” is watching me so I have to do good or I will not get into Heaven.
Non-religious concept: Nothing is watching me but I’ll do good anyway because I can and feel like it.
A recent study(July of this year, actually) has found that Atheists and agnostics are more driven by compassion to help others than are highly religious people. Surprise, surprise!
In Study 1, religiosity moderated the relationship between trait compassion and pro-social behavior such that compassion was more critical to the generosity of less religious people. In Study 2, a compassion induction increased generosity among less religious individuals but not among more religious individuals. In Study 3, state feelings of compassion predicted increased generosity across a variety of economic tasks for less religious individuals but not among more religious individuals. These results suggest that the pro-sociality of less religious individuals is driven to a greater extent by levels of compassion than is the pro-sociality of the more religious.
Social Psychological and Personality Science
Here’s what the
study co-author and University of California, Berkeley social psychologist Robb Willer said in a statement:
“Overall, we find that for less religious people, the strength of their emotional connection to another person is critical to whether they will help that person or not. “The more religious, on the other hand, may ground their generosity less in emotion, and more in other factors such as doctrine, a communal identity, or reputational concerns.”
Now all we have to do is sit and wait for all the crazy Bible-thumpers to get pissy.
I now leave you with this: