Cognitive ability is a powerful predictor of political tolerance

https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1111/jopy.12667

by mpweiher • 4 years ago

240 337 4 years ago

onlinelibrary.wiley.com

mypastself2• 4 years ago

So that’s why I’m so tolerant of those idiots on the other side of the political spectrum…

In all seriousness, as I don’t have access to the full text, I’m wondering how they measured tolerance in particular.

atoav2• 4 years ago

In the methods section they mention a survey. So that is likely how they meassured it. Of course the particulars would be more interesting, but for this access to the paper would be needed.

tomlockwood13• 4 years ago

Yeah same, the definition of tolerance is very important here. Like for example I think a lot of people would view me as very intolerant of transphobia, but I doorknocked 1000 doors in our recent state election here, so in some ways I'm very tolerant when encountering people that don't agree with me.

atoav2• 4 years ago

Karl Popper's paradox of tolerance springs to mind where he postulates that every free society that aims to remain just that: free has to be intolerant to certain opinions that (should they become too widespread) would endanger the freedoms of others as well.

Freedom is a complicated thing, because it has both positive and negative definitions. You can have the freedom to do what you want on the one hand but also have the freedom to be placed into certain situations (e.g. tortured) on the other hand.

Now obviously there is going to be a collision space where somebody wants to excersise the positive freedom to do a certain thing that hurts the negative freedom of another perspn or a group of persons to not be subjected to that very thing.

Freedom in that sense is the attempt to constantly balance those two sides and allow the individual to be as free as possible, while also preventing malicous actors to take away the freedoms of others.

The thing is that freedom in that sense takes constant effort and adjustment to keep alive and up date and this goes beyond just writing new laws and enforcing them.

Intolerance toward the intolerant is a crucial thought if you want to keep your and everybody elses freedom as it is.

ThunderSizzle• 4 years ago

I dont see how canvassing for a political agenda is tolerance of opposition. Sure, you'll run into people who disagree with you, but you don't tolerate their POV and are actively encouraging political action against their POV.

endominus6• 4 years ago

The first sentence of the introduction clarifies the definition of "political tolerance", which seems to be a term of art; "Citizen support for the rights and liberties of even those political groups that they dislike, commonly termed political tolerance, is an important element of liberal democracy." So what is being measured is support for the civil liberties of political groups that are disliked by the respondent. Survey respondents were given a list of groups and asked to rate, from -4 to 4, a. how much they liked that group, and b. how much they would protect that group's rights.

tomlockwood13• 4 years ago

Also worth pointing out that this was a sample of only Mechanical Turk users in America, and members of the Danish Military in Denmark.

thriftwy2• 4 years ago

Citizen support for the rights and liberties of even those political groups that they dislike

Is exactly zero now for most of politicized Twitter with their loud congratulations of deplatforming of their opponents.

(Who otherwise think they are an example of tolerant)

I wonder if the research highlights their low cognitive ability.

GoblinSlayer3• 4 years ago

Is that extreme support? Not all liberties are private.

ohCh6zos• 4 years ago

Given the summary I think they mean the "I hate your ideas but will defend your rights" kind of tolerance.

mcculley• 4 years ago

We all have access. Thank you, Sci-Hub!

https://sci-hub.se/downloads/2021-09-02/07/rasmussen2021.pdf...

photochemsyn• 4 years ago

Looking into the paper (see the sci-hub link), it's a bit odd. Data source is Mechanical Turk respondents in the USA, and Danish military draftees in Europe, who had to take a 'cognitive ability test'. "Political groups" don't include members of political parties - they have 'neo-Nazis', 'Christian fundamentalists', 'socialists' and 'communists'. Seems like there are a great many other groups one could list.

Social science papers are notorious for being non-replicabale and based on non-representative samples, so I doubt these conclusions really mean much.

tbrownaw6• 4 years ago

I don't see tolerance or threat columns for "socialists" and "communists" listed in the results table?

Joel_Mckay• 4 years ago

Mostly vote for whoever I think causes the least amount of damage.

I don't believe in branding, or false dichotomies masquerading as a democratic process.

If Lord Buckethead ran internationally, the policies would poll well in my area.

voxadam• 4 years ago

Full paper: https://sci-hub.ru/https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/1...

tomlockwood13• 4 years ago

So their samples were drawn from Mechanical Turk users and the Danish military, exclusively? I'm dubious about how representative these samples are.

runeks4• 4 years ago

True. But it's an interesting result regardless of whether it can be extrapolated to the general population.

giantg29• 4 years ago

It's not that powerful of a predictor. I know many intelligent people who absolutely hate the opposite party.

Although I do see some truth to the overall idea. I have also seen many average or below average people parroting whatever inflammatory stuff they heard from the media or others, without even understanding the topic.

throwaway5Am1k• 4 years ago

I know many intelligent people who absolutely hate the opposite party.

Intelligent or simply well educated?

adam_arthur• 4 years ago

Usually its the latter rather than the former

swayvil• 4 years ago

Or well spoken. It's amazing how intelligent you sound when you talk good.

giantg29• 4 years ago

In many cases, both. But there are a few that didn't go to higher education.

2muchcoffeeman• 4 years ago

Let’s all remember that these “unintelligent” people exist on both sides of the political divide. Whatever you believe, some one without a clue it parroting it.

giantg29• 4 years ago

Very true. I tried to leave my comment generic so that it applies to all sides (which is what I've seen so far).

jwmoz2• 4 years ago

It's not that powerful of a predictor.

Their research states otherwise.

giantg29• 4 years ago

No, it doesn't.

It merely says that cognitive ability is the strongest single predictor. That may very well be true when comapring to other indicators. However, it doesn't mean that it's powerful enough to have any practical application. I don't see anything that we can use this information for - another useless study.

PartiallyTyped• 4 years ago

There's a whole lot of difference between hating a political party and hating the supporters of said party.

I have had to explain this to online friends who felt persecuted while in reality people's issues is the party not the person.

giantg29• 4 years ago

True, many people even hate their own party, just less than they hate the others.

commandlinefan• 4 years ago

absolutely hate

Does that necessarily mean the don’t tolerate them though?

giantg29• 4 years ago

I guess we would have to define tolerance, which it seems there are other comment threads here asking the same thing.

I'd say calling them stupid, cursing at the TV, etc would not fit many definitions of tolerance.

xcambar• 4 years ago

I'm afraid the title could be misread as "I'm tolerant so I'm more clever than you" or "the population of democratic nations are more intelligent than nondemocratic". All of that is obviously bullshit if you give it 2s of thoughts.

That being said, democratic countries typically focus greatly on 1/ free speech (a driver of diversity) and 2/ education, which certainly is a good driver for cognitive ability, and might very well be a good driver for tolerance as well.

biggerChris• 4 years ago

The title reads like me saying, “ I’m smart because I work with 3 year olds and put up with their annoying voice and bullshit”.

pca006132• 4 years ago

You probably don't want to mess with someone who is both dumb and with low political tolerance. Now you can reduce this to avoiding people who are dumb...

lr4444lr2• 4 years ago

with larger effects than education

This is absolutely no surprise to those of us centrists who live in East coast blue cities.

tomlockwood13• 4 years ago

I wonder how consequential this paper is? It has been cited once but appears to have been widely retweeted. Is it a particularly good paper?

tomlockwood13• 4 years ago

Having a look at mentions of "political tolerance" in academic papers, it seems like there's been a great deal of discussion surrounding this since the 50s.

holmesworcester• 4 years ago

Yikes. Maybe this is why we tend to get less politically tolerant as we get older.

Redilon• 4 years ago

Anecdotally people in their mid/late twenties + thirties are often the most tolerant. Teenagers and young adults are often more extreme in their views and hence often less tolerant.

I'd argue the reason some grow less tolerant in the later half of their life is just that people often just stop giving a shit.

ip26• 4 years ago

Or perhaps they grow tired of tolerating things that (empirically) keep leading to the same bad outcome.

Also known as wisdom, when cast in another light.

brainchild-adam3• 4 years ago

Tied to this topic seems to be the ability to tolerate unpleasant emotions.

My impression is that avoiding negative emotions is something we all impulsively attempt, and it takes practice to increase one's ability to tolerate them. This, in turn, seems necessary to tolerate positions so different to our own that they cause us to feel threatened, which can, if the fear is intense enough, lead to outright hatred.

I assume quite some intolerance can be linked to this principle.

It seems our earlier evolutionary impulses (fight, flight in this case) can easily take over unless we not only learn to become aware of them but also to tolerate them.

gavinray4• 4 years ago

I don't know that it's necessarily so much unpleasant emotions

Let me paint a picture:

My maternal grandparents are country folk, from Kentucky. My grandfather was an electrical engineer and a sort of whizz kid type. Architected/drafted and built his own house, made youngest highest-ranking naval officer in Coast Guard history, stuff of that sort.

Having lived their entire lives together, they are on very different sides of the political spectrum. My grandmother is... unfortunately, a somewhat stereotypical Kentucky old white lady. You can guess her stance on things like immigrants and who she voted for. I love her but I have to try to blank out some of the things she says.

My grandfather on the other hand will just say things like "Well, you have to try to see it from their side.", and "Don't you think that's a bit of a generalization?"

But God help you if you cross the old man. I've done it once in my life and rarely seen a scarier thing.

So (IME), you can have political tolerance separate of your emotional tolerance and emotional experiences.

Political tolerance (for me) really boils down to: "Treat others how you want to be treated; Live and let live" which seems to me the most logical/reasonable way to go about it.

rayiner8• 4 years ago

"... Live and let live" which seems to me the most logical/reasonable way to go about it.

Only if you assume we're not a society, and that there's no social benefits to enforcing socially desirable behaviors and suppress socially undesirable ones.

tstrimple• 4 years ago

Live and let live

This isn't possible when one major political party refuses to allow that to happen. Many conservatives claim to just want to be left alone and then turn around and try to legislate who can marry who, how people live their lives, who is "worthy" of being part of our country, what books are available in libraries. You can't live and let live when you're constantly being attacked for intrinsic traits and being disenfranchised.

brainchild-adam3• 4 years ago

Thank you for sharing.

I might be reading this wrong, but it seems to me from your description that your grandfather simply did not get "ticked off" by the same things as your grandmother. Those topics do not seem to have generated strong emotions in him. But they seem to have done so in your grandmother.

What raises strong emotions in people seems to be highly subjective. To what extent you are able to have those stronger emotional responses while at the same time not succumbing to the impulses that go along with them, is what I would argue determines your ability to tolerate the stimuli that generate these emotional responses.

Since these responses are physiological, rooted in our survival instincts, they greatly affect our ability to be rational, open, and contextualize. Instead, they move us into increasing levels of black-and-white thinking and fight or flight, first mentally, then physically.

Whenever I explore topics that stir up strong (negative) emotions in myself, I find that they are usually tied to this, if I can get deep enough in my exploration.

After all, we're just animals trying to survive and procreate, even though we have become very elaborate and ornamental in our pursuit of these goals.

passwordoops• 4 years ago

I had a thought the other day if the current intolerance is due to the growing infantilism that's been occurring since the 90s. This whole notion that interactions must be positive, pursue good feelings, people need protection from "harmful" content, etc. is the root of the current climate. If everything you've been told up to now is "be positive, be happy!" then it follows that unpleasant emotions are to be avoided.

synu3• 4 years ago

I seem to find the opposite, that people appear to be admired and build audiences based on how much they can troll or generally how nasty they can be to whichever rival group. People aren’t avoiding each other to stay in safe, happy and positive bubbles, it’s more like rival football club ultras out to kill each other.

kitsunesoba• 4 years ago

As someone who grew up watching the media of that era, I have trouble agreeing with that characterization.

Most of what I saw wasn’t encouraging Stepford/Disney saccharine positivity nearly as much as it was encouraging basic decency and politeness in day to day interactions, including those with groups that traditionally hadn’t enjoyed that. It didn’t even discourage arguments but rather emphasized being productive with them — in other words, argue to find solutions, not to stoke each others’ emotional bonfires.

If anything based on the steep decline in basic decency in the past couple of decades, I think it could be argued that the messaging of the 90s was unfortunately a failure.

naasking10• 4 years ago

I had a thought the other day if the current intolerance is due to the growing infantilism that's been occurring since the 90s. This whole notion that interactions must be positive, pursue good feelings, people need protection from "harmful" content, etc. is the root of the current climate

This is one of the core ideas behind prof. Jonathan Haidt's book "Coddling of the American Mind". There's probably something to it.

jwmoz2• 4 years ago

That's quite interesting. I always found it difficult to relate to the left/right binary hatred.

JackFr2• 4 years ago

I find academic fads fascinating. "Intelligence" has become a taboo word, and so we find "cognitive ability" in its place, which is I guess a shibboleth for the in-group when you mean intelligence.

contravariant• 4 years ago

Given how often intelligence is conflated with education or knowledge I don't think they're trying to avoid the word per se they're just trying to be explicit.

They do use the term intelligence in the article itself.

runeks4• 4 years ago

How do they measure "cognitive ability" in this study?

If it's just IQ the then why not just write "high-IQ" and avoid the ambiguity?

EDIT: See here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33855704

cinntaile• 4 years ago

That's not an academic fad, it's just how languages organically evolve. The connotation of words shifts over time. Retard was ok before, now people say braindead instead. Switching one "medical" condition for another doesn't really change much but here we are because one is considered more ok than the other. In the future it'll be something else again.

svnt8• 4 years ago

Braindead people are the least able to defend themselves of any living humans. The fact that we use their condition as an insult is unconscionable.

I don’t know if I’m being sarcastic or not anymore.

spookie• 4 years ago

I believe cognitive ability to be more concrete, clearer. In all honesty.

Veen• 4 years ago

Why? And by "why" I mean "for what reason". And by "reason" I mean "a cause for an action or event". And by "cause" I mean "a thing that gives rise to a phenomenon". So I suppose what I am saying is: "What cause for an action or event gives rise to the phenomenon of your belief that "cognitive ability" is clearer?"

jackmott42• 4 years ago

This sort of churning around of words happens all over our culture, not just academia. Back in ~1985 when I was in school it became not ok to say retarded as that is derogatory , and there was shift to use the word "Special". Immediately then "special" become derogatory.

Anyway this is normal human stuff that is always going on, its a bit silly, but its also fine. Find other battles to get irritated about that matter, is my advice.

a_f• 4 years ago

Casuallly known as the euphemism treadmill I believe

BMc20203• 4 years ago

GWB wasn't stupid, he was 'intellectually incurious'.

t-3• 4 years ago

No, he was a good actor. If you thought he was a folksy idiot, that means he got you.

lr4444lr2• 4 years ago

He flew interceptor aircraft in the US military, so obviously he had significant mental capacities. He also abused alcohol for a while in his early adult life, which would explain a lot of the symptoms we saw in his older years as president.

peoplefromibiza2• 4 years ago

there are many serial killers with very high IQ and zero ability to process logically the consequences of what they were about to do.

cognitive abilities don't necessarily require intelligence, depending on which they are talking about.

for example attention is a cognitive ability, many so called gifted kids lack the ability to focus and/or pay prolonged attention.

WitCanStain• 4 years ago

I'm not sure I buy the high IQ but zero logical abilitu claim. Source?

runeks4• 4 years ago

"Intelligence" has become a taboo word [...]

Doesn't seem to be the case. Quote from the paper:

Largely omitted from the conversation, by contrast, is cognitive ability—also called intelligence, and which reflects the individuals' maximal (rather than typical) performance when understanding and solving complex problems and ideas.

raegis• 4 years ago

They were using "cognitive ability" back in the 1980s when I was in high school taking the SAT.

motohagiography• 4 years ago

I can say that tolerance requires a capability for abstraction that is not intuitive to everyone. When we take things personally or respond emotionally, it is because we have reached the limit of our ability to reason about them abstractly. An example would be someone attached to a solution to a problem at work. They reach for emotional tools when they run out of ability to reason about it as categories or as objects. Some people don't bother with abstract reason at all and just act with whatever tools on whatever makes them central. The most seductive aspect of a lot of current political discourse is that it elevates and centers people with limited cognitive ability and offers them redemption and exaltation in exchange for channeling their smaller urges like envy and malice. It's an ancient hustle, imo.

Politically and physically, it doesn't matter how intelligent you or your group are if you are outnumbered by a herd that responds to the appeals and actuation of its lower instincts. Enjoy the ride. The whole thing is quite a spectacle.

mway• 4 years ago

[...] it doesn't matter how intelligent you or your group are if you are outnumbered by a herd that responds to the appeals and actuation of its lower instincts.

Quite so, at least empirically speaking (in my own observations, anyway).

I guess a natural follow up would be, is there any feasible external (to such a group) or general (trans-group) impetus to either (a) increase abstract reasoning or (b) avoid "baser" framing, assuming that's not intrinsically pointless? Obviously with e.g. politics, this is the goal of many folks (to incite emotionally rather than engage rationally, or to mask emotion as rationality), but I wonder how feasible it is to increase rational discussion (through abstraction, or other means) about rational topics for the sake of productive discourse.

prirun• 4 years ago

It seems that encouraging this would have to start at a very young age, in elementary school. Parents may not have the capability (cognitive ability) or time to instill this kind of thinking in their kids.

However, school is usually a place where authority, hierarchy, and group-think is reinforced rather than questioned. I can't see schools encouraging kids to do thought experiments like "Let's say your parents don't like it that a boy wants to have a boyfriend instead of a girlfriend. Instead of you just believing whatever your parents say, let's talk about why they believe that, how they might be getting it wrong, and why it's okay if you don't agree with them." Actually, some schools are trying that, with the predictable backlash from parents and others in the local community.

Nasrudith• 4 years ago

For one if they recognize that they are getting repeatedly ripped off, even the dimmest bulb may draw a conclusion eventually that as great as a feeling the idea of getting rich off of the traffic of the Brooklyn Bridge may be, that guy selling it is scamming you.

Fanatics are remarkably reality resistant but sustaining it within a group is more difficult and expensive in abstract ways, such as worse ability to recruit.

syzarian2• 4 years ago

There’s a theory that human reasoning evolved in such a way that humans collectively don’t search for the truth or the correct decision but rather for the most convincing reason. Whether or not this true it does appear to be how groups of humans act.

svnt8• 4 years ago

Define truth, though.

doliveira• 4 years ago

We're emotional beings first and foremost. That we're able to reason is just an accident of the big brains evolution gave us.

Godel_unicode8• 4 years ago

Do you have any evidence for that? I’d be interested in reading serious papers that explain how reason is an accident as opposed to the point. Also that we are “emotional first and foremost”. I have found that people are generally emotional in situations where reason has failed them, implying that we are reasoning beings first.

ren_engineer• 4 years ago

I can say that tolerance requires a capability for abstraction that is not intuitive to everyone

there's some pretty interesting research related to this done with criminals. At lower levels of IQ they aren't capable of hypotheticals like "how do you think the person felt when you robbed them" or "how do you think the mother of the person you killed felt about that". Which raises the question of how much they can even be held accountable for their actions to some degree

Empathy requires a certain level of intelligence, children don't have the cognitive ability for it until they are a few years old and there are many "normal" adults walking around with IQ in a similar range as those children. High IQ psychopaths are interesting because they seem to be able to overrule most criminal behavior despite also not feeling empathy, they probably just run some sort of cost-benefit analysis that simulates empathy

generalizations2• 4 years ago

Which raises the question of how much they can even be held accountable for their actions to some degree

I think they can still be held accountable. They were told not to do a thing, and they did it.

rgrieselhuber3• 4 years ago

This is the basis of the (apocryphal?) idea developed in the SAS of having a cup of tea. It's the same idea as "delay your reaction to a negative stimuli as long as possible."

Political disagreements have been structured in our society along dialectics of power and, as such, are designed to attack and malign the very identity of the parties who disagree. This triggers the social isolation / anxiety response and can amount to amygdala hijacking, and then people lose their cool.

It helps a lot to keep in mind that these responses have been exquisitely engineered via social media, cable news, etc. and that the person in front of you (or even online) is likely not your true enemy and you probably have more shared interests than you might think.

l33t233372• 4 years ago

When you say SAS, are you referring to the UK’s special air service?

marmetio3• 4 years ago

Can you explain dialects of power? There seem to be a lot of unrelated topics that use the same terminology.

tescocles• 4 years ago

I don't know if this is quite what you mean, but I've had more than one discussion (and seen many more online on twitter, reddit) that goes something like:

Alice: say, for the sake of argument, that A is true
Bob: But A isn't true?
Alice: Whether A is true or not is a different question. For the purposes of our conversation (that we're talking about the consequences of A being true), it is.
Bob: But... A isn't true.
Alice: I give up!
Bob: I win!

For Bob, it seems to be completely impossible to talk "stipulatively".

It's equal parts frustrating and baffling to me that some people just can't understand the concept of talking about logical conclusions from some starting point independently from the veracity of that starting point, and I'd agree it's one of the big issues with (online) discourse today.

cogman10• 4 years ago

I've had your exact discussion both online and in person, You aren't alone.

Sometimes online, I suspect it's insincere. They know why you are doing the hypothetical, it hurts their position, so instead of engaging with it they become absolutists.

Other times, though (especially easy to see in person) it is VERY real. They simply are not capable of dealing with hypotheticals.

Where that came up the most for me was when tutoring math in college. The abstract nature of math past algebra was just something some people could not grok. They wanted the hard and fast facts. "Ask me to do 7 * 5 and I'll have that answer in an instant, don't ask me riddles about x * 5 = 35".

nine_k• 4 years ago

Alice need to adapt to Bob's perception if she wants him to listen.

"If we lived in a completely imaginary world where A were true" could address Bob's sensibilities a bit better.

First make yourself heard, then make your point. Otherwise your point falls on deaf ears. This takes some ability to listen and tailor your arguments to fit your audience.

tbrownaw6• 4 years ago

Bob: False premises lead to absurd conclusions. Therefore your demand that I agree to a "hypothetical" that we both know is false, is an attempt to pull a fast one somehow.

dataflow5• 4 years ago

I've been, and will probably continue to be, on both sides of this. The problem is that not every "A" deserves counterfactual analysis for both parties 100% of the time. As a silly nonpolitical example, imagine if A is "the earth is flat". I would be Bob in that example, because, well... I am not really willing to spend the time and effort required to debate the topic seriously every time it comes up, and I think most people are similar in this respect. It's not about cognitive ability, it's just that most people don't see the point of engaging in every conversation that's based on premises that are manifestly untrue to them.

netsharc• 4 years ago

If Bob had heard the phrase before, maybe he'd say "I don't deal with hypotheticals". If I were Alice, that would make me see Bob as smart as an amoeba, because even animals deal with "What if" scenarios...

MaysonL• 4 years ago

if A is false then A implies B is true, whatever the truth value of B is. Thus arguing from a false premise is meaningless.

nootropicat• 4 years ago

The problem with doing this in an adversarial online setting is that it's often used as a trick to make someone admit to some position that's 'close' to the original, and then spin that as agreeing to the original position.

Especially on twitter where post length forces shortcuts which are very easy to maliciously leverage.

In some cases if the assumption is what's being argued itself doing this is an attempt at manipulation, not genuine discussion.

anotherman554• 4 years ago

Can you think of a scenario where you would be playing the role of Bob, not Alice, here? Suppose it went down this way:

Alice: Say, for the sake of argument, Bob beats his wife.

Bob: But I don't beat my wife...

Alice: Whether you beat your wife or not is a different question. For purposes of our conversation about consequences you beat your wife.

In this scenario Bob understands the implication of logical conclusions but considers the conversation to be a trap.

pickovven• 4 years ago

The research in this link isn't about whether or not people's behavior becomes emotional when encountering disagreement. But it's certainly interesting that takeaway is the top comment here.

shrimp_emoji• 4 years ago

The signs of neurodegeneration like Alzheimer's include irritability and impulsivity, which intuitively supports this. It's like a failure of higher cognitive functions, so the basal emotions take over. Alternatively, it could just be a failure to regulate emotions.

lo_zamoyski2• 4 years ago

When we take things personally or respond emotionally, it is because we have reached the limit of our ability to reason about them abstractly.
Politically and physically, it doesn't matter how intelligent you or your group are if you are outnumbered by a herd that responds to the appeals and actuation of its lower instincts.

But this is not purely a matter of raw, inherent intellectual potential. Academics are notorious for having a history of rationalizing power or depravity of all kinds. The tyrannies of communism, for example, were the product of intellectuals who exploited the vices of the "proletariat" as a cudgel against their opponents. Ultimately, these intellectuals were fools because they either actually believed the absurdity of communism or they exploited a communism they didn't actually believe to gain power for themselves and through especially wicked deeds, and all evil is, after all, foolish and opposed to reason. I object to the notion that the more intellectual potential you have, the less evil you are just because you have a greater potential for intelligence. You can choose to be unwise for emotional and vicious reasons, thus thwarting the exercise of reason when it leads you some place you cannot handle.

ltbarcly3• 4 years ago

Is cognitive ability a euphemism for intelligence or something more specific?

the-printer3• 4 years ago

Studies like this are dangerous.

1. Scientific articles are almost like luxury clickbait these days. Let’s be frank: how many of us paid even the minimum of 12 USD for 48-hour access to the complete study and know what they even mean by the title?

2. This study in particular will likely engender the notion, that will now be taken as fact, that political intolerance is indicative of lack of “cognitive ability” (whatever that means). This point itself is an assumption, because the abstract consists of stanzas of loaded jargon.

wheelinsupial2• 4 years ago

how many of us paid even the minimum of 12 USD for 48-hour access to the complete study and know what they even mean by the title?

I know not everyone on HN has a degree or access to college / university, but for those that do, don't you have alumni library access privileges?

ThrowawayTestr4• 4 years ago

science is dangerous

Is this really the level of discussion we're having now?

the-printer3• 4 years ago

You have betrayed the nature of the angle-bracketed blockquote. Granted my initial response was prior to reading the article, I feel the same independent of the study in question, if not…stronger even, in spite of my errors. Perhaps my error itself is a testament to what I was saying.

To entertain your intentional misquote, of course science has the capacity for danger. Is science some sort of monolithic and infallible structure that is incapable of being manipulated to inflict harm? Are you cognitively able to tolerate that?

psychphysic5• 4 years ago

Or not having more to the point!

psychphysic5• 4 years ago

What is half shocking, half depressing and increasingly common.

Is mundane topics becoming "too dangerous" for general discourse.

We (well I) mock the idea of religious topics know only to a small career (Rightful Heir star Trek TNG S06E23).

Then it occured to me while the Klingons hid the true story of the creation of the original Kutliss by Kahless.

People such as yourself would like to hide any topic which might undermine their personal preferred political agenda.

tbrownaw6• 4 years ago

This paper is available on sci-hub.

# What do they mean by "cognitive ability"?

Our Danish sample was selected using a registry of military draftees, which has been in operation since 2006. We drew our sample from the subset of the registry which had taken a cognitive ability test.
For our American sample, 2,766 respondents completed our survey using MTurk in September and October 2014.
The Danish Draftee Board administered the Børge Priens Prøve (BPP; Kousgaard, 2003) to the draftee sample. This 78- item test has a correlation of .82 with the full Wechsler Adult Intelligence Scale (Mortensen et al., 1989). We have access only to the composite BPP score
MTurk participants completed the 16-item International Cognitive Ability Resource measure (Condon & Revelle, 2014).

# What do they mean by "tolerance"?

First, questions of tolerance concern whether one thinks a group's fundamental rights (particularly pertaining to expression) should or should not be protected. This is, conceptually, not the same as asking whether one likes or has a positive affect for the group in question, although some psychological studies appear to treat it as such.
To say that questions of affect and tolerance are different is not to say they are entirely separable. The relationship between these domains in fact represents the second key element to operationalizing tolerance. Specifically, tolerance only meaningfully applies to groups that one might be motivated to restrict—that is, those one dislikes or otherwise opposes (Gibson, 2013; Sullivan et al., 1982).
A third element related to assessing tolerance is that the frequently observed discrepancy between an individual's generalized commitments to tolerance and the tolerance they endorse for specific groups makes the assessment of tolerance a distinctively complicated task (Gibson, 2013)

# What groups did they ask about people's tolerance of?

Right/Christian Fundamentalists
Neo-Nazis

tbrownaw6• 4 years ago

This does not appear to be the standard "university graduates have more leftist social values" that the title initially looked like it might be.

the-printer3• 4 years ago

The actual content of the article is underwhelming and mildly comical. Maybe the collective responses that can be gleaned from the comments here are as telling as the actual study.

toss12• 4 years ago

Now, what is the cognitive ability required to not only understand and be tolerant of other political points of view, but also recognize that this has limits, first and best highlighted by Karl Popper’s Paradox of Tolerance [0].

"Less well known is the paradox of tolerance: unlimited tolerance must lead to the disappearance of tolerance. If we extend unlimited tolerance even to those who are intolerant, if we are not prepared to defend a tolerant society against the onslaught of the intolerant, then the tolerant will be destroyed, and tolerance with them..."

And managing this paradox of tolerance requires even higher cognitive load than simply being absolutely tolerant, but constant judgements, and maintaining stability on a very 'slippery slope'.

[0] https://www.politicalempathyproject.org/blog-posts/karl-popp...

JetAlone• 4 years ago

It's not a paradox, it's a contradiction. The "open society" is a closed circuit.

toss12• 4 years ago

That should probably be taken up with Popper, who named the thing. ;-)

Yes it is a self-contradicting property of an open society, 'tho I'm not sure that rules out it being a paradox either/also.

uptownfunk• 4 years ago

Let’s assume tolerance means tolerance of viewpoints which disagree with our own position.

From an evolutionary lens, if someone disagrees with us, then aren’t we predisposed not to tolerate since tolerating would be at odds with our own survival? That’s the sort of lazy evaluation approach.

A more nuanced take could be that being tolerant also encourages us to revisit our own position and improve it if need be enabling a greater likelihood of survival.

halkony2• 4 years ago

This approach seems to assume that there is one "correct" position that optimizes likelihood of survival. With biology, it's not like evolution approaches a "limit" of the perfect species, so the most valuable opinion for a decision making species is whatever is needed in the moment. In fact, we gain a lot of evolutionary advantage by outsourcing our opinions to other members of the species. Tolerance gives us mental capacity to worry about our immediate problems.

Also consider that disagreement takes psychological, emotional, and sometimes physical resources to act on properly. Disagreement can be expensive and won't always pay off. So that's probably why humans are evolutionary predisposed to agreement.

stackedinserter• 4 years ago

"I'm tolerant to those who have opposing views, just want to shut them up, de-platform and bully their employers to make them non-hireable" /s

js2• 4 years ago

The fundamental cause of the trouble is that in the modern world the stupid are cocksure while the intelligent are full of doubt. -- Bertrand Russell (1933) in “The Triumph of Stupidity”

https://quoteinvestigator.com/2015/03/04/self-doubt/

brundolf2• 4 years ago

Seeing a lot of self-congratulatory nodding here

I'll just say, this doesn't necessarily line up with my experience. The extremely intelligent people I know are every bit as likely to be politically intolerant as the less-intelligent people I know. They just have different reasons (overconfidence in their own logic/education, in their mental modeling, in the stupidity of the other side, etc)

Would be curious to see a study where one high-IQ group is shown a fictional study with this conclusion and one isn't

dTal3• 4 years ago

In corner A, a published and peer reviewed N=2408 study that tracks political tolerance and its stability over several years across two countries.

In corner B, your personal qualitative impression of your immediate acquaintance group.

Is it possible that your skepticism is itself an example of overconfidence?

throwoutway• 4 years ago

Skepticism can lead to hypothesis which can lead to new studies which can be superior to previous studies

tomlockwood13• 4 years ago

N=2408 members of the Danish military or mechanical Turk participants, in a paper with one citation but a huge amount of retweets, in the time of the replication crisis. How is this paper credible?

bpodgursky• 4 years ago

I don't want to be too abrasive, but are you sure they are actually more intelligent, and not just more confident in their own intelligence?

brundolf2• 4 years ago

Yes, I have in mind people that I know quite well (several of whom I've worked with)

The biggest predictor I've seen for political tolerance is exposure (or lack of) to those they disagree with (in non-political contexts). It's really easy to demonize people you've never gotten to know or develop rapport with as an individual, multifaceted person. And demons don't need political rights

patrulek• 4 years ago

More intelligent people base on data, statistics and facts often than less intelligent ones, which are driven by emotions, feelings and intuition. And data are often against political tolerance/correctness. That's my opinion.

chrsig• 4 years ago

Seeing a lot of self-congratulatory nodding here

I mean yeah...you see that in every HN thread though.

runeks4• 4 years ago

For anyone else curious how they measured "cognitive ability", here's the relevant section from the paper[1]:

Børge Priens Prøve

The Danish Draftee Board administered the Børge Priens Prøve (BPP; Kousgaard, 2003) to the draftee sample. This 78-item test has a correlation of .82 with the full Wechsler Adult Intelligence Scale (Mortensen et al., 1989). We have access only to the composite BPP score, but a study of its four subtests demonstrated that Cronbach's alpha for the four tests, composed of verbal analogies, number sequences, letter matrices, and geometric figures, ranged from 0.72 to 0.82 (Hartmann & Teasdale, 2005).

International cognitive ability resource

MTurk participants completed the 16-item International Cognitive Ability Resource measure (Condon & Revelle, 2014). Alpha reliability was high (0.80), and strong convergent validity has been reported for the test (such as a correlation of 0.81 with the Shipley-2 measure of cognitive abilities: Condon & Revelle, 2014).

[1] https://sci-hub.ru/downloads/2021-09-02/07/rasmussen2021.pdf

omarhaneef• 4 years ago

N+1 theory on why this may be the case:

Cognitive ability is forged in reading and discussions. After you’ve seen the arguments rehearsed hundreds of times you’ve become inundated and exhausted by the arguments and counter arguments from both sides of many debates.

d0100• 4 years ago

I'd like if ChatGPT would know what are the most common arguments (as word-for-word as possbile) for X, where it started and how people picked up and how often it gets repeated. For example "crossed state lines"

lo_zamoyski2• 4 years ago

Some commentary...

- Without access to the article and the author's definitions, I have some concern about the use of the word "ideals" in relation to tolerance as tolerance is less a matter of ideals and more a matter of being able to endure what we regard as disagreeable. It's something like patience. We can't show tolerance or patience for what we regard as good.

- Today, we often construe tolerance as an obligation to accept and agree with ideas you disagree with (or else risk being called a bigot). Those who seem to be more vocal about the need for tolerance are often some of the nastiest people you'll meet. To quote Marcuse, "What is proclaimed and practiced as tolerance today, is in many of its most effective manifestations serving the cause of oppression."

- What, then, does this article say about our universities? Our culture? Where is the tolerance of people with political views other than those now practically sanctioned by the state?

- That cognitive ability should correlate highly with whatever is held to be an ideal in a culture is not especially surprising given that children who do well in school often do so because of how well they've conformed their thinking to what they've been taught. What is the difference between a child who receives high marks in a school following a curriculum laced with Nazi or Soviet propaganda versus one celebrating liberal or progressive values or something else? I am reminded of a story by Czeslaw Milosz in which he was addressing the problem of why so many intellectuals went along with the tyranny of the communist regime, and why he did not. His poetic answer was that it had less to do with reason and more to do with a "revolt of the stomach". What I take that to mean is that the "stomach" stands here for conscience (which is ultimately a matter of intellect, virtue, and rightly ordered will), and that intellectuals are great at rationalizing the hand that feeds them or threatens them if they do not possess properly formed consciences and virtue. If a certain understanding of tolerance is promoted in schools, then that's the version of tolerance I will expect most graduates to hold. You might even put on a show of considerate listening of the most absurd and obviously bad claims because you don't want to appear boorish and not because you're actually examining the claim seriously.

- While it's true that greater cognitive ability means a greater potential ability to examine claims, raw cognitive ability alone is worthless without virtue. You have to be honest, you have to have practice reasoning, you have to want to examine a belief fairly, you have to possess humility so you can know where your knowledge ends and therefore where your capacity to judge the truth of a claim ends, and you must not be swayed by ulterior motives like the desire for social approval or fear of disapproval. You should also have nothing to do with stupid, nonstarter ideas like skepticism or relativism or whatever else is used to justify false varieties of tolerance.

hristov• 4 years ago

Now there is a very clever bit of mind control.

dragonwriter3• 4 years ago

Full text is paywalled, and I’m not interested in paying to see it, but if I did, what I’d be looking at is the operationalization of “political tolerance” and “cognitive ability”, particularly the former. I’ve found that studies with the kind of conclusion this has often use very dubious methods of operationalizing complex variables, particularly the dependent variable, such that while the conclusion may be true with the given operational definitions, it is far from clear that it corresponds in any close way to what most people hearing the conclusion would understand it to mean without seeing the particular operationalization in use.

tbrownaw6• 4 years ago

Full text is paywalled, and I’m not interested in paying to see it,

$diety bless sci-hub

guerrilla• 4 years ago

I'd bet on this not replicating, but if it were to, it would remind me a lot of Idiocracy. The "smart" people will tolerate the fascists until they are eliminated by them (keeping in mind this nearly happened in recent history.)

gnicholas• 4 years ago

This is interesting since cognitive ability can exacerbate confirmation bias, which would suggest the opposite conclusion regarding political tolerance.

https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/stretching-theory/20...

chrismsimpson• 4 years ago

Smart people have a high tolerance for bullsh*t? Seems legit..

GoblinSlayer3• 4 years ago

If tolerance is intolerant of intolerance and politics is intolerant, then tolerance is indistinguishable from intolerance.

psychphysic5• 4 years ago

I'm so politically tolerant I haven't voted in 6 years.

I must be a genius by now.

Cognitive ability is a powerful predictor of political tolerance

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