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<\/a><\/p>\nAs you can see, the rank order is Secular Left > Secular Right > Religious Right > Religious Left. \u00a0If you look at the original data, you will note interestingly that the most and least intelligence classes on a more granular level seem to be the extreme liberals who are non-religious (the smartest) and religious (dumbest). \u00a0This applies both when you have a racially diverse, or whites only, sample. \u00a0Extreme conservatives who are non-religious don’t seem very bright, but the N is small (19), so I don’t know what to say about that. \u00a0If I had to hazard a hypothesis, it might be that very smart people know what society expects of their worldviews. So secular people should<\/em>\u00a0be on the Left, and the bright ones know this and conform their disparate\u00a0Weltanschauung appropriately. \u00a0The rather dull on the other hand don’t realize that society expects the religious to be on the Right, and so avow their extreme liberalism without any doubt or self-consciousness. \u00a0Perhaps the same could be said of non-religious individuals who assert their extreme conservatism? (Or perhaps they don’t even know what “extreme conservatism” entails)<\/p>\n But you want to know the distributions, right?<\/p>\n Obviously you can conclude from these data one definitive point: secular liberals are smart<\/strong>. \u00a0On the other hand, only ~30% of liberals are secular, vs. ~15% of conservatives. \u00a0The self perception of “liberals” that they are much smarter than “conservatives” \u00a0probably has to do with the fact that the intelligentsia is dominated by secular liberals.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" A friend emailed me and suggested I look into the GSS and figure out which groups are smarter in terms of political & religious combinations. \u00a0So again, my methodology is simple. I took the WORDSUM variable, which is the # … Continue reading <\/a><\/a><\/a><\/p>\n
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