Studies Show Liberals Are More Evolved Than Conservatives

After a former co-worker of mine, who happens to be a right-wing conservative Christian, posted yet another anti-American-Muslim news article on Facebook, I couldn't help wonder what his deal was. He gets offended after posting such bigotry when no one rushes to his side in commentary solidarity. In my mind, his hatred makes him no better than any other type of religious zealout here in the United States or abroad. Several of my friends on Facebook show varying degrees of right-wing nutbaggetry, but that particular post sent me running to Google.

Now, I'm no liberal. I'm an even moderate who has strong opinions that fall on the right and left sides of the political spectrum. I take an individualistic, common sense approach to politics, and this person's constant rehashing of Pat Robertson quotes and anti-Muslim rants left my nerves raw. Expecting to find some levity, I typed in, "Conservative Christians are," and one of the options that popped up was "insane." I went for it to see where it led, but also because I've always felt like conservatives were indeed, a little off. Okay, a lot off.

To my feigned surprise, on the first page I found articles about several studies that compared the brains of liberals to conservatives. In each unbiased, professional study, liberals won. According to studies conducted at New York University, Berkeley, and UCLA, it seems liberals have more evolved brains and are slightly more intelligent across the board.

In one 2003 study, researchers found students who considered themselves either very liberal, or very conservative, and had them participate in a computerized test designed to find out which type of person was less prone to "knee-jerk" reactions. They were told to press a key when an M appeared on the screen, and not to hit a key if a W appeared.

Study participants were wired to an EEG to read brain activity during the test. EEG readouts showed liberals had more brain activity and made fewer mistakes than their conservative counterparts. In a second round, the scores and brain activity were the same when the letters M and W were switched.

Liberals were nearly five-times more likely to show complex brain activity when analyzing the split-second difference between an M and a W, and two-times more precise in selecting the correct response. To scientists, this data suggested liberals were literally more open-minded and, "...could be expected to more readily accept new social, scientific or religious ideas."

This study does not suggest that liberal political views are necessarily better for running our country than conservative views. It does explain why conservatives and liberals cannot get along, no matter how hard they might try.

In a more recent study conducted this year, liberals were found to have an IQ eleven points higher than conservatives.

"Young adults who identify themselves as "not at all religious" have an average IQ of 103 during adolescence, while those who identify themselves as "very religious" have an average IQ of 97 during adolescence."

Scientists went after IQ points after theorizing that liberal brains were more evolved and therefore more intelligent than conservatives due to certain natural habits of conservatives. For instance, liberals tend to go to bed much later than conservatives who often rise at dawn and go to bed at dusk - a custom of earlier human civilizations that depended on sunlight for farming or hunting. If this is true, then liberal minds have adapted easier to "new" situations, mirroring their ability to new and unpopular political ideals.

Satoshi Kanazawa, a professor in Evolutionary Psychology at the London School of Economics and Political Science, said humans are evolutionarily designed to be conservative and paranoid. He said, "Humans are evolutionarily designed to be paranoid, and they believe in God because they are paranoid." Kanazawa went on to say, "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." If this is the case, it makes sense that these same children would also grow up and find fault with conservative politics. It would be out with the old, in with new, more logical political viewpoints that aren't centered on old-fashioned paranoia.

Conservative partiality towards paranoia served humans well when preservation instinct depended on tremendous awareness towards anticipated danger toward family and clans. Today, liberals have evolved to look past these archaic dangers and prefer more logical, peaceful, and united society. This is why liberals baffle conservatives, and vice-versa.In a third study, Berkeley researchers (yes, uber-liberal Berkeley, but bear with me) went through fifty years of psychology research regarding conservative politics and 22, 818 participants. They found several psychological factors that were prominent in all studied conservatives. The conservatives were driven by, "Fear and aggression, dogmatism and intolerance of ambiguity, uncertainty avoidance, a need for cognitive closure, and terror management." The conservatives studied were more interested in pacifying certain personal psychological needs than looking outward

The Berkeley researchers stress, "This does not mean that conservatism is pathological or that conservative beliefs are necessarily false, irrational, or unprincipled." To an open-minded thinker like myself, the results do imply that conservative thoughts hold us back as a nation. Since conservatives are everywhere and in every religion, there is little hope for a world-wide peaceful existence where people of different religions and political values look out for each others' best interests. Our minds are just too different.

To be fair, I also Googled, "Liberals are insane," and only came up with red state blog rants and no scientific research whatsoever.

Being a perfectly-down-the-middle moderate, I do think left-wing liberals are a little nutty, but I prefer their peaceful, environmentally-sustaining ideals to the war-mongering, religion-crazed conservatives. Sure there are plenty of super-intelligent conservatives all over the world, but just because someone is book-smart doesn't mean they are evolved beings whose thoughts and actions are devised from something other than obsolete instincts.

How do you feel about these results? Do they confirm what you've suspected all along?

Sources:

http://www.berkeley.edu/news/media/releases/2003/07/22_politics.shtml

http://www.latimes.com/news/obituaries/la-sci-politics10sep10,0,2687256.story

http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2010/02/100224132655.htm