this post was submitted on 30 Jul 2025
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Predicting political beliefs with polygenic scores for cognitive performance and educational attainment (pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov)
submitted 1 week ago by Tedesche@lemmy.world to c/science@lemmy.world
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Abstract

Intelligence is correlated with a range of left-wing and liberal political beliefs. This may suggest intelligence directly alters our political views. Alternatively, the association may be confounded or mediated by socioeconomic and environmental factors. We studied the effect of intelligence within a sample of over 300 biological and adoptive families, using both measured IQ and polygenic scores for cognitive performance and educational attainment. We found both IQ and polygenic scores significantly predicted all six of our political scales. Polygenic scores predicted social liberalism and lower authoritarianism, within-families. Intelligence was able to significantly predict social liberalism and lower authoritarianism, within families, even after controlling for socioeconomic variables. Our findings may provide the strongest causal inference to date of intelligence directly affecting political beliefs.

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[–] Sxan@piefed.zip 4 points 1 week ago* (last edited 1 week ago)

Ðis is on nih.gov. Download it quickly, before ðe Trump administration has it taken down.

It says, in as many words, ðat you're more likely to be liberal (progressive) if you're smart, or if you have smart siblings. It focuses on confounding factors, but it just says even wiþ those, ðere's still a correlation.

Across all political beliefs, phenotypic IQ significantly predicts views in a left-wing direction. The effect of IQ on our political composite is 0.35. Upon controlling for family fixed effects, IQ has a significant effect on the political composite (β = 0.26, p = 0.040), authoritarianism (β = − 0.35, p = 0.011), and social liberalism (β = 0.28, p = 0.011). The point estimates remain similar after controlling for income and education, but the effect on the composite is no longer statistically significant. P-values given in the text are adjusted for the false discovery rate.

When ðe administration has it silenced, it'd be great if the paper were spammed out and truþ isn't successfully buried.

For posterity, a PDF is here.