According to a very interesting study conducted by Brock University in Ontario, Canada, racism and prejudice are linked to having lower IQ.
Gordon Hodson, the lead psychologist researcher at Brock University, says that the research revealed that low intelligence children are more likely to hold prejudiced attitudes as adults while lower IQ adults tend to gravitate toward more traditional ideologies. In his email to LiveScience, he explains why this situation creates a vicious cycle:
“The study found that low-intelligence adults tend to gravitate toward more traditional ideologies. Those ideologies, in turn, stress hierarchy and resistance to change, attitudes that can contribute to prejudice”. (the article continues after the ad)
Hodson goes on to say that this may also explain why many anti-prejudice programs fail. These programs are usually designed to encourage participants to “see things from another group’s point of view”. For people with lower IQ this mental exercise is too demanding and more often than not, fails to deliver the desired results.
But…
and there’s a big “but” here: there are dangers of taking these findings literally. As Brian Nosek, a social and cognitive psychologist at the University of Virginia, noted:
“We can say definitively men are taller than women on average,” he said. “But you can’t say if you take a random man and you take a random woman that the man is going to be taller. There’s plenty of overlap.
When one selects intelligence, political ideology and racism and looks at any of the relationships between those three variables, it’s bound to upset somebody.”
The research will definitely stir public controversy as similar research, this one conducted in the US in 2012 by Hodson and Busseri, concluded that what applies to racism and prejudice may also apply to homophobia. The study found that people with poor abstract reasoning were more likely to exhibit prejudice against homosexuals.
The research can be found in .pdf format here.
If you like what you read, then you will definitely love this one: A 10-Year Research Reveals How You Can Increase Your Luck
Source: www.livescience.com
Photo: www.missionaloutreachnetwork.com, Thought Catalog
Photoshop: I’m A Useless Info Junkie
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