What do you think?
So the kids in Belgium are more likely to vote for a certain American political party based on how they score on this test?
Almost no sentence in the article is coherent, but I found this to be the most humorously unaware: “People who endorse authority and strong leaders and who do not mind inequality — the two basic dimensions underlying right-wing political ideology”
3 Likes
I think the article serves as an excellent example illustrating the misrepresentation of research as well as the underlying research itself being misleading.
First the paper being cited by that “news” article does not state: “People with low emotional intelligence are more likely to vote Republican.”
The original paper claims people holding right-wing authoritarian (RWA) attitudes have low EQ’s.
Not all Republicans fit this mold.
So one could say, “ahah… but you still have more idiots voting Republican.” Well, not so fast.
The paper only studies RWA’s. There are also left-wing authoritarians which the paper itself did not study.
As far as I can tell, the paper did not control for political belief. So it’s quite possible that folks with a high authoritarian inclination (whether on the “left” or "right) are more likely to have low EQ’s.
An example of LWA authoritarianism would be forbidding “hate” speech. Certain forms of censorship would also qualify.
3 Likes
Problem in America is we’re given this choice of two parties who aren’t actually THAT different. So it’s all down to issues you must buy as a whole package.
Meaning I disagree with gun control but also must agree with their BS rules about immigration, environment, LGBT rights, etc.
And in the end neither parties will really do much to buck the trends of those issues. Meaning R won’t expand gun rights (claiming it’s all Democrat’s faults) while Democrats will further reduce gun rights.
Just better to say America is a single party state who pretends to be democratic while they really are a plutocratic state.
To be clear, the study found that people with low EQ have more right-wing, and more prejudiced views.
https://psycnet.apa.org/record/2018-41368-001
The aim of the present study was 2-fold: (a) to investigate the relationship between emotional abilities and right-wing and prejudiced attitudes, and (b) to pit the effects of emotional and cognitive abilities on these attitudes against each other. Results from 2 adult samples (n = 409 and 574) in which abilities scores were collected in individual testing sessions, revealed that emotional abilities are significantly and negatively related to social-cultural and economic-hierarchical right-wing attitudes, as well as to blatant ethnic prejudice. These relationships were as strong as those found for cognitive abilities. For economic-hierarchical right-wing attitudes, emotional abilities were even the only significant correlate. It is therefore concluded that the study of emotional abilities has the potential to significantly advance our understanding of right-wing and prejudiced attitudes.