Britain’s elite cultural institutions – the BBC, universities, the national trust – are dominated by the woke. Since smart people tend to get ahead in life, you might assume the woke would have higher intelligence. Not so, according to a new study.
Louise Drieghe and colleagues surveyed 300 North Americans adults using the platform Mechanical Turk. To measure participants’ cognitive ability, they administered the Ammons Quick Test, which involves correctly assigning words to pictures. Previous studies have shown that people’s scores on the test correlate strongly with their scores on more comprehensive IQ tests, such as the Wechsler Adult Intelligence Scale.
The researchers also assessed participants’ support for free speech and concern for political correctness. To measure the former, they constructed a 9-item scale, comprising items such as “Every individual has the unalienable right to express their thoughts freely,” and “Censorship of speech leaves little room for debate and diverse points of view”.
To measure the latter, they used a 7-item scale developed by two other researchers. It includes items such as “I get mad when I hear someone use politically incorrect language,” and “I try to educate people around me about the political meaning of their words”.
Drieghe and colleagues’ key finding is shown in the first column of the table below. The values are correlation coefficients – a way of quantifying how strongly related two variables are.
As you can see, there was a moderate positive correlation between cognitive ability and support for freedom of speech, and a moderate negative correlation between cognitive ability and concern for political correctness. (The asterisks tell us these results are statistically significant.)
North Americans with higher cognitive ability are more supportive of free speech and less concerned about political correctness. They’re less woke.
One possibility is that this is only true among highly educated people. Indeed, the sample was skewed towards those with a university degree: 66% of participants had one, compared to less than 40% in the general population. Perhaps the correlations would have been weaker if the sample had been more representative? I can’t rule this out.
Having said that, the study’s findings are consistent with previous research that finds cognitive ability is associated with broadly classically liberal beliefs, such as support for free speech, democracy and rights for women, and opposition to state control of the economy.
Which prompts the question: if the woke are less intelligent, how did they gain so much influence?
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How did they gain so much influence? Empty vessels make the most noise as the saying goes
… and the squeaky wheel gets the oil.
Never argue with idiots. They bring you down to their level and then beat you with experience…
This directly contradicts my personal experience and observation. Would be interested to see this study repeated in the UK with a larger sample size.
Are my six downtickers calling me a liar? Or are they just pathetic trolls. Or are they simply idiots who think I am saying that the intelligent choice is to be woke? I expect better from BTL commenters. Almost everyone I know is woke to a degree and in the “higher cognitive ability” bracket.
I suspect that’s because the people you know fit a particular demographic. Personal observation is entirely skewed to the peculiarities of your social/employment world and therefore not really a very useful measurement.
Of course that is true, but recent events have taught me to treat polls, surveys, projections etc with scepticism and to pay attention to evidence that is in my direct experience. I can’t imagine my experience is unique. Most people are know are through work and most of them are metropolitan “liberals” who vote Labour or Lib Dem.
That demographic is representative of a small loud minority – try talking to normal people.
I can only go by my own experience, in conjunction with anecdotes from others and analysis from various sources – but as I have pointed out, I have grown wary of published analysis and feel like I should always check with my own experience – bearing in mind of course that this is limited. That’s why I said I would like to see a UK based study with a larger sample size.
But can you really say that your “experience” is a reliable judge of how intelligent the people around you actually are? For example, Noah in the article admitted that the study may be skewed toward a certain “educated” demographic, but “educated” is not synonymous with “intelligent” or “higher cognitive capacity” – it simply means that one’s intelligence has been channelled into one thing rather than another. So I think it’s neither here nor there as to whether the woke contingent have less powerful brains than right-wing liberals. They might be about the same, or markedly different, but whoever has the upper hand in an IQ test is quite inconsequential. If it turns out to be correct, what’s anyone going to do with that information?
“But can you really say that your “experience” is a reliable judge of how intelligent the people around you actually are?”
Well, these are people I work with who are in general on top of their lives, successful, articulate, able to process data and information, organise it, produce technical documents, software, understand business processes – they walk and talk as if they have “higher cognitive ability”.
“So I think it’s neither here nor there as to whether the woke contingent have less powerful brains than right-wing liberals.”
I agree.
I just think that intelligence is more basic to us than its apparent manifestations in the abilities you listed. Successful, articulate, data processing, etc. are more expressions of a latent intelligence that in the case of the people you work with have resulted in successful careers. Real intelligence is a nebulous concept. A street sweeper could potentially learn to handle all these tasks, should he or she feel so inclined to follow a different career path. But the intelligence, the cognitive potential, was always there from the start.
I imagine it varies, but all the people I am talking about have “high cognitive ability” by what seems the generally accepted definition.
Neither, simply pointing out that the group from which you have drawn your anecdotes isn’t representative or randomly selected – what you have offered is “anecdotal observatrion”, which has no role to play in a statistical analysis.
“Statistical analysis” from some sources told me that covid was a deadly pandemic that would kill half a million people in the UK along. My “anecdotal observation” told me otherwise.
I’m guessing that your post has been misinterpreted by some. You meant (I’m pretty sure) that in your experience supposedly clever people are more likely to be politically correct. I think some have misread your post as implying that the less politically correct you are the more likely you are to be stupid.
Indeed I expect you are right; thanks.
No, it just means they don’t agree with you! Not sure where I am on the intelligence argument.
I don’t think my statement can be “disagreed” with, unless people think I am lying. I was merely reporting what I had observed, not expressing an opinion.
True.
The plural of “anecdote” is not “data”.
Yes, that is indeed correct – and as I pointed out, I would be curious to see the results of a UK based study using larger sample size.
Your comment “…most of them are metropolitan “liberals” who vote Labour or Lib Dem…”, makes me strongly doubt yout integrity in this matter. Try talking to hard working, highly educated and intelligent engineers (I don’t mean mechanics or technicians) out in the field, as opposed to your metroplitian humanities chums, and you’ll get a rather a shock as to how we feel about “wokeness”
You doubt my integrity? What is that supposed to mean?
I’m talking about highly educated, “intelligent” and hard working software engineers – almost all lefties and covidians. I’m implying nothing about you or the people you know, just communicating my own experience.
“Lefty and covidian” is all that we need to know. Thanks for that.
Fortunately I don’t have to talk to them much. The boss is a sceptic.
While I don’t think highly of these one-off correlation collections, to a large degree, woke means Believes in magic, namely, that words have to power to affect/ change things and not only human minds. That’s not a trait of intelligent people, who’ll all too often notice that their words seem to be entirely powerless, no matter how reasoned they are, and that someone who cleverly plays on other people’s greed, envy and fear and who banks on them being too stupid to notice this will always practically outsmart them.
I guess it depends on what one means by “intelligent”. I know lots of people who would score well above average on IQ tests who have bought into the woke agenda to varying degrees, because they think being “woke” is about being “nice”, and they are desperate to think of themselves or be seen as “nice”, or they simply choose to pretend to themselves they believe this stuff because they know it will advance their career/save them from dismissal.
I remember doing an IQ test in the fifth form. By that time, it was just another of those tests (you’ll have to do all the time), so I did my best to solve it. I certainly wouldn’t do so again today, as I have much more important things to do than solve a bunch of silly riddles for the purpose of demonstrating that I can do that.
The wife of my brother is a university professor and he a (usually unemployed) doctor of mineralogy. As far as I know, they’ve (especially she) always bought into the current thing, whatever the current thing currently is, and their academic achievements are far above anything I could boast of. I have no contact with them because – even assuming goodwill on their side, something they both certainly haven’t – trying to communicate with them is just too darn difficult because they understand absolutely nothing which is composed of more than three words in a row (and tend to get very unpleasant once they’ve again managed to convince themselves that whatever they again didn’t understand must have been some sort of attack on them).
Yes, I know quite a few people like that.
I suspect that most of those “lots” are humanites graduates, of which we have far too many.
Mainly computer scientists actually
In this case, their political/ social orientation is no wonder: The universal wokification of software development started around 2005 with a sudden invasion of equality-of-outcome feminists who soon convinced all major organizations that stuff like workforce diversity matters more than work results. Eg, there are (or used to be, I’ve been ignoring the nonsense for a while now) programmes for getting CS students into mentored, paid work during their summer holidays but they’re strictly only for students from so-called underrepresented groups. Ironically, most of the big names associated with the initial push for that have long since stopped working in the field at all and have instead turned into professional political activists and -ity consultants.
In this area, if you actually want to work in it, especially, if you’d prefer a real job with a company that’s actually making money and not a We’ll see if anyone’s getting paid next month! startup position, you’ll have to chose your convictions accordingly. Google announces itself as Carbon-neutral since 2007 for a reason.
Indeed. I think there’s a geographical element to this too – we’re London based and virtue-signalling types seem generally overrepresented there.
Don’t need research.
It’s patently obvious.
If you believe in abject garbage, you are an idiot.
QED.
Trust me, I’m a doctor.
Comment of the day. 😄
Thank you Trev
“One possibility is that this is only true among highly educated people.”. There is no correlation between educational intelligence and making the right decisions. None. The former is largely based on memory, the latter largely based on intuition. You can be academically brilliant, but be thick as a plank; in fact the last few years have brought this poorly understood fact into sharp focus.
“Which prompts the question: if the woke are less intelligent, how did they gain so much influence?”
You know why. The sheer force of numbers through the institutions of academia. Both Blair and Clinton assisted the process through the target of getting as many kids through college as possible at the detriment of vocational and technical jobs.
This was financed through debt as usual, the root of all our evils, artificially low Uni rates in the UK and trillion dollar student loans in the US. Academia has always been the place where common sense goes to die, it’s just gotten sociopathic.
Then theirs the 4th turning issue, and larger fin de siecle degradation in morality and grand arc dissolution of Christianity and the belief in God. So anything goes, up means down, girl is boy, victim is valued….
See Free Lemming’s post adjacent to yours.
“Which prompts the question: if the woke are less intelligent, how did they gain so much influence?”
’Common Purpose’ and its offshoots. First infiltrate the selection and appointment committees. Make sure top jobs go to people who wouldn’t expect to get them and promise them a pension beyond their wildest dreams … as long as they ‘behave’, politically. Then you have control. The thicko at the top won’t wear underlings who are bright enough to show them up, and on it goes. A ‘Mediocracy’.
Spot-on.
” Which prompts the question: if the woke are less intelligent, how did they gain so much influence?”
Because they are sheep who are easy to herd, providing they have a genuinely intelligent “shepherd” leading them in the direction they want.
It’s the motives of the intelligent “shepherd” which are the real question? Usually it’s money, power and control.
Sadly, those that would control us, appoint underlings who will obey orders rather than thinking for themselves, the inevitable outcome is that the less bright are those making decisions and dictating policy.
As a side note the unwise expansion of Higher Education, by the quisling John Major, has led to the merely average (who are easily indoctrinated by unscrupulous academics) being awarded degrees, and accordingly believing that they are something intellectually special.
The “Long March Through the Institutions” is all too real, and will be almost impossible to halt.
I’m glad that I’m in my 60’s as I, hopefully, won’t be around when it all reverts to savagery. Net Zero will ensure that pre-industrial revolution society will make a comeback, and it will not be pretty. The useless wokerati will be the first to be eaten (certainly metaphorically and possibly literally).
Net Zero will ensure that pre-industrial revolution society will make a comeback,
I’m not so sure about that. It’s usually a safe assumption that people want to do what they are doing. Wrt Net Zero, that’s making all kinds of grand announcement about stuff that’s supposed to take place at a really safe distance (ie, a couple general elections away and thus, most likely, somebody else’s problem by then) while funneling state money into all kinds of otherwise doomed alt-tech projects (like wind farms). The most likely real reason for the announcements is to serve as cover story for subsidizing stuff which is – in practical terms – not worth it. In the end, water always runs downhill and the Net Zero fantasies won’t survive colliding with reality.
Case in point: The German Energiewende. An atrocious amount of money has been burnt on that. And since that didn’t help, coal-fired power stations are being brought back online and the projected end-of-life of nuclear-powered ones is pushed into the future while the government tries to limp on without major investements in these supposedly obsolescent technologies. It’s only a few years, after all, and then, attempts to govern in some sensible way can again be suspended for a year of campaigning and idle promises.
The answer is nuclear, nuclear and more nuclear – we, as a society, were absolute mugs to let the green eco-terrorists derail it 40 years ago.
Hmm … did someone ever believe Trisha ‘Antirvial Underpants!’ Greenalgh was particularly intelligent?
The reality is, if you want to get on in life (especially so in Academistan), you have to be sociable, average and quietly dishonest where need be. That way, the people who currently rule the roost won’t regard you as future threat to their own position and thus, won’t sabotage you early on when that’s still fairly easy. The so-called meritocracy has always really been a chumocracy.
Having the correct political stance is also critical.
“How did they gain so much influence”—-A very good question. —–If indeed “cognitive ability” comes into it, it might depend on where the line gets drawn. Is it drawn just below the top 10% of people’s IQ or lower?——- But also when you look at the progression of this wokery, it started out as an awareness of social injustice (or apparent social injustice), and over the years it has grown out of control with everyone afraid to challenge the nonsense for fear of being labelled inconsiderate, racist, mysoginist etc. We now see the rise of woke capitalism whereby companies are trying to outdo each other and be woker than thou. You see this in their TV commercials. The woke scam comes when companies pretend to care about something other than profit and power in order to gain more of both of these things. By selling Liberal Progressive values along with their product they hope and often succeed in gaining market advantage. Only those perhaps with the “cognitive ability” to see this scam for what it is might decide not to indulge these woke capitalists by not buying their product. The rest of the people are not necessarily lacking in “cognitive ability”, but they may not have the time or inclination if they are busy with work and family life to think too hard about it. But these people need to realise that they are allowing a small section of society (woke capitalists) to dictate our social values. Staying silent is no longer an option as we all continually are hounded more and more for our “micro aggressions”.
“If the woke are less intelligent, how did they gain so much influence?”
I’m not sure we can say “the woke are less intelligent” on the basis of this one study, with a tiny sample size, in one country, or on the basis of our own views. I tend to think they are wicked rather than stupid.
I like stewart’s theory (which I hope I am not misrepresenting) which is that those on the left who believe in collectivism like telling other people what to do and how to live their lives, and are happy to expend a lot of energy doing so and putting themselves into a position to do so. Those of us on the right who tend to be more individualist just want to be left alone to get on with our lives, and becoming do-gooders and busybodies doesn’t motivate us. So we lose out. Take Wikipedia as an example – politically very left wing biased, not representative of the general population. There are people who edit it, voluntarily I imagine in many cases, who probably spend a lot of their spare time labelling horrid far-right people as “deniers” or spreaders of “misinformation” – I can’t be arsed to spend my life changing it all.
I think you’re right. Labelling the woke faction of society as “the thick ones” really is asking for it. If the results of this study are to be taken seriously, the only consequence of that can be further division in society – as if we didn’t have enough of that already!
And its not due to malice either. I think it’s all a result of people with unresolved psychological issues finding a way to embody and externalize their generalized sense of being disrespected by the world. So PC and woke have landed many points among those who permanently harbour the proverbial “chip on the shoulder”. After all, the main result of the attempt at a woke revolution is finding imaginary offense where there really is none.
“And its not due to malice either. “
Yes, in the main I would agree. But the people pulling the strings are malicious, IMO.
.Possibly, some of them, all of them? Malicious, deluded or misinformed – who knows? One thing they are not is philanthropic. We are all pawns in a much larger game called “Tail Wags the Dog”.
Dog’s getting a bit feisty though!
The clue as to why political correctness has become so ingrained in our worldviews and interactions is in the word “political”. It is not necessarily “ethically correct” or in some cases even linguistically correct, merely “politically” correct. And it is only political in the sense that language is used selectively for the avoidance of waking up swarms of slightly smaller-brained woke folk whose relentless whinging will ruin people’s careers, “disappear” them from cyberspace and take all the fun out of children’s literature!
“Which prompts the question: if the woke are less intelligent, how did they gain so much influence?”
The same way so many third rate people have always gained positions of power and authority; nepotism, the ‘right’ connections, the ‘right’ school, etc..
.
On British Chumocracy: Playing Six Degrees of Petronella Wyatt
The Critic, 4 January 2023
https://thecritic.co.uk/on-british-chumocracy/
As an example, as someone once wrote,
“Polly Toynbee is a total paradox, a privately educated girl who gets into Oxford with a sole A level, an essay, and a relation. She leaves after a year without a degree.
Then she gets a job at the Guardian, where virtually all the other journalists are Oxbridge graduates.
Someone whose whole life is dependent on her ‘contacts’ to obtain her position, she always rails against others who might have the same advantages that she has exploited.”
For what it’s worth, I am a sceptic in many things and definitely not PC and have an IQ in the top 4% of the UK population, but am academically lazy!
I like this study…😂