We are all crossed with biases. We all tend towards tribalism. To fall in love with ideas that form the foundations of our tall, beautiful and fragile houses of cards. Naturally, We are all intolerant of outgroup members. (and with all the ideas that come from there).
The difference is that smarter people have more sophisticated tools to advance justifications for that intolerance. It doesn't matter what your political point is: if you are smarter you can probably be more Machiavellian when it comes to displaying your intolerance.
Liberals and conservatives
This is what it suggests a new study published in Journal of Personality and Social Psychology. Specifically, it establishes that conservative Americans are ideologically more intolerant than liberals, because the former are more politically sophisticated.
As the authors explain:
High cognitive ability allows individuals more cognitive resources, making them better able to reason about and justify their political ideology. From this perspective, cognitive ability influences ideological intolerance because those with higher cognitive ability are likely to have greater political sophistication than those with lower cognitive ability and, as a result, are more likely to rely on their ideology when forming attitudes toward the ideological outgroup, which makes the difference with the outgroup more prominent.
This relationship between ideology and exogenous intolerance also seemed to be influenced by extremism. Among both conservatives and liberals, extreme ideological views were linked to greater intolerance toward the out-group.
The researchers note that when comparing data from the two survey-based studies, it appeared that outgroup dislike was much higher in the recent 2010s sample compared to the 1980s sample. which likely reflects the greater polarization of American politics.
For this reason, more examples of liberticide also appear., both on one side and the other. Nobody pursues true freedom of expression. There are always ideological red lines, health cordons, cultural cancellations, even murders or attacks. There is always some faculty that does not want, by force, a speaker to present their ideas because they consider that their ideas are monstrous.
Therefore, in all countries, and until very few years ago, it was normal for genocide to be defended by intellectuals of international stature. Right now we live in a strange time where a minimal percentage of people believe that everyone should say theirs, and that in the event that two rights collide, we must ensure that freedom of expression prevails.
Maybe that small percentage will disappear again soon. Let's do everything possible to prevent it from happening. So that some do not think that others are slobs and that they deserve censorship, jail, cancellation or cordon sanitaire. So that at least a small percentage of people do not think that the solution to a perfect world It's about eliminating those you don't like:
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The news
If you are intelligent you are more likely to be intolerant than if you are not so intelligent.
was originally published in
Xataka Science
by
Sergio Parra
.