Smarter people tend to be more socially liberal — less racist, less homophobic, less nationalistic, more supportive of free speech and immigration — and the pattern shows up in study after study, according to a deep dive by Aporia Magazine’s Noah Carl. The observation isn’t new: in an 1866 House of Commons debate, after a Conservative MP accused his party of being “the stupidest party in the State,” the philosopher and Liberal MP John Stuart Mill shot back: “I did not mean that Conservatives are generally stupid; I meant that stupid persons are generally Conservative.”
Modern data backs him up, mildly. A 2015 meta-analysis of 67 studies by Emma Onraet and colleagues found a modest average correlation (r = .20) between intelligence and social liberalism, and a more recent study by Tobias Edwards and colleagues found an even stronger link (r = .38) that held up within sibling pairs and using genetic proxies for intelligence — evidence, Carl writes, that the relationship may be causal rather than coincidental. The pattern turns up outside English-speaking countries too: Danish liberals score nearly 14 IQ points higher than supporters of the country’s anti-immigration party, and better-educated American Jews are more likely than their less-educated peers to disapprove of Israel’s military campaign in Gaza.
Carl is careful to note that “socially liberal” doesn’t mean “woke” or “Democrat” — plenty of Democrats hold traditional views, and plenty of libertarian-leaning Republicans don’t.
Why the link exists, Carl argues, comes down to two explanations. The less flattering one: intelligent people may mistakenly assume that the freedom from social norms that works fine for them — say, casual drug use without addiction — would work fine for everyone. The more flattering one: smarter people are simply more pro-social, discounting the future less, reading other people’s intentions better, and finding novelty, and outsiders, less threatening than instinct-driven minds do.
