CNN) -- Political, religious and sexual behaviors may be reflections of intelligence, a new study finds.Evolutionary psychologist Satoshi Kanazawa at the the London School of Economics and Political Science correlated data on these behaviors with IQ from a large national U.S. sample and found that, on average, people who identified as liberal and atheist had higher IQs. This applied also to sexual exclusivity in men, but not in women. The findings will be published in the March 2010 issue of Social Psychology Quarterly.
The IQ differences, while statistically significant, are not stunning -- on the order of 6 to 11 points --
| As I recall, the test as normally done has an error range of +10 points, so that would just about be within test error... |
The reasoning is that sexual exclusivity in men, liberalism and atheism all go against what would be expected given humans' evolutionary past. In other words, none of these traits would have benefited our early human ancestors, but higher intelligence may be associated with them.
"The adoption of some evolutionarily novel ideas makes some sense in terms of moving the species forward," said George Washington University leadership professor James Bailey,
| Leadership professor? Is that a new field? |
| Sadly, higher intelligence too often enables one to arrive at the wrong conclusion more quickly, rather than guaranteeing one arrives at the correct one. |