Good morning. Good afternoon. Good evening, wherever you are. And welcome to the politics guys with your host, Jay Carson and Michael Baranowski.

Welcome to the politics guys. I'm Michael Barronowski, a political scientist at Northern Kentucky University.

My co-host this week, as always, is Cleveland Area Attorney and sometime Republican strategist, Jay Carson.

Here's this week's ask the politics guys question, Jay.

All right.

It comes from Alex from Hastings, Minnesota.

Alex writes, I remember reading a study that said, generally, people with higher IQs or higher education are more liberal than conservative.

Any idea as to why?

Well, you know, that study, I'm not sure what study Alex is referring to, but it could have been any one of a number of studies.

And let me just kind of give a representative sampling.

In 2008, the National Longitudinal Study of Adolescent Health found that the IQs of young adults who described themselves as very liberal average 106.42, whereas the average of those who identified themselves as very liberal, average 106.42, whereas the average of those who identified

themselves as very conservative was 94.82. There was another study from 2009 that looked at

cognitive capacity and political beliefs of around 2,800 university students in the U.S.

That study found that conservatism is, I quote, related to low performance on

cognitive ability tests.

Then there's a 2012, yeah, I know.

Then there's a 2012 paper that reported that people endorse more conservative views when

they're either drunk or under cognitive

pressure. And the authors concluded that political conservatism may be a process consequence of

a low effort thought. Finally. Yeah. Ouch. Yeah. Let me just, yeah. Go ahead. Finally, I'll mention

a 2010 study, which found pretty much the same thing as these other studies,

but it suggested an interesting theory as to why this might be the case.

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