The Political Views of High-IQ Americans and American Sociology Professors

Outlines the methodology used to produce a chart showing the distribution of political views among high-IQ Americans and American sociology professors

The distribution of political views among high-IQ Americans was obtained from the General Social Survey. Specifically, the variable ‘polviews’ was recoded into three categories, corresponding to ‘liberal’ (= 1/3), ‘moderate’ (= 4) and ‘conservative’ (= 5/7). The distribution of this variable was then computed for the sub-sample of respondents who scored 10/10 on the ‘wordsum’ vocabulary test, and who were interviewed during the years 2000–2018 (unweighted n = 450). Sample weights were applied when calculating proportions. Respondents scoring 10/10 in the vocabulary test represent those in the top ~4% of verbal IQ.

The distribution of political views among American sociology professors was obtained from the recent paper by Horowitz et al. (2018). These authors surveyed n = 479 American sociology professors (response rate = 14%). In their sample, 21% of respondents identified as ‘radical’, 62% identified as ‘liberal’, 13% identified as ‘moderate’, 2% identified as ‘conservative’, and 2% identified as ‘libertarian’. The categories ‘radical’ and ‘liberal’ were combined into a single ‘liberal’ category (= 83%), while the categories ‘conservative’ and ‘libertarian’ were combined into a single ‘conservative’ category (= 4%).

Two important caveats are as follows. First, the simplistic three-category measure described above ignores the multi-dimensionality of political views. Second, even in the absence of factors like discrimination and hostile climate, one should not expect the distribution of political views among professors to exactly match the distribution among high-IQ Americans. Individuals select into academia not only on the basis of their intelligence, but also on the basis of their personality traits and interests, and these vary systematically by political ideology.