Right-Wing Men Are Obsessed With IQ. A New Study Shows Theirs Tend To Be Lower.

Love that for them.

Feb 19, 2026

Over the last decade, hungry to be told a story they want to hear about themselves, right-wing men have become increasingly obsessed with the concept of IQ and Charles Murray-eque race science. They have madly fallen in love, especially, with the idea that white people have higher IQs than Black people, posting endless memes just begging the world to tell them that they are special and smart and should be in charge of everything and would be in charge of everything if “merit” counted for anything.

Dear Leader, for example, loves to call anyone he doesn’t like “Low IQ,” as if it means anything at all coming from him.

Now, like most people who don’t fall for ads claiming that the ability to win a child’s puzzle game on one’s phone means they have an IQ of two million and five, I am of the opinion that IQ is bullshit. I believe this because all the empirical evidence tells us that standardized testing is not an accurate way to determine intelligence, and that IQ tests tend to be skewed to favor of white people and men and Western concepts of intelligence. “Testing well” is just one form of intelligence among many. In fact, it might be the least helpful form of intelligence as it pertains to the real world, as one can do very well on standardized tests and still not remember what it was she meant to get from the refrigerator.

That being said, I think we can all still delight in the irony of a new study, recently published in the scientific journal Intelligence, showing that conservative men tend to have lower IQs than men who are liberal.

For the study, titled “Exploring exceptional minds: Political orientations of gifted adults,” researchers first asked the group of gifted (IQ over 130) and non-gifted individuals where they would place themselves on a simple right-left scale. Then, they had them complete a “Political Ideologies Questionnaire,” which explored their political beliefs in four dimensions: economic libertarianism, conservatism, socialism and liberalism.

On the whole, the tests did not show too much difference between the groups, with one very notable exception: that “non-gifted men showed higher conservatism scores than gifted men.”

For the purposes of the study, conservatism was defined as the belief “that societal cohesion relies primarily on a shared culture, cautioning against the disappearance of a shared culture to prevent societal fragmentation. High-scoring individuals are skeptical about rapid social change and emphasize individuals' security, positing that freedom is viable only within a framework of precise societal rules (e.g. “The state should focus primarily on preserving our common culture and traditions”).

The researchers put much of the differences down to “cognitive flexibility,” stating that “highly intelligent and gifted individuals are characterized by high cognitive flexibility and openness to complex ideas.”

This seems especially relevant in today’s political environment, with the Right being particularly riled up over the preservation of “white culture” (which … what even is it?) in the United States and confusion over the idea that gender and sexuality are just more complex than they have been led to believe.

This is not the first time that anyone has done research on the relationship between IQ and political orientation, and it’s not the first time those with socially liberal ideas have been found to have higher IQs than those with socially conservative views.

From the study:

In one commonly posited explanation for the negative relationship between intelligence and conservatism (or in other words, the positive relationship between intelligence and liberalism), it has been suggested that lower intelligence may go hand in hand with feelings of discomfort or anxiety in situations of uncertainty or threat, which may promote conservative viewpoints (Wilson, 1973). Furthermore, the finding that individuals with higher intelligence tend to favor liberal orientations is assumed to be due to greater cognitive flexibility and openness to complex ideas of these more intelligent individuals as described in the Cognitive Complexity-Openness Hypothesis (Van Hiel et al., 2010).

Again with the cognitive flexibility!

It makes a certain amount of sense. If there’s no evidence on earth that can get someone to change their mind about vaccines, climate change or the mere existence of trans people, they just might not be all that swift. Frankly, I’d buy “cognitive flexibility” (within reason) as a marker of intelligence well before standardized testing.

Donate Just Once!

It’s not clear why this differentiation only applied to men, though. Perhaps women, regardless of their orientation, are simply socialized to be able to accept the possibility that they could be wrong — whereas the rules of toxic masculinity forbid such a thing and deem changing one’s mind to be a sign of weakness (rather than strength and security, which it actually is).

Once again, I do not believe that IQ is an accurate measure of intelligence. I do, however, love knowing that this study will be endlessly thrown in the faces of those who try to use IQ pseudoscience to assert the superiority of white people or men, ideally to the point where they don’t want to bring it up anymore. I also find it positively delicious that, according to their own rules, according to the very metric by which they assert their superiority over all other people, they are actually intellectually inferior to the supposed “soy boys” they are always whining about.

Whoops!

PREVIOUSLY ON WONKETTE!