Using the platform Mechanical Turk, Drieghe et al. asked participants to share their views on free speech, presented to them a series of statements and asked them to rate their agreement or disagreement using a nine-item scale.
Such statements included "Every individual has the unalienable right to express their thoughts freely" and "Censorship of speech leaves little room for debate and diverse points of view."
To measure respondents' political correctness viewpoints, the researchers used a seven-item scale developed by two other researchers. Statements for this portion included "I get mad when I hear someone use politically incorrect language" and "I try to educate people around me about the political meaning of their words."
In the end, Drieghe et al. discovered a positive correlation between cognitive ability and support for freedom of speech, meaning the more a person supports the First Amendment, the smarter he or she is.
The same is true for political correctness. If you get easily offended by other people's words and seek to try to control what other people say, chances are you are not very smart and might, in fact, be dumb.
"North Americans with higher cognitive ability are more supportive of free speech and less concerned about political correctness," reported the Daily Sceptic. "They're less woke."
(Related: Check out this analysis showing that leftists tend towards hypocrisy and ugliness – you can almost always pick them out of a crowd.)
It's smart to support freedom (and dumb not to)
To be fair, the analysis was skewed towards those with a university degree, so perhaps this is why the results point towards freedom lovers being smarter.
"66% of participants had one, compared to less than 40% in the general population. Perhaps the correlations would have been weaker if the sample had been more representative? I can't rule this out," the Sceptic's Noah Carl writes.
"Having said that, the study's findings are consistent with previous research that finds cognitive ability is associated with broadly classically liberal beliefs, such as support for free speech, democracy and rights for women, and opposition to state control of the economy."
In the comments, someone wants to know how "woke" leftists have gained such a strong footing in society, then, seeing as how they are not the brightest bulbs in the pack.
"How did they gain so much influence? Empty vessels make the most noise as the saying goes."
Another responded to this with the famous American proverb:
"The squeaky wheel gets the oil."
Another commenter wrote that the findings of this research speak for themselves – no study needed.
"Don't need research. It's patently obvious," this person said. "If you believe in abject garbage, you are an idiot. QED. Trust me, I'm a doctor."
Someone else emphasized that there is no correlation between educational intelligence and making the right decisions.
"None," this person said. "The former is largely based on memory, the latter largely based on intuition. You can be academically brilliant, but be thick as a plank; in fact, the last few years have brought this poorly understood fact into sharp focus."
Others pointed out that the reason why liberals hold so much power, despite being dumb, is because of their ability to infiltrate key segments of society, i.e., academia, and create a monopoly on what gets said and done at the policy level.
"This was all financed through debt, as usual," one of them said about the subsidization of left-wing ideology across many sectors of society.
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