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Originally Posted by Hesla
Seriously though....
This seems like an extremely flawed study.... first off was there examiner bias? Secondly, they are saying that changing habits = smart, while staying structured isnt ?? I hardly think that has anything to do with how smart someone is.
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I agree--one of the problems in measuring intelligence is that when pressed, cognitive scientists have a really hard time defining it.
Furthermore, if you look at how they measure "adaptive" versus "habitual" thinking, it strikes me that there's a leap there too.
It's the kind of thing where I WANT to be able to point to this study and say "look--we liberals really ARE smarter!" But in fact, having seen the study it does nothing to contradict the evidence of my own admittedly anecdotal experience that there are plenty of really smart conservatives out there.
I think it's interesting that they structured the study in this way in the first place. Why allow people to self-identify into "liberal" vs. "conservative" cohorts rather than asking more specific questions about their philosophical approach to life and politics? Are people who call themselves conservative really always conservative? I rather suspect that this isn't always the case.