Using data from the American National Election Studies, we investigated the relationship between cognitive ability and attitudes toward and actual voting for presidential candidates in the 2012 and 2016 U.S. presidential elections (i.e., Romney, Obama, Trump, and Clinton). Isolating this relationship from competing relationships, results showed that verbal ability was a significant negative predictor of support and voting for Trump (but not Romney) and a positive predictor of support and voting for Obama and Clinton. By comparing within and across the election years, our analyses revealed the nature of support for Trump, including that support for Trump was better predicted by lower verbal ability than education or income. In general, these results suggest that the 2016 U.S. presidential election had less to do with party affiliation, income, or education and more to do with basic cognitive ability.
AguinisH.BeatyJ. C.BoikR. J.PierceC. A. (2005). Effect size and power in assessing moderating effects of categorical variables using multiple regression: A 30-year review. Journal of Applied Psychology, 90, 94–107.
2.
AlwinD. F. (1991). Family of origin and cohort differences in verbal ability. American Sociological Review, 56, 625–638.
3.
BrandtM. J.CrawfordJ. T. (2016). Answering unresolved questions about the relationship between cognitive ability and prejudice. Social Psychological and Personality Science, 7, 884–892.
4.
CaplanB.MillerS. C. (2010). Intelligence makes people think like economists: Evidence from the general social survey. Intelligence, 38, 636–647.
5.
CarlN. (2014a). Verbal intelligence is correlated with socially and economically liberal beliefs. Intelligence, 44, 142–148.
6.
CarlN. (2014b). Cognitive ability and party identity in the United States. Intelligence, 47, 3–9.
7.
CarlN. (2015a). Cognitive ability and political beliefs in the United States. Personality and Individual Differences, 83, 245–248.
8.
CarlN. (2015b). Does intelligence have a U-shaped relationship with leftism?Intelligence, 49, 159–170.
9.
CarnesN.LupuN. (2016). Do voters dislike working-class candidates? Voter biases and the descriptive underrepresentation of the working class. American Political Science Review, 110, 832–844.
10.
ChomaB. L.AshtonM. C.HaferC. L. (2010). Conceptualizing political orientation among Canadian political candidates. A tale of two (correlated) dimensions. Canadian Journal of Behavioural Science, 42, 24–33.
11.
ChomaB. L.HanochY. (2017). Cognitive ability and authoritarianism: Understanding support for Trump and Clinton. Personality and Individual Differences, 106, 287–291.
12.
ChomaB. L.HodsonG.HoffarthM.CharlesfordJ. J.HaferC. L. (2014). Reasoning ability and ideological beliefs: Inaccuracies in hierarchical relations (but not numerical ability) are associated with right-wing authoritarianism. Journal of Individual Differences, 35, 177–183.
13.
DearyI. J.StrandS.SmithP.FernandesC. (2007). Intelligence and educational achievement. Intelligence, 35, 13–21.
14.
DuckittJ. (2001). A dual-process cognitive-motivational theory of ideology and prejudice. Advances in Experimental Social Psychology, 33, 41–113.
15.
FeldmanS.JohnstonC. (2014). Understanding the determinants of political ideology: Implications of structural complexity. Political Psychology, 35, 337–358.
16.
GanzachY. (2016). Cognitive ability and party identity: No important differences between democrats and republicans. Intelligence, 58, 18–21.
17.
GanzachY. (2017). Cognitive ability and party affiliation: The role of the formative years of political socialization. Intelligence, 61, 56–62.
18.
HauserR. M.HuangM.-H. (1997). Verbal ability and socioeconomic success: A trend analysis. Social Science Research, 26, 331–376.
19.
HellevikO. (2007) Linear versus logistic regression when the dependent variable is a dichotomy. Quality & Quantity, 43, 59–74.
20.
JostJ. T.KruglanskiA. W.GlaserJ.SullowayF. J. (2003). Political conservatism as motivated social cognition. Psychological Bulletin, 129, 339–375.
21.
KanazawaS. (2010). Why liberals and atheists are more intelligent. Social Psychology Quarterly, 73, 33–57.
22.
KanazawaS. (2004). General intelligence as a domain-specific adaptation. Psychological Review, 111, 512–523.
23.
KnowlesE. D.TroppL. R. (2018). The racial and economic context of trump support: Evidence for threat, identity, and contact effects in the 2016 presidential election. Social Psychological and Personality Science, 9, 375–284.
McDonaldM. P. (2007). The true electorate: A cross-validation of voter registration files and election survey demographics. Public Opinion Quarterly, 71, 588–602.
26.
MeisenbergG. (2015). Verbal ability as a predictor of political preferences in the United States, 1974–2012. Intelligence, 50,135–143.
27.
MinerJ. B. (1957). Intelligence in the United States. New York, NY: Springer.
28.
MinerJ. B. (1961). On the use of a short vocabulary test to measure general intelligence. Journal of Educational Psychology, 52, 157–160.
29.
MollerstromJ.SeimD. (2014). Cognitive ability and the demand for redistribution. PLoS One, 9, 1–7.
30.
MottaM. (2017). The dynamics and political implications of anti-intellectualism in the United States. American Politics Research, 46(3), 1–34.
31.
NavarroV. (2017). The importance of considering social class to understand what is happening in the United States: The election of Donald Trump. International Journal of Health Services, 47, 601–611.
32.
OnraetE.Van HielA.DhontK.HodsonG.SchittekatteM.DePauwS. (2015). The association of cognitive ability with right-wing ideological attitudes and prejudice: A meta-analytic review. European Journal of Personality, 29, 599–621.
33.
PennycookG.RandD. G. (2017, August23). Who falls for fake news? The roles of bullshit receptivity, overclaiming, familiarity, and analytic thinking. SSRN. doi:10.2139/ssrn.3023545
34.
PettigrewT. F. (2017). Social psychological perspectives on Trump supporters. Journal of Social and Political Psychology, 5, 107–116.
SchramS.FordingR. (2017). The cognitive and emotional sources of trump support: The case of low-information voters. New Political Science, 39, 1–17.
38.
SolonI. S. (2014). How intelligence mediates liberalism and prosociality. Intelligence, 47, 44–53.
39.
StankovL. (2009). Conservatism and cognitive ability. Intelligence, 37, 294–304.
40.
ThorndikeR. L. (1942). Two screening tests of verbal intelligence. Journal of Applied Psychology, 26, 128–135.
41.
Van HielA.OnraetE.DePauwS. (2010). The relationship between social-cultural attitudes and behavioral measures of cognitive style: A meta-analytic integration of studies. Journal of Personality, 78, 1765–1800.
42.
WechslerD. (1958). The measurement and appraisal of adult intelligence(4th ed.)Philadelphia, PA: Williams & Wilkins.
43.
ZhuJ.WeissL. (2005). The Wechsler scales. In FlanaganD. P.HarrisonP. L. (Eds.), Contemporary intellectual assessment: Theories, tests, and issues (2nd ed., pp. 297–324). New York, NY: Guilford Press.
Supplementary Material
Please find the following supplemental material available below.
For Open Access articles published under a Creative Commons License, all supplemental material carries the same license as the article it is associated with.
For non-Open Access articles published, all supplemental material carries a non-exclusive license, and permission requests for re-use of supplemental material or any part of supplemental material shall be sent directly to the copyright owner as specified in the copyright notice associated with the article.
