Does Education Level Determine Political and Religious Beliefs?

Numerous studies have confirmed that intelligence is associated with a specific set of religious and political beliefs, including liberalism, anti-racism, free speech, tolerance of others and being fiscally conservative. There is a positive correlation between intelligence test scores, as represented by IQ, and educational duration. Essentially, education reduces the probability of being poor and having right-wing ideology. Does educational level really play such a vital role? Various approaches have been used to unscramble the effect of intelligence from confounds, such as socioeconomic variables. Recent studies discussed below consistently report robust relationships between educational levels, cognitive ability, low religiosity, and liberal views.

Education and Politics

A recent study using a within-family design (to circumvent environmental confounds) examined the relationship between cognitive performance and political beliefs using polygenic scores. Cognitive performance is simply a euphemism for intelligence. A polygenic score is a DNA-based predictor of someone’s trait, calculated as a linear combination of the estimated effect of alleles. This approach was taken because other studies have demonstrated that polygenic scores can predict political beliefs such as social liberalism.

The most definitive outcome was that the amount of education significantly affects political beliefs. The authors concluded that intelligence has a causal effect on political beliefs, suggesting the relationship between intelligence and political belief is not due to environmental confounding such as socioeconomic factors. People do not have right-wing conservative ideology because they are poor, they hold these beliefs because they are poorly educated. According to earlier publications (Onraet et al. 2015; Jedinger & Burger, 2022) less intelligent people may be attracted to conservatism because rules and stereotypes reduce the need for cognitive resources. Gandhi concluded that it’s easier to go along with whatever one is told to believe in than to think for oneself.

Education and Religiosity

Increasing educational levels significantly correlate with the current trends towards a lower level of church attendance and a lower level of religious beliefs and attitudes. The higher the level of education, the less likely one is to be orthodox or fundamentalistic in one’s religious beliefs. In addition, the higher one’s educational level, the less likely one is to believe in God and to think of God as a person, the less favorable one is toward the church, and the less importance one attaches to religious values. A recent poll found that 93 percent of the current members of the National Academy of Sciences do not believe in God.

The trend in today’s culture is unusual. Religious beliefs have been a durable feature of the world’s cultures. For example, up until the nineteenth century, it is unlikely that you would meet someone who does not believe in God. Anthropologists estimate that at least 18,000 different gods, goddesses, and various animals (bulls and bears were very popular) or objects (such as quartz stones during the Neolithic) have been worshipped in some form by humans since our species first appeared. Evolution has clearly selected for a brain that has the ability to accept a logically absurd world of supernatural causes and beings. Spirituality must have once offered something tangible that enhanced survival. Something has clearly changed in the past 200 years that underlies the increase in religious non-believers. There are two possibilities: greater access to education and scientific knowledge and differences in brain structure and function between conservatives and religious groups versus liberal non-believers. I’ve discussed the first option; let’s consider the second option.

A recent fMRI study found that not believing in a God is due to the activation of distinct higher-order brain networks. The results demonstrated that religious believers are more likely to use more intuitive and heuristic reasoning and that religious non-believers are more likely to use more deliberative and analytic reasoning. For example, non-believers are more likely to process sensory information, such as something they see, in a more deliberative manner that involves higher cortical areas, called top-down processing, involved in reasoning. In contrast, religious believers are more likely to interpret visual information in a more emotional or intuitive manner, called bottom-up processing, that involves more ancient brain systems. Religious believers share this bottom-up processing bias with people who believe in the supernatural or paranormal activity, such as telekinesis or clairvoyance. We may inherit both our brain structure and our religious and political beliefs from our parents. However, separated twin studies have found only a small effect of parental beliefs on their adopted children. Future studies will need to focus on the role of specific brain structures on religious and political beliefs.

Conclusions

It is tempting, and certainly unfair, to make inferences about the accuracy or the quality of an ideology or belief system based on the intelligence of its supporters. Intelligence is likely to affect political and religious beliefs through increased knowledge of the facts. Nevertheless, there are likely other possible causal connections that have not yet been explored. All that can be concluded from the current literature is that there are causal pathways to religious and political beliefs that are not mediated by income or other environmental factors but rather by educational level and brain structure. We cannot say that the beliefs of high IQ people tell us what is right to believe, but rather only what smart people choose to believe.