The idea that the changes behind the Flynn Effect have also expanded the moral circle passes a sanity check, but that does not mean it is true. To show that rising intelligence has led to less violence, at the very least one needs to establish this intermediate link: that on average, and all else being equal, people with more sophisticated reasoning abilities (as assessed by IQ or other measures) are more cooperative, have larger moral circles, and are less sympathetic to violence. Better still, one would like to show that entire societies of better-reasoning individuals adopt policies that are less conducive to violence. If smarter people and smarter societies are less likely to be violent, then perhaps the recent rise in intelligence can help explain the recent decline of violence.
Before we examine the evidence for this hypothesis, let me clarify what it is not. The kind of reasoning relevant to moral progress is not general intelligence in the sense of raw brainpower, but the cultivation of abstract reasoning, the aspect of intelligence that has been pulled upward by the Flynn Effect. The two are highly correlated, so measures of IQ will, in general, track abstract reasoning, but it’s the latter that is relevant to the escalator hypothesis. For the same reason, the specific differences in reasoning that I will focus on are not necessarily heritable (even though general intelligence is highly heritable), and I will stick with the assumption that all differences among groups are environmental in origin.
It’s also important to note that the escalator hypothesis is about the influence of
rationalit
y—the level of abstract reasoning in a society—and not about the influence of
intellectuals
. Intellectuals, in the words of the writer Eric Hoffer, “cannot operate at room temperature.”
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They are excited by daring opinions, clever theories, sweeping ideologies, and utopian visions of the kind that caused so much trouble during 20th century. The kind of reason that expands moral sensibilities comes not from grand intellectual “systems” but from the exercise of logic, clarity, objectivity, and proportionality. These habits of mind are distributed unevenly across the population at any time, but the Flynn Effect lifts all the boats, and so we might expect to see a tide of mini- and micro-enlightenments across elites and ordinary citizens alike.
Let me present seven links, varying in directness, between reasoning ability and peaceable values.
Intelligence and Violent Crime.
The first link is the most direct: smarter people commit fewer violent crimes, and they are the victims of fewer violent crimes, holding socioeconomic status and other variables constant.
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We have no way to pinpoint the causal arrow—whether smarter people realize that violence is wrong or pointless, whether they exercise more self-control, or whether they keep themselves out of situations in which violence takes place. But all else being equal (setting aside, for example, the oscillations in crime from the 1960s through the 1980s), as people get smarter, there should be less violence.
Intelligence and Cooperation.
At the other end of the abstractness scale, we can consider the purest model of how abstract reasoning might undermine the temptations of violence, the Prisoner’s Dilemma. In his popular
Scientific American
column, the computer scientist Douglas Hofstadter once agonized over the fact that the seemingly rational response in a one-shot Prisoner’s Dilemma was to defect.
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You cannot trust the other player to cooperate, because he has no grounds for trusting you, and cooperating while he defects will bring you the worst outcome. Hofstadter’s agony came from the observation that if both sides looked down on their dilemma from a single Olympian vantage point, stepping out of their parochial stations, they should both deduce that the best outcome is for both to cooperate. If each has confidence that the other realizes that, and that the other realizes that he or she realizes it, ad infinitum, both should cooperate and reap the benefits. Hofstadter envisioned a
superrationality
in which both sides were certain of the other’s rationality, and certain that the other was certain of theirs, and so on, though he wistfully acknowledged that it was not easy to see how to get people to be superrational.
Can higher intelligence at least nudge people in the direction of superrationality? That is, are better reasoners likely to reflect on the fact that mutual cooperation leads to the best joint outcome, assume that the other guy is reflecting on it as well, and profit from the resulting simultaneous leap of trust? No one has given people of different levels of intelligence a true one-shot Prisoner’s Dilemma, but a recent study came close by using a
sequential
one-shot Prisoner’s Dilemma, in which the second player acts only after seeing the first player’s move. The economist Stephen Burks and his collaborators gave a thousand trainee truck drivers a Matrices IQ test and a Prisoner’s Dilemma, using money for the offers and payoffs.
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The smarter truckers were more likely to cooperate on the first move, even after controlling for age, race, gender, schooling, and income. The investigators also looked at the response of the second player to the first player’s move. This response has nothing to do with superrationality, but it does reflect a willingness to cooperate in response to the other player’s cooperation in such a way that both players would benefit if the game were iterated. Smarter truckers, it turned out, were more likely to respond to cooperation with cooperation, and to defection with defection.
The economist Garrett Jones connected intelligence to the Prisoner’s Dilemma by a different route. He scoured the literature for all the Iterated Prisoner’s Dilemma experiments that had been conducted in colleges and universities from 1959 to 2003.
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Across thirty-six experiments involving thousands of participants, he found that the higher a school’s mean SAT score (which is strongly correlated with mean IQ), the more its students cooperated. Two very different studies, then, agree that intelligence enhances mutual cooperation in the quintessential situation in which its benefits can be foreseen. A society that gets smarter, then, may be a society that becomes more cooperative.
Intelligence and Liberalism.
Now we get to a finding that sounds more tendentious than it is: smarter people are more liberal. The statement will make conservatives see red, not just because it seems to impugn their intelligence but because they can legitimately complain that many social scientists (who are overwhelmingly liberal or leftist) use their research to take cheap shots at the right, studying conservatism as if it were a mental defect. (Tetlock and Haidt have both called attention to this politicization.)
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So before turning to the evidence that links intelligence to liberalism, let me qualify the connection.
For one thing, since intelligence is correlated with social class, any correlation with liberalism, if not statistically controlled, could simply reflect the political prejudices of the upper middle classes. But the key qualification is that the escalator of reason predicts only that intelligence should be correlated with
classical
liberalism, which values the autonomy and well-being of individuals over the constraints of tribe, authority, and tradition. Intelligence is expected to correlate with classical liberalism because classical liberalism is itself a consequence of the interchangeability of perspectives that is inherent to reason itself. Intelligence need not correlate with other ideologies that get lumped into contemporary left-of-center political coalitions, such as populism, socialism, political correctness, identity politics, and the Green movement. Indeed, classical liberalism is sometimes congenial to the libertarian and antipolitical-correctness factions in today’s right-of-center coalitions. But on the whole, Haidt’s surveys show that it is the people who identify their politics with the word
liberal
who are more likely to emphasize fairness and autonomy, the cardinal virtues of classical liberalism, over community, authority, and purity.
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And as we saw in chapter 7, the self-described liberals are ahead of the curve on issues of personal autonomy, and the positions they pioneered decades ago have been increasingly accepted by conservatives today.
The psychologist Satoshi Kanazawa has analyzed two large American datasets and found that in both, intelligence correlates with the respondents’ political liberalism, holding age, sex, race, education, earnings, and religion statistically constant.
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Among more than twenty thousand young adults who had participated in the National Longitudinal Study of Adolescent Health, average IQ increased steadily from those who identified themselves as “very conservative” (94.8) to those who identified themselves as “very liberal” (106.4). The General Social Survey shows a similar correlation, while also containing a hint that intelligence tracks classical liberalism more closely than left-liberalism. The smarter respondents in the survey were
less
likely to agree with the statement that the government has a responsibility to redistribute income from the rich to the poor (leftist but not classically liberal), while being more likely to agree that the government should help black Americans to compensate for the historical discrimination against them (a formulation of a liberal position which is specifically motivated by the value of fairness).
A better case that intelligence causes, rather than merely correlates with, classical liberal attitudes comes from analyses by the psychologist Ian Deary and his colleagues on a dataset that includes every child born in Britain in a particular week in 1970. The title of their paper says it all: “Bright children become enlightened adults.”
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By “enlightened” they mean the mindset of the Enlightenment, which they define, following the
Concise Oxford Dictionary
, as “a philosophy emphasizing reason and individualism rather than tradition.” They found that children’s IQ at the age of ten (including tests of abstract reasoning) predicted their endorsement of antiracist, socially liberal, and proworking-women attitudes at the age of thirty, holding constant their education, their social class, and their parents’ social class. The socioeconomic controls, together with the twenty-year lag between the measurement of intelligence and the measurement of attitudes, make a prima facie case that the causal arrow goes from intelligence to classical liberalism. A second analysis discovered that brighter ten-year-olds were more likely to vote when they grew up, and more likely to vote for the Liberal Democrats (a center-left/libertarian coalition) or the Greens, and less likely to vote for nationalist and antiimmigrant parties. Again, there is a suggestion that intelligence leads to classical rather than left-liberalism: when social class was controlled, the IQ-Green correlation vanished, but the IQ–Lib Dem correlation survived.
Intelligence and Economic Literacy.
And now for a correlation that will annoy the left as much as the correlation with liberalism annoyed the right. The economist Bryan Caplan also looked at data from the General Social Survey and found that smarter people tend to think more like economists (even after statistically controlling for education, income, sex, political party, and political orientation).
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They are more sympathetic to immigration, free markets, and free trade, and less sympathetic to protectionism, make-work policies, and government intervention in business. Of course none of these positions is directly related to violence. But if one zooms out to the full continuum on which these positions lie, one could argue that the direction that is aligned with intelligence is also the direction that has historically pointed peaceward. To think like an economist is to accept the theory of gentle commerce from classical liberalism, which touts the positive-sum payoffs of exchange and its knock-on benefit of expansive networks of cooperation.
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That sets it in opposition to populist, nationalist, and communist mindsets that see the world’s wealth as zero-sum and infer that the enrichment of one group must come at the expense of another. The historical result of economic illiteracy has often been ethnic and class violence, as people conclude that the have-nots can improve their lot only by forcibly confiscating wealth from the haves and punishing them for their avarice.
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As we saw in chapter 7, ethnic riots and genocides have declined since World War II, especially in the West, and a greater intuitive appreciation of economics may have played a part (lately there ain’t been much work on account of the economy). At the level of international relations, trade has been superseding beggar-thy-neighbor protectionism over the past half-century and, together with democracy and an international community, has contributed to a Kantian Peace.
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Education, Intellectual Proficiency, and Democracy.
Speaking of the Kantian Peace, the democracy leg of the tripod may also be fortified by reasoning. One of the great puzzles of political science is why democracy takes root in some countries but not others—why, for example, the former satellites and republics of the Soviet Union in Europe made the transition, but the -stans in Central Asia did not. The wobbliness of the democracies imposed on Iraq and Afghanistan makes the problem all the more acute.
Theorists have long speculated that a literate, knowledgeable populace is a prerequisite to a functioning democracy. Down the road from where I sit, the Boston Public Library displays on its entablature the stirring words “The Commonwealth requires the education of the people as the safeguard of order and liberty.” Presumably by “education” what the carvers had in mind was not an ability to name the capitals of all the states one would pass through on a trip from Columbus, Ohio, to the Gulf of Mexico, but literacy and numeracy, an understanding of the principles behind democratic government and civil society, an ability to evaluate leaders and their policies, an awareness of other peoples and their diverse cultures, and an expectation that one is part of a commonwealth of educated citizens who share these understandings.
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These competencies require a modicum of abstract reasoning, and they overlap with the abilities that have risen with the Flynn Effect, presumably because the Flynn Effect itself has been driven by education.