From what I gathered from the link I posted above:
- 1st postulate: lower intelligence during childhood (presumably measured by IQ tests)
- 2nd postulate: People of lower intelligence tend to conform to socially conservative ideology
- 3rd postulate: conservatives are more likely to be easily provoked
Curious, I surfed around the comments and didn't find much in the comments except for liberals and conservatives arguing. Not surprising.
There were links posted, so I tried my luck.
The first link from Huffington Post stated that
- I.Q., or intelligence quotient, is a score determined by standardized tests, but whether the tests truly reveal intelligence remains a topic of hot debate among psychologists.
- People of low intelligence gravitate toward socially conservative ideologies, which stress resistance to change and, in turn, prejudice...
- [conservative] ideologies feature "structure and order" that make it easier to comprehend a complicated world...
- "Reality is complicated and messy," he [Dr. Brian Nosek, a University of Virginia psychologist] told The Huffington Post in an email. "Ideologies get rid of the messiness and impose a simpler solution. So, it may not be surprising that people with less cognitive capacity will be attracted to simplifying ideologies."
- But Nosek said less intelligent types might be attracted to liberal "simplifying ideologies" as well as conservative ones.
Despite the last sentence, liberals are quick to state that science proves that conservatives are dumb, and conservatives jump to why the research has been wrongly analyzed.
There was a link in the comment section that attempted to find the correlation between
- People with liberal views tended to have increased grey matter in the anterior cingulated cortex, a region of the brain linked to decision-making, in particular when conflicting information is being presented. Previous research showed that electrical potentials recorded from this region during a task that involves responding to conflicting information were bigger in people who were more liberal or left wing than people who were more conservative.
- Conservatives, meanwhile, found increased grey matter in the amygdala, an area of the brain associated with processing emotion. This difference is consistent with studies which show that people who consider themselves to be conservative respond to threatening situations with more aggression than do liberals and are more sensitive to threatening facial expressions.
- Taken together, the findings suggest that, at least to some extent, political persuasions are encoded in the structure of the brain. However, given that the structure of even the adult brain can be altered with training, it is not clear whether these differences would affect a person's political choice or vice versa.
Additional reading from livescience.com.
My 2 cents: Everybody has prejudices, no exceptions. Whether one expresses them outwardly determines whether he/she is "socially conservatively" inclined.
Also, there was some discussion in the comment sections of all of those links I posted in regard to how the Republican party and the Democrat party have switched ideologies somewhere in US history. Therefore, for the sake of semantics, please do not group Republicans = conservative and Democrats = liberal (though it seems that it is largely the case now).