Noah Carl

• Doctor of Philosophy
• Independent Researcher

We gathered survey data on journalists' political views in 17 Western countries. We then matched these data to outcomes from national elections, and constructed metrics of journalists' relative preference for different political parties. Compared to the general population of voters, journalists prefer parties that have more left-wing positions over...

It has recently been argued that subjective status – the way individuals feel about their worth in society – deserves greater prominence in accounts of political preferences including anti-immigration sentiment and Brexit. In this paper, we give a detailed empirical account of the relationship between Subjective Social Status (SSS) and Brexit-relat...

Stereotypes about 32 country-of-origin groups were measured using an online survey of the adult, non-elderly Danish population (n = 476 after quality control). Participants were asked to estimate each group’s net fiscal contribution in Denmark. These estimates were then compared to the actual net fiscal contributions for the 32 groups, taken from a...

The Good Country Index ( GCI ) measures countries’ contributions to global prosperity in domains such as peace, climate and health. It is known that political institutions and wealth can enhance a country’s ability to be ‘good’. However, past research has shown that the cognitive ability of a society – and of its intellectual classes in particular...

The field of intelligence research has seen more controversies than perhaps any other area of social science. Here we present a scientometric analysis of controversies involving intelligence researchers working in the democratic Western world since 1950. By consulting books and articles, conducting web searches, and contacting some of the individua...

There is a large amount of evidence that groups differ in average cognitive ability. The hereditarian hypothesis states that these differences are partly or substantially explained by genetics. Despite being a positive claim about the world, this hypothesis is frequently equated with racism, and scholars who defend it are frequently denounced as ra...

It is often asserted that, when it comes to taboo topics like race, genes and IQ, scholars should be held to higher evidentiary standards or even censored entirely because of the harm that might result if their findings became widely known. There is held to be an asymmetry whereby the societal costs of discussing certain topics inevitably outweigh...

The OpenPsych journals were set up in 2014 by Emil Kirkegaard and Davide Piffer due to dissatisfaction with existing journals in differential psychology and behavioural genetics. To date, 51 papers have been published in total, encompassing a range of topics from differential psychology and behavioural genetics to socio-political science. However,...

Since the UK's vote to leave the European Union, there has been considerable debate about whether voters (particularly Leave voters) were well-informed prior to making their decisions. We gave a 15-item EU knowledge quiz to a large, nationally representative sample of the British population via an online survey. Our quiz included nine ‘ideologicall...

To date, most accounts of the UK’s vote to leave the EU have focussed on explaining variation across individuals and constituencies within the UK. In this article, we attempt to answer a different question, namely ‘Why was it the UK that voted to leave, rather than any other member state?’. We show that the UK has long been one of the most Euroscep...

Following the UK’s EU referendum in June 2016, there has been considerable interest from scholars in understanding the characteristics that differentiate Leave supporters from Remain supporters. Since Leave supporters score higher on conscientiousness but lower on neuroticism and openness, and given their general proclivity toward conservatism, we...

This paper analyses data on average IQ and four measures of political attitudes at both the regional level (n = 11) and the local authority level in Britain (n = 372). At the regional level, average IQ is positively associated with right-wing economic attitudes and trust in experts, but is not significantly associated with liberal social attitudes...

Data from the General Social Survey indicate that conservatives’ self-reported trust in scientists has steadily decreased since 1974. In Cofnas et al. (The American Sociologist, 2017), we suggested that this trend may have been partly driven by the increasing tendency of scientific institutions, and the representatives of such institutions, to dist...

The media are often said to be left-leaning in most or all Western countries, but this has been disputed by others. There are multiple ways to examine the question, e.g. content analysis of stories, interviewee choices, think tank citations etc. Here we focus on the political leanings of journalists, specifically on voting behavior as this avoids i...

The political discourse is characterised by two opposing ideals of hard and soft Brexit. In this article, we present evidence of attitudinal types that map neatly onto these archetypal views. The hard Brexit view is defined by issues that eurosceptics prioritise, most prominently sovereignty. By contrast, europhiles prioritise cooperation with Euro...

Data from the General Social Survey suggest that conservatives have become less trustful of scientists since the 1970s. Gauchat argues that this is because conservatives increasingly see scientific findings as threatening to their worldview. However, the General Social Survey data concern trust in scientists, not in science. We suggest that conserv...

Countries differ with respect to human rights. Using the cross-country CIRI data (Cingranelli & Richards), the authors tested two theories. The cognitive-moral enlightenment theory going back to Piaget and Socrates postulates that individuals and nations with higher levels of cognitive ability think and behave in a way more conducive to human right...

In their target article, León and Antonelli-Ponti propose that regions of countries subject to higher levels of UV radiation tend to have lower average IQs. They cite supporting evidence from Italy, the United States and Brazil. The present comment tests their theory using data from the United Kingdom. Contrary to the theory, average IQ among white...

Stereotypes about 32 country-of-origin groups were measured using a nationally representative survey of the Danish population (n = 484 after quality control). Participants were asked to estimate each group’s net fiscal contribution in Denmark. These estimates were then compared to the actual net fiscal contributions for the 32 groups, taken from a...

Several reports have highlighted that, within Britain, allegations of electoral fraud tend to be more common in areas with large Pakistani and Bangladeshi communities. However, the extent of this association has not yet been quantified. Using data at the local authority level, this paper shows that percentage Pakistani and Bangladeshi (logged) is a...

Since late 2007, the Eurozone has been embroiled in a crisis that has seen GDP per capita stagnate, public debt soar, and unemployment reach record levels. This article argues that the Eurozone crisis will inevitably force fundamental changes in the structure of the EU. The only way to make the Eurozone work is through deeper fiscal integration of...

Multiple studies have reported positive relationships between cognitive ability and preferences for freedom, both at the personal level (e.g. drug use) and the economic (e.g. smaller government). To add to this, we investigated the relationships between cognitive ability and multi-dimensional political preferences in a Danish general population sam...

In three rural Ecuadorian schools from" different regions (central highlands in the Andes, hinterland of Quito, and Amazonian lowlands) N = 161 pupils aged 9-14 with about 86% Amerindian background were tested for cognitive ability. Fluid intelligence was measured using culture-reduced Raven's SPM, while crystallized intelligence was measured using...

It is frequently asserted that conservatives exhibit a cognitive style that renders them less well disposed toward science than progressives, and that they are correspondingly less trusting of scientific institutions and less knowledgeable about scientific ideas. Here we scrutinize these assertions, using data from the U.S. General Social Survey. W...

Cross-regional correlations between average IQ and socio-economic development have been reported for many different countries. This paper analyses data on average IQ and a range of socio-economic variables at the local authority level in the UK. Local authorities are administrative bodies in local government; there are over 400 in the UK, and they...

It is well known that individuals with so-called liberal or leftist views are overrepresented in American academia. By bringing together data on American academics, the general population and a high-IQ population, the present study investigates how much of this overrepresentation can be explained by intelligence. It finds that intelligence can acco...

Recent evidence indicates that cognitive ability has a monotonically positive relation to socially liberal beliefs and some measures of fiscally conservative beliefs, and that it has a non-monotonic relation to other measures of fiscally conservative beliefs. This study examines the relationship between cognitive ability and political beliefs in a...

Cross-regional correlations between average IQ and socioeconomic development have been documented in many different countries. This paper presents new IQ estimates for the twelve regions of the UK. These are weakly correlated ( r =0.24) with the regional IQs assembled by Lynn (1979). Assuming the two sets of estimates are accurate and comparable, t...

Solon (2014) makes an interesting and thoughtful contribution to the literature on intelligence and political beliefs. He concludes that there is a U-shaped relationship between intelligence and leftism such that people with very low and very high intelligence tend to be more left-wing. One piece of evidence he cites is the prevalence of support fo...

Carl (2014) analysed data from the U.S. General Social Survey (GSS), and found that individuals who identify as Republican have slightly higher verbal intelligence than those who identify as Democrat. An important qualification was that the measure of verbal intelligence used was relatively crude, namely a 10-word vocabulary test. This study examin...

Both generalized trust and intelligence are correlated with economic development. However, recent research has shown that trust and intelligence are themselves correlated, both across countries and among individuals. Theory suggests that causality runs from intelligence to trust at the individual level, which raises the possibility that the associa...

Research has consistently shown that intelligence is positively correlated with socially liberal beliefs and negatively correlated with religious beliefs. This should lead one to expect that Republicans are less intelligent than Democrats. However, I find that individuals who identify as Republican have slightly higher verbal intelligence than thos...

Generalized trust refers to trust in other members of society; it may be distinguished from particularized trust, which corresponds to trust in the family and close friends. An extensive empirical literature has established that generalized trust is an important aspect of civic culture. It has been linked to a variety of positive outcomes at the in...