Racist Idiots

The study also employed a measure of subtle racism, included because greater psychometric intelligence is associated with lesser prejudice. The researchers explored whether psychometric and self-assessed intelligence had the same or different links to racism.

Remarkably the two ways of assessing intelligence had opposite associations with subtle racism. As expected, higher psychometric intelligence was associated with lower racism, largely because more intelligent people thought about social groups in less crudely categorical ways. However, higher self-assessed intelligence was associated with higher levels of racism.

The explanation for this finding is that people who estimate their cognitive ability to be higher than others tend to perceive the social world vertically in terms of superiority and inferiority. Such people are high in “social dominance orientation”, an anti-egalitarian ideology linked to prejudice.