Episode Summary
“I love the poorly educated,” Donald Trump famously boasted in early 2016 as he started racking up victories in the Republican primary election. It was an unintentionally hilarious thing to say, but it pointed to a truth that’s since became undeniable: People with less education are more likely to vote for Republicans.
Trump has almost certainly never heard of the 19th century philosopher John Stuart Mill, but the disgraced ex-president’s enthusiasm for the poorly educated echoes something that Mill said on the floor of the English parliament in 1866 that “stupid persons are generally conservative.”
What if Mill was right? Since 2016, it’s become commonplace to think of educational attainment as a sort of proxy for Trump voting among white Americans, but what if there’s something even deeper at work?
Republicans don’t want to hear this, but there’s a pretty long-standing body of social science research that indicates people who have right-wing attitudes, particularly regarding religion and epistemology, appear to have lower cognitive capacity.
Thinking about this topic can be uncomfortable, but it’s important because understanding that political movements are just as much about psychology as they are about ideology can help us understand the enduring appeal of someone like Trump who is flagrantly stupid, corrupt, and deceitful. I also feel like I can discuss this given my personal history as a former Mormon fundamentalist and Republican activist.
Our guest in today’s episode to discuss is Darren Sherkat, he’s a professor of sociology at Southern Illinois University where he focuses the relationships between ideology, cognition, and religious belief. He’s also the author of “Changing Faith: The Dynamics and Consequences of Americans' Shifting Religious Identities,” and another book which will be forthcoming on these topics.
The video of this discussion is available. The transcript of audio is below. Because of its length, some podcast apps and email programs may truncate it. Access the episode page to get the full text.
Related Content
Have Trump Republicans lost their grip on reality, or are they just lying to pollsters to support him?
Far-right pundits aren’t trying to make arguments, they’re affirming the emotions of their fans
How Fox News and talk radio warped a man’s thinking, and what his daughter and wife did to save him
America’s political polarization isn’t about partisanship, it’s about epistemology
Reactionaries do not actually believe in logic, this is why you can’t argue with them
How congressional Republicans made the internet a safe space for disinformation
Audio Chapters
00:00 — Introduction
02:19 — Why discussing cognition in a political context is not unfair or deterministic
08:51 — In the 1970s, Republicans were the party with higher verbal ability
10:10 — How the "Southern Strategy" remade the Republican party cognitively
13:01 — Why "poorly educated" is a better term than "uneducated" in this context
14:56 — How religious fundamentalism inhibits sound thinking at individual and the communal levels
20:02 — Cognitive capital and social capital
23:44 — Theodor Adorno's "authoritarian personality" research included cognition
30:46 — Why cognition is a better predictor of Trump support than education
35:38 — Abductive reasoning versus empirical reasoning
44:23 — Trump is an ideal candidate for less-intelligent people
50:58 — Why Ron DeSantis, JD Vance, and intelligent reactionaries have trouble copying Trump
54:53 — Public education as the cornerstone of democracy
01:00:19 — Non-religious Americans need to start advocating for themselves
01:03:00 — Conclusion
Audio Transcript
The following is a machine-generated transcript of the audio that has not been proofed. It is provided for convenience purposes only.
MATTHEW SHEFFIELD: So, these are some very sensitive topics to people that we're going to be discussing here today. It's no fun for people to discuss cognitive ability and political ideology if you are the group assessed to have lower cognition at least outputs. But before we get into that, though, I did want to ask you—and to clarify that because the brain is a highly plastic organ and cognition is a form of exercise, these are not necessarily judgments that are set in stone, if you will. And this research is still just beginning in a lot of ways, right?
DARREN SHERKAT: [00:03:00] Oh, absolutely. I mean, I think that we've had kind of a disjuncture between the kind of genetic model of cognition and the more environmental model of cognition. And it's not been very sociologically informed about how do processes of politics and religion and other factors influence individuals. Instead, it's been individuated that it's an assumption that this is a product of the individual rather than their social origins and their social settings.
SHEFFIELD: Yeah. And people's environment and also their own behavior, it can modify what their cognitive outputs are.
SHERKAT: Absolutely. I mean, we're seeing this mostly in our gerontological research about, kind of use it or lose it. That if you don't think about things in systematic ways, then your brain will not operate as it should in an ideal [00:04:00] way.
SHEFFIELD: Yeah. And also, I have to also say that, myself as a former fundamentalist Mormon and former Republican activist, this is me talking about my former self. And I can say, when I reflect back on my earlier life, when I had these belief systems, they did inhibit my ability to think clearly and to fully perceive the world accurately. That actually was something that, that did inhibit me.
So, I did want to kind of mention that before we get further into it. But before we get into your research here, tell us about your background on these matters, your overall academic background,
SHERKAT: Personal background or academic background?
SHEFFIELD: Academic background.
SHERKAT: I came to research American fundamentalism, American religion largely because we didn't really know much about it back in the eighties and [00:05:00] nineties when the second wave of the new Christian right came up we didn't even know how many. conservative Christians there were, and so I really came through it through religious demography and looking at how many of these people are there that are fomenting these political movements, and at the time they were still not identifying as Republicans.
Back in the early 90s, many of them voted Republican, but they didn't identify as Republicans, and that's shifted over time. So gradually I came to do more political research that was more partisan in a sense that it paid attention to things like party politics. And that's where some of my research has been going in the last decade or so.
And I'll be presenting a paper at the I'm going to be having a number of sociology of religion meetings here in the next few weeks that examines these kind of cognitive issues by party and how religion plays a role in that looking at the measures of [00:06:00] cognitive sophistications that I have available, which are related to verbal ability and vocabulary.
SHEFFIELD: Yeah. And then like, what's your so you were a sociologist by academic training. Yes,
SHERKAT: yes. I had a PhD at Duke in the early nineties.
SHEFFIELD: Yeah. Before we get into, the specific findings of the studies that you're just referring to you were using a metric that people maybe may not be familiar with the idea of using verbal ability as a proxy for cognitive ability. So how, how does one measure verbal ability in the research that you're doing, that you're relying on?
SHERKAT: In the General Social Survey, they followed a lot of educational research that uses a standard 10 question vocabulary examination. And it's widely used to measure vocabulary in the English language. And [00:07:00] there are variants of it for other languages that educational psychologists have also used.
So it's a pretty standard measure that correlates about 0. 66. With measures of IQ using the kind of revised Stanford and stuff like that indicators. So it's, it's not exactly the same as the IQ type measures that some people use. And it's of course different from things like the armed forces qualifying tests, which is also been used as measures of intelligence.
But it, it does measure something that's very specific where it's. Detached from any concept we might have of what whatever raw intelligence means, whatever psychologist or educational psychologist may be interested in but it has a pretty profound influence on people's lives on their ability to do things like read the New York Times or navigate a complex argument in a paper or something like that.
SHEFFIELD: [00:08:00] Or understand how to fill out a form properly or things like that. You have to lower it and
SHERKAT: it can be bad.
SHEFFIELD: Yeah. Yeah. So the GSS has done this and the variable for those who are into that sort of thing is called word sum. If anybody wants to look that up on your own. But so how, how long have they been asking that particular question?
SHERKAT: They insert that in the second year of the general social survey in 1974. So some of my research in my book, I look at differences in party, lines along party lines, political party lines, and their scores on this verbal score since 1974. So for 50 years, we have data comparing Republicans and Democrats and independents on this measure of cognitive skill.
In the 1970s, Republicans were the party with higher verbal ability
SHERKAT: And one of the things that my research shows is that Republicans, as we would expect, starting out as elites, had higher levels of verbal ability in the [00:09:00] 1970s, all the way up through the early 1990s, when the Democrats and Republicans kind of converged. Since the 1990s, the Democrats scores have gone up, and the Republicans scores have gone down.
This is only focusing on white Americans, by the way. There's a different process and a different connection between politics and religion and cognition for African Americans, Black Americans, and Latinos. And we don't really have enough Asians to, you know analyze them separately, at least effectively except for in the 21st century.
We've got enough in the later years of the General Social Survey, but not enough in the earlier year.
SHEFFIELD: You're keeping the data consistent and also kind of filtering out any sort of racial or linguistic bias, which might be implicit in the test. By focusing only on, on white [00:10:00] voters or sorry, white respondents in the study.
As you were saying, the, the, the scores for the parties kind of started to they crossed in the, in the nineties.
How the "Southern Strategy" remade the Republican party cognitively
SHEFFIELD: But religion was the, was, appears to be the, the reason why it was. Cause the Republican party, as, as you said, was not principally a vehicle for Christian supremacism that it currently is today, but there was a process over time, right?
SHERKAT: Especially identification. A lot of this has to do with the transformation and the reshuffling of party identifications that came after Nixon's southern strategy. The Southern strategy, which brought all these white Southerners into the Republican party, brought with it their fundamentalist religion, their adherence to mostly Baptist and Pentecostal denominations and lower tier Methodists, not high brow Methodists that you find in other types of [00:11:00] places.
And because of that, that had an effect on their cognition. And the cognitive composition of the Republican party add to that also is we saw a transformation of education in the South that was a result of desegregation that many of white Southerners began abandoning public schools or influencing content of public schools more substantially in a way that hindered their adherence ability to Access new information.
I mean, we all have to access new things to learn new things or even retain the things that we may have learned before. And this kind of implosion, a social implosion led to this kind of crossover. Between Democrats and Republicans, but what's interesting, this is something that I presenting I may not have told you about before because I haven't fully analyzed it until just this week is that [00:12:00] the Republican deficit remains even controlling for religion in the 21st century. And so if I just the last decade of the general social survey, look at this, yet there are profound differences by religion, as I showed papers, but the religious factors did not explain away. The Republican deficit, and that's kind of fast, and I'm still trying to grapple with what does this mean in the 21st century that they've, they've essentially, it's an additional burden cognitively, apparently to be a Republican even above and beyond the fact that many of them are sectarian Christians or biblical fundamentalists, and they tend not to be secular individuals or non identifiers.
And so that, that was, is kind of still something I'm trying to grapple with as I finish off this [00:13:00] paper for the meetings.
Why "poorly educated" is a better term than "uneducated" in this context
SHEFFIELD: Okay. Well, yeah, well, let's get into that. After we talk about the, your earlier research, definitely want to, for sure. So to preface further, I mean, Donald Trump himself did explicitly state, I love the poorly educated.
And so, this is not you being a meanie this is you studying a thing that Donald Trump himself invited people to talk about, right?
SHERKAT: Well, and Trump is right that it's not just the uneducated, but the poorly educated, what I show in my other papers is that this transcends education levels. And in fact, kind of extrapolated for other media sources. It's worse for the more educated. a more profound effect on verbal ability among people who graduated from college.
SHEFFIELD: Yeah. And there was a recent study that kind of did [00:14:00] show that with regard to fact checking, for instance. So like when, when Donald Trump voters were shown a label on tweets that he made while he was the president that were saying the, the statements are misleading or have been disputed or something like that, that people, as their political knowledge increased and they were Trump supporters, they were more likely to believe that his lies if they were labeled as lies rather than less. So it was a, it's a, it's a fascinating finding.
So, but to go back to your, your earlier studies though.
So let's go back to the first study that you did on this, that was a more politically oriented that you Looked at 2016 vote or preference of Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump and you had a number of different findings With regard to verbal facility.
So talk about some of those findings that you had there.
How religious fundamentalism inhibits sound thinking at individual and the communal levels
SHERKAT: Well, one of the things that that begins [00:15:00] to examine is first the effect of religion on Trump vote, which is pretty profound. And also though the effect of cognitive ability and cognitive ability as you move in into the equation in the initial baselines has a very strong Positive, negative, excuse me, relationship with voting for Donald Trump, even controlling for educational attainment, region of the country, rural, urban residency I focus on white voters in this paper also.
But then when I add in religiosity and specifically biblical fundamentalism versus secularism. And. Identification with sectarian Protestant denominations, the effect of verbal ability goes away, suggesting that it's working through and with [00:16:00] sectarian identifications and fundamentalist beliefs to influence or increase support for Trump votes among people who have cognitive deficits.
The religion gets them there somehow.
SHEFFIELD: Yeah. Well, and, and, and specifically in terms of the numbers, I mean, you found that of the people who missed, so there's 10 questions in the, in the word sum variable that of the people who missed all 10 questions. So in other words, they couldn't identify the meaning of of a specific word of the people who missed all 10 questions, 73 percent of them said that they were going to vote for Donald Trump,
SHERKAT: That they had voted. Yeah. For Donald Trump.
SHEFFIELD: Yeah. That they had.
SHERKAT: Yeah. And that's, I think what you're quoting or reciting is my predicted probabilities from the baseline models.
And that's controlling for education region and stuff like that. So it's even a [00:17:00] higher because, presumably those, those people do have lower levels of educational attainment. They're more likely to be people from rural areas or from the south where language and dialect are different. And so there can be expected to score a little bit lower.
So, the empirical. Scores for somebody who would actually be a zero, just all the zeros among whites is, is a little bit higher than that. Higher than 73?
SHEFFIELD: Yeah. Well, and, and, and it's, yeah. So the 73 is. You were arriving at that by, by control. Yeah. And other things like that. Yeah.
And so, so, I think though , the finding that you've had with this, it, it may seem a bit shocking to people who are new to this type of research. But on the other hand, you've got to think about how the recent news events have shown you that these educational deficits you can see them being created in Republican regions of the [00:18:00] country, but where they're going after a specific textbooks or saying we don't want schools to teach anything about, racist actions by, historical American historical figures, or we don't want to teach about that homosexuality is biological or, they don't want to, like that it's not, that it's not a sin or, whatever it is.
Like you can see this happening, these structures of, of tearing down and you can see the tearing down of education happening with your own eyes, like this is not a supposition on your part.
SHERKAT: And all of this is consequential because it reinforces that kind of social implosion. That is what drives the low levels of cognitive ability and sophistication among religious fundamentalists and sectarians. They think that people who are outside their group are evil and that anything that they say or produce or write [00:19:00] is something that you should avoid and burn not something that you should engage and see that if you can understand it or why you disagree with it, even articulating that type of disagreement is is virtually impossible when you've never engaged with something.
