Study Explains Trump Supporters: Bigoted People Aren’t Very Smart

The question isn’t so much why is Donald Trump the Republican presidential nominee as much as it is, who are the people willing to support such a hateful, misogynist, vitriolic, ignorant and dangerous buffoon?

The obvious answer appears to be racist people who can most identify with the candidate’s message, while lacking the cognitive ability to properly assess how unqualified Trump is to be a world leader; to the point that his potential presidency has been listed in the top 10 “global risks,” by the EIU assessment.

EIU researchers rated a Trump presidency as being more dangerous than “Britain leaving the European Union or an armed clash in the South China Sea.”

Are Trump supporters the same people who depend on Fox News for their information and have been consistently polled as less informed on current events than if they watched no news at all?  Political analysts believe it’s a safe bet.

A recent study on the connection between cognitive ability and prejudice, conducted by Mark Brandt and Jarret Crawford, was published in Social Psychology & Personality Science.  It found that people of lower intelligence showed prejudice against groups identified as “liberal” leaning and individuals classified in groups defined by race, sexual orientation or gender.

“People dislike people who are different from them,” said Brandt. “Disparaging people with different worldviews can help people maintain the validity of their own world view.”

Here is an excerpt from the research abstract:

Previous research finds that lower cognitive ability predicts greater prejudice. We test two unresolved questions about this association using a heterogeneous set of target groups and data from a representative sample of the United States (N = 5,914). First, we test “who are the targets of prejudice?” We replicate prior negative associations between cognitive ability and prejudice for groups who are perceived as liberal, unconventional, and having lower levels of choice over group membership. We find the opposite (i.e., positive associations), however, for groups perceived as conservative, conventional, and having higher levels of choice over group membership.

The studies confirm what many Trump critics have long suspected:  Throngs of primarily white people are willing to support Trump like hapless lemmings prepared to fall off a cliff to their own demise and take the country with them.

Feature image via screengrab.

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