"A Yale University professor conducted a cross-analysis of intelligence [1] and political affiliation, expecting to find that people who identified with the tea party knew less about science than the average person.
[1] What’s this conflation of intelligence and scientific comprehension?
Instead, he discovered the opposite: tea party members have higher than average rates of scientific comprehension.
That may come as no surprise to members of the movement, which champions limited government and the Constitution. But what will shock tea partiers is this: Not only did the professor publicize the results, but he readily admitted that he had changed his pre-conceived notions about his political opponents.
Dan Kahan, professor of law and psychology at Yale, took a data point that he described as 'scientific comprehension' and cross-referenced it with different political affiliations. He found that in general, Democrats and liberals scored better than Republicans and conservatives. However, when he limited his analysis to people who self-identify with the Tea Party, he found them to be highly knowledgeable about science.
'Identifying with the Tea Party correlates positively … with scores on the science comprehension measure,' he wrote.
Kahan readily admitted that this result contradicted his expectations — he assumed that Tea Party members would score manifestly worst on measures of scientific knowledge."
"Finally, the utility of OSI_2.0 [ordinary science intelligence is briefly illustrated by its use to assess standard survey items on evolution and global warming: when administered to members of a US general population sample, these items are more convincingly viewed as indicators of one or another latent cultural identity than as indicators of science comprehension.’ (bc’s point!)