Very low on critical thinking skills, seems like education was never stressed in their homes resulting in reptilian think, chest beating and short loud grunts and flag waving in regard to any attempts to have a rational discussion with them
New research reports Trump voters were more likely to perform poorly on a test of intellectual ability.
During the 2016 election, Donald Trump famously proclaimed "I love the poorly educated!" Well, if "poorly educated" is a euphemism for "cognitively challenged," new research finds they loved him right back.
In the journal Social Psychological and Personality Science, Ganzach and his colleagues analyzed data from the American National Election Studies, which included 5,914 participants in 2012 and 4,271 in 2016.
Besides expressing their attitudes toward that year's presidential candidates, participants took a standard test of verbal ability. Specifically, they were presented with 10 sets of words, and asked "to identify the word or phrase in a set of five that was the closest to the target word."
While hardly comprehensive, the test "is considered a good indicator of general cognitive ability," the researchers note.
After taking into account participants' party affiliation, the researchers found intellectual ability was a strong predictor of attitudes toward the two major candidates in 2016. Specifically, they found "clear negative relationships of verbal ability and education with attitude toward Trump."
Ganzach and his team note that Trump, on the campaign trail, expressed his opposition to both socially liberal beliefs (such as support for abortion rights and opposition to racism) and fiscally conservative beliefs (such as free trade). Both sets of beliefs have been linked in past research with higher cognitive ability, so it makes sense that their appeal would be largely limited to those who score lower on such measures.
https://psmag.com/news/trumps-appeal-to-the-cognitively-challenged
