High authoritarians score normally on IQ yet fail at abstract reasoning and critical thinking

Evidence

These results surprised me because I had never discovered Highs to differ from Lows in “intellectual” skills. In the fall of 1980 I had found no RWA correlation with students’ performance on the Wonderlic Intelligence Test— a group-administered “twelve-minute dash” through the usual IQ fields of vocabulary, comprehension, and so on. I also had established several times that High RWAs did as well in introductory psychology as others. At one point I had also given out abstract-reasoning tests to my students, such as “If some A are B, and no B are C, is it true that no A can be C?” (Nope.) I found that most of them did not have a clue; they thought almost everything was true. So Mary Wegmann’s findings intrigued me. — Bob Altemeyer, The Authoritarian Specter, 1202

Categorization

• QUESTION: Crucial qualifier: authoritarian cognitive deficits appear selective — not general intelligence but specific reasoning skills (abstract/deductive, critical). Worth chasing what exactly the mechanism isolates.