The headline glared at me early this morning.
Intelligence Institute Study shows Fox News viewers have an IQ that is 20 points lower than the U.S. National average.
(I bolded it for your reading pleasure. You’re welcome. 🙂 )
Now… I’m not a big 24 hours news watcher. It’s too annoying, the navel gazing drives me crazy. I am aware of the big names in network “journalism” and I’m aware that Fox is the more conservative of the three. But this “study” has me skeptical from word one.
First, it was sourced from PRWeb. Ugh. I could post a press release claiming my dog just beat me at chess. Write it good enough, throw in some plausible details and someone just may pick it up. Nothing special here. Then there’s the lead:
The results of a 4 year study show that Americans who obtain their news from Fox News channel have an average IQ of 80, which represents a 20 point deficit when compared to the U.S. national average of 100. IQ, or intelligence quotient, is the international standard of assessing intelligence.
Researchers at The Intelligence Institute, a conservative non-profit group, tested 5,000 people using a series of tests that measure everything from cognitive aptitude to common sense and found that people who identified themselves as Fox News viewers and ‘conservative’ had, on average, significantly lower intelligent quotients. Fox Viewers represented 2,650 members of the test group.
One test involved showing subjects a series of images and measuring their vitals, namely pulse rate and blood pressure. The self-identified conservatives’ vitals increased over 35% when shown complex or shocking images. The image that caused the most stress was a poorly edited picture of President Obama standing next to a “ghostly” image of a child holding a tarantula.
Huh? Read that last sentence again. Sounds like a quote from The Onion.
Lead researcher, P. Nichols, explains, “Less intelligent animals rely on instinct when confronted by something which they do not understand. This is an ancient survival reaction all animals, including humans, exhibit. It’s a very simple phenomenon, really; think about a dog being afraid of a vacuum cleaner. He doesn’t know what a vacuum is or if it may harm him, so he becomes agitated and barks at it. Less intelligent humans do the same thing. Concepts that are too complex for them to understand, may frighten or anger them.”
As a publisher, I would say, “This dialogue doesn’t ring true.”
P. Nichols concludes that he wasn’t shocked by the studies’ results, rather how dramatic their range. “Several previous studies show that self-identified conservatives are less intelligent than self-identified moderates. We have never seen such a homogeneous group teetering so close to special needs levels.”
More info to this study can be seen here
P. Nichols
The Intelligence Institute
202-656-1746
Email Information
The link in the article leads to a Huffington Post piece, not a .pdf of the full study, not a link to the Intelligence Institute website AND the Huffington article isn’t about this particular study. Yet another strike.
I have no reason to doubt this story except it sounds… well… wonky. I hope the story unfolds enough so we can find out if it’s a hoax.
