Not to put too fine a point on it: The smartest kids turned into the most broad-minded and progressive adults. For example, the most intelligent kids turned out 20 years later to be much more tolerant of other races. They were also much more supportive of working mothers, rejecting the notion that pre-school children will suffer without a stay-at-home mother. In general, the sharpest kids came to embrace much less traditional moral values and were much more apt to challenge authority. They were also much less cynical as adults, more trusting that the political system can do good.

Why would native intelligence translate into a more enlightened worldview later on? One obvious possibility is that the smarter kids end up getting a better education; they read more books and newspapers and are exposed to a richer culture of ideas. But the data, reported in the January issue of Psychological Science, don’t appear to support this explanation.

Instead, it appears to be something about the intelligent brain itself: Smart people may have a different emotional makeup, a personality that is more open to experience. Or it may be that high IQ at age ten eventually leads to more complex moral reasoning: In short, smart people alone may have the cognitive machinery that’s needed for more flexible analysis of political and moral quandaries.

They said they accounted for this, but I worry about smart people being biased by liberal beliefs by being exposed to university and academics. It just seems like such a massive influence that it'd be hard to account for.

Anyway, this is certainly my experience, but I'm smart and liberal enough to know that doesn't matter much.