The Brexit Thread

[The Sisko]

The future of their economy may be in the  crapper, but at least they don’t have to endure Europe’s unwashed masses…even if they were doing a lot of the jobs Brits didn’t want. 

[China]

 

[China]

Higher cognitive ability linked to higher chance of having voted against Brexit

 

A new analysis suggests that a person with higher cognitive ability may have been more likely to vote "Remain" in the 2016 Brexit referendum, and that a spouse's cognitive skills may also be linked to Brexit voting decisions. Chris Dawson and Paul Baker of the University of Bath, U.K., present these findings in the open-access journal PLOS ONE on November 22, 2023.

 

Having higher cognitive ability has previously been associated with a greater tendency to recognize and resist misinformation. Studies have also shown that the U.K. public received a large volume of misinformation about the referendum prior to voting for the U.K. to withdraw from the EU ("Brexit"). However, while a growing body of research has investigated potential links between people's Brexit votes and socioeconomic, sociodemographic, and psychological factors, less research has addressed the potential role of cognitive ability in their decisions.

 

Dawson and Baker analyzed data on 3,183 heterosexual U.K. couples collected as part of a large survey study called Understanding Society. They examined whether there were any links between participants' reporting that they had voted "Leave" or "Remain" and their cognitive ability—as measured by their performance on a variety of tasks. The researchers statistically accounted for other factors that could also be linked to voting decisions, such as socioeconomic and sociodemographic traits, political preferences, and a widely studied set of personality traits known as the Big Five.

 

The analysis revealed a strong statistical link between higher cognitive ability and having voted "Remain."

 

Click on the link for the full article