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INTELLIGENCE AND HOMOSEXUALITY

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  31 January 2012

SATOSHI KANAZAWA
SATOSHI KANAZAWA
Affiliation:
Department of Management, London School of Economics and Political Science, UK
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Summary

The origin of preferences and values is an unresolved theoretical problem in behavioural sciences. The Savanna-IQ Interaction Hypothesis, derived from the Savanna Principle and a theory of the evolution of general intelligence, suggests that more intelligent individuals are more likely to acquire and espouse evolutionarily novel preferences and values than less intelligent individuals, but general intelligence has no effect on the acquisition and espousal of evolutionarily familiar preferences and values. Ethnographies of traditional societies suggest that exclusively homosexual behaviour was probably rare in the ancestral environment, so the Hypothesis would predict that more intelligent individuals are more likely to identify themselves as homosexual and engage in homosexual behaviour. Analyses of three large, nationally representative samples (two of which are prospectively longitudinal) from two different nations confirm the prediction.

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Type
Research Article
Information
Journal of Biosocial Science , Volume 44 , Issue 5 , September 2012 , pp. 595 - 623
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2011

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